You make the valid, but rarely made point that: immigration doesn’t take jobs because “the same immigrants who supply labor also demand products that are made with labor”. That also means that immigration does not alleviate labour shortages. A point even more rarely made - at least in my country, the U.K. where the labour shortage has been used to justify mass immigration even though it has had no effect on the level of vacancies.
It can in very specific situations, like when Germany after WWII faced a shortage of able-bodied men. The Gastarbeiters demanded meals, clothing and accomodation, but that could be done by German women. Coal mining and steel production much less so.
I suspect that it's business groups that talk about alleviating labor shortages. It could be that the businesspeople are simply mistaken like everybody else. OTOH, if a business can increase the population by 1%, increase its sales by 1%, and increase its employment by 1%, it can increase its profit by 1% even if it still experiences the same subjective degree of labor shortage.
I am not surprised that solutions to unsolved math problems will come from seemingly unconnected areas. Math is interconnected in ways that we do not fully comprehend. Mathematicians are finding it increasingly difficult to solve problems because one must be a polyglot. This has been one of the applications of AI I have been anticipating and most excited about. The other is the discovery of applications. One criticism of pure math is "what is it good for." Using Number Theory as an example, it was long thought the purest of maths was a discipline meant to just tickle the brains of those smart enough to dabble in it. Then came cryptography. Math doesn't just exist for the sake of existing, it is connected to and helps explain something in the universe. We just haven't yet found what all those connections are. Mathematical AI will be a tidal wave. The mathematician's job will be to supervise and help confirm the results.
On number 7 (neoliberalism), the other explanation is that the classical liberalism which helped foster the greatest advance in human welfare (by promoting representative democracy, science and free enterprise) contains a key insight into creating sustainable problem solving systems.
Most of the ideas you listed are the types of ideas that open minded intellectuals not blinded by partisan tribalism tend to discover.
Noahpinion fam — because I'm a dork and love cross-tabs and opinion data on stuff like this, I built an interactive app to gauge how different communities stack up on a variety of takes across a bunch of dimensions to see the fault lines. EG, compare distributions of Noahpinion readers to Slow Boring, Free Press, etc. Dedicated page for this community here: https://votto.app/noahpinion
Respond to takes, explore if you like interesting cross-tabs, and generate a cool readout of themes and throughlines across your own positions. Meant to be more like a living vibe check than a traditional survey (the feed is virtually endless), so don’t expect question statements to read like typical, dry polling mush. Testing out the flow and would love survey results from here!
Amazing! You’ll see a deep variety of questions when you open the Noahpinion page, most of them intended to be engaging & shared across audiences for comparison.
Idea is that you — and other audience “owners” — could eventually claim and curate audience pages with dedicated questions, bounded survey formats, etc. to engage with readers and generate deeper insights. This is more or less an MVP right now, and it’s generating some pretty exciting engagement, so would absolutely love feedback on features that would be useful to you!
I would love to use this to find what might or might not persuade a target audience.
For example, politicians sometimes point to rich people and claim the only reason they are rich is because they stole from the poor. I would like to have a way to test this or other questions against different audiences or demographics.
My impression is that, in biology, the lag time from "newspaper headline about a discovery" to "actually available medical treatment" is about 30 years, give or take...
Nice post. Re the appearance of the self reinforcing 'technium' that emerged in the mid 1850s.... I think that is what Marx was getting worked up about in Kapital.
Folks I know who grew up educated in the Soviet system say that their teaching on Marx was that he argued that humans and technology were inseparable... that humans made technology and the technology remade the humans. Pretty cutting edge stuff for 1970s Moscow.
Well, Marx wrote "Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned" -- in 1848.
And de Tocqueville said in 1833 that ordinary Americans consider constant progress the norm.
I was struck by your mention of only increased policing as a response to violent crime. Poverty is a big driver of crime. Europeans have a much better safety net for those at the bottom. We dont and the numbers of those living a precarious life is increasing over time. While I am entirely in favor of increased police presence, especially in high crime areas, it is important not to lose focus on the true underlying drivers.
Unfortunately, we can find almost no empirical link at all between poverty and crime. There might be a long-term link, but it's very hard to get clean identification. In the short term it basically doesn't matter at all.
Poverty-adjusted crime rates are even more dramatically different between the US and Europe, and there is a much stronger correlation between local police presence and crime than there is between poverty and crime.
I’ve always heard and seen empirical data that when adjusted for other factors, there is almost no correlation between poverty and crime. What data do you have that contradicts this?
If you've lived in both Europe and America for a long time, like I have, you know that Europeans take enforcement much more seriously. Americans will visit Germany for a few months rack up hundreds in traffic fines because traffic law is actually enforced there.
That innovation chart makes it look like the gap has gone to almost zero, but it's an illusion of scaling. It looks like it's currently 25 years (plausible) / 10 years (straightforward). That still leaves quite a lot of room for improvement. This is especially important because of the iterative nature of the problem. You collapse 25 / 10 to 5 / 2, and not only does that tech come faster, but new "plausible" and "straightforward" paths emerge faster too.
You said this about the effect of deportation on industry:
> Over the long term, of course, things might be different — the fruit picking industry might recover from temporary disruption and decide a few years from now that it needs to hire more U.S.-born workers. But research on past waves of immigration enforcement suggests that affected industries might simply take a permanent hit. We might simply live with more expensive fruit from now on.
Why would we be living with more expensive fruit if wages aren't rising with less immigrant labor? This is exactly. what you would expect with a lowered supply of labor. Wages rise, the price of fruit rises, and the amount of fruit produced drops. That's the cost of rising wages. Neither side of the immigration debate is willing to confront this.
Basic Econ 101.theory says when you kick immigrants out, some things get more expensive and other things get cheaper, and the two basically cancel out. But there may be an increasing returns to scale effect where kicking out immigrants also incurs a dead weight loss and makes everyone a little poorer.
So in some areas of the economy the labor supply effect will dominate and market clearing prices will end up higher, and in other areas the demand destruction from removing customers will dominate and the market clearing price will be lower, but it will net out overall. Is that the idea here?
If you want to make food more expensive, kick out the economic migrants who are willing to toil in the CA summer sun. Americans are just not willing to do it, almost at any price. Add the high cost of diesel and you make food unaffordable.
I don’t think there’s any suggestion that AI is going to reduce the number of mathematicians just yet. From the people I’ve been talking to in math departments (including people working on AI math) the expectation is it will change the role of humans in math (and in any case, not many people were hiring mathematicians for the theorems).
On #3, the choice seems to me to embrace creative destruction or prepare for economic irrelevance. Said another way, to be the next Silicon Valley or the next UK.
You mention it annoys you when people respond to concerns about crime by saying crime has gone down (#1). What annoys me is that crime discourse has gone up for no good reason (vibecession like), and that concerns about crime are being used as a rationalization to advocate for particular set of political beliefs (like we need to go scorched earth like El Salvador did) or to bash the straw-man that we have stopped arresting people or putting them in jail. One tell is that when people do concede that crime has gone down, they immediately pivot to concerns about “disorder,” further feeding the likelihood that it is nothing but a rationalization to begin with.
The Democrats, on the whole, will probably adopt the advice from this post, focus on affordability, and still get their butts kicked, then wonder why once more. Not because a focus on affordability is wrong but because a) it's less important than the culture war and b) because Democrats are perceived as wanting to increase affordability for all the people who already piece together thousands of dollars in transfer payments every month and don't seem to care specifically about people who work for a living. Hence they're perceived as the champions of slackers (and illegal immigrants, trans people, Hamas fans etc, you name it) and not the champions of working people. Abundance is going to get card-carrying Dems excited, not anybody else.
The only way to get it done would be to partner with Republicans. They would be neutral to in favor of plenty of stuff on that list. If 10 Democrat senators got behind NEPA reform it would pass tomorrow. You wouldn't get any of the tax items, though.
You make the valid, but rarely made point that: immigration doesn’t take jobs because “the same immigrants who supply labor also demand products that are made with labor”. That also means that immigration does not alleviate labour shortages. A point even more rarely made - at least in my country, the U.K. where the labour shortage has been used to justify mass immigration even though it has had no effect on the level of vacancies.
It can at least change which fields are understaffed.
Yep
What helps is if the immigrants are working age rather than retirees.
It can in very specific situations, like when Germany after WWII faced a shortage of able-bodied men. The Gastarbeiters demanded meals, clothing and accomodation, but that could be done by German women. Coal mining and steel production much less so.
I suspect that it's business groups that talk about alleviating labor shortages. It could be that the businesspeople are simply mistaken like everybody else. OTOH, if a business can increase the population by 1%, increase its sales by 1%, and increase its employment by 1%, it can increase its profit by 1% even if it still experiences the same subjective degree of labor shortage.
It’s also cheaper/simpler to import skilled or motivated labor than to train or motivate employees.
I am not surprised that solutions to unsolved math problems will come from seemingly unconnected areas. Math is interconnected in ways that we do not fully comprehend. Mathematicians are finding it increasingly difficult to solve problems because one must be a polyglot. This has been one of the applications of AI I have been anticipating and most excited about. The other is the discovery of applications. One criticism of pure math is "what is it good for." Using Number Theory as an example, it was long thought the purest of maths was a discipline meant to just tickle the brains of those smart enough to dabble in it. Then came cryptography. Math doesn't just exist for the sake of existing, it is connected to and helps explain something in the universe. We just haven't yet found what all those connections are. Mathematical AI will be a tidal wave. The mathematician's job will be to supervise and help confirm the results.
On number 7 (neoliberalism), the other explanation is that the classical liberalism which helped foster the greatest advance in human welfare (by promoting representative democracy, science and free enterprise) contains a key insight into creating sustainable problem solving systems.
Most of the ideas you listed are the types of ideas that open minded intellectuals not blinded by partisan tribalism tend to discover.
That was my preferred explanation! 🥰
The Merovingian was an extremely accomplished AGI slacker. But Agent Smith got him eventually.
Noahpinion fam — because I'm a dork and love cross-tabs and opinion data on stuff like this, I built an interactive app to gauge how different communities stack up on a variety of takes across a bunch of dimensions to see the fault lines. EG, compare distributions of Noahpinion readers to Slow Boring, Free Press, etc. Dedicated page for this community here: https://votto.app/noahpinion
Respond to takes, explore if you like interesting cross-tabs, and generate a cool readout of themes and throughlines across your own positions. Meant to be more like a living vibe check than a traditional survey (the feed is virtually endless), so don’t expect question statements to read like typical, dry polling mush. Testing out the flow and would love survey results from here!
Thanks, I'll check it out!
Amazing! You’ll see a deep variety of questions when you open the Noahpinion page, most of them intended to be engaging & shared across audiences for comparison.
Idea is that you — and other audience “owners” — could eventually claim and curate audience pages with dedicated questions, bounded survey formats, etc. to engage with readers and generate deeper insights. This is more or less an MVP right now, and it’s generating some pretty exciting engagement, so would absolutely love feedback on features that would be useful to you!
I would love to use this to find what might or might not persuade a target audience.
For example, politicians sometimes point to rich people and claim the only reason they are rich is because they stole from the poor. I would like to have a way to test this or other questions against different audiences or demographics.
This was really fun to play with!
should i expect it to not work ex-US, or on mobile? I’m in Berlin and it isn’t loading
Es ist langsam, warte mal ein Wenig!
My impression is that, in biology, the lag time from "newspaper headline about a discovery" to "actually available medical treatment" is about 30 years, give or take...
Nice post. Re the appearance of the self reinforcing 'technium' that emerged in the mid 1850s.... I think that is what Marx was getting worked up about in Kapital.
Folks I know who grew up educated in the Soviet system say that their teaching on Marx was that he argued that humans and technology were inseparable... that humans made technology and the technology remade the humans. Pretty cutting edge stuff for 1970s Moscow.
I've joked in the past that the Singularity happened in 1876, when Thomas Edison invented the industrial research laboratory.
Curious if you’re referencing this:
https://bactra.org/weblog/699.html
“The Singularity in Our Past Light-Cone”
Well, Marx wrote "Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned" -- in 1848.
And de Tocqueville said in 1833 that ordinary Americans consider constant progress the norm.
I hadn't seen that particular post before, but it's something of the same idea.
I was struck by your mention of only increased policing as a response to violent crime. Poverty is a big driver of crime. Europeans have a much better safety net for those at the bottom. We dont and the numbers of those living a precarious life is increasing over time. While I am entirely in favor of increased police presence, especially in high crime areas, it is important not to lose focus on the true underlying drivers.
Unfortunately, we can find almost no empirical link at all between poverty and crime. There might be a long-term link, but it's very hard to get clean identification. In the short term it basically doesn't matter at all.
Poverty-adjusted crime rates are even more dramatically different between the US and Europe, and there is a much stronger correlation between local police presence and crime than there is between poverty and crime.
I’ve always heard and seen empirical data that when adjusted for other factors, there is almost no correlation between poverty and crime. What data do you have that contradicts this?
The true underlying drivers are cultural and biological, not poverty.
If you've lived in both Europe and America for a long time, like I have, you know that Europeans take enforcement much more seriously. Americans will visit Germany for a few months rack up hundreds in traffic fines because traffic law is actually enforced there.
That innovation chart makes it look like the gap has gone to almost zero, but it's an illusion of scaling. It looks like it's currently 25 years (plausible) / 10 years (straightforward). That still leaves quite a lot of room for improvement. This is especially important because of the iterative nature of the problem. You collapse 25 / 10 to 5 / 2, and not only does that tech come faster, but new "plausible" and "straightforward" paths emerge faster too.
You said this about the effect of deportation on industry:
> Over the long term, of course, things might be different — the fruit picking industry might recover from temporary disruption and decide a few years from now that it needs to hire more U.S.-born workers. But research on past waves of immigration enforcement suggests that affected industries might simply take a permanent hit. We might simply live with more expensive fruit from now on.
Why would we be living with more expensive fruit if wages aren't rising with less immigrant labor? This is exactly. what you would expect with a lowered supply of labor. Wages rise, the price of fruit rises, and the amount of fruit produced drops. That's the cost of rising wages. Neither side of the immigration debate is willing to confront this.
To answer your question, we would live with more expensive fruit because some fruit companies shut down.
Basic Econ 101.theory says when you kick immigrants out, some things get more expensive and other things get cheaper, and the two basically cancel out. But there may be an increasing returns to scale effect where kicking out immigrants also incurs a dead weight loss and makes everyone a little poorer.
So in some areas of the economy the labor supply effect will dominate and market clearing prices will end up higher, and in other areas the demand destruction from removing customers will dominate and the market clearing price will be lower, but it will net out overall. Is that the idea here?
If you want to make food more expensive, kick out the economic migrants who are willing to toil in the CA summer sun. Americans are just not willing to do it, almost at any price. Add the high cost of diesel and you make food unaffordable.
I don’t think there’s any suggestion that AI is going to reduce the number of mathematicians just yet. From the people I’ve been talking to in math departments (including people working on AI math) the expectation is it will change the role of humans in math (and in any case, not many people were hiring mathematicians for the theorems).
On #3, the choice seems to me to embrace creative destruction or prepare for economic irrelevance. Said another way, to be the next Silicon Valley or the next UK.
You mention it annoys you when people respond to concerns about crime by saying crime has gone down (#1). What annoys me is that crime discourse has gone up for no good reason (vibecession like), and that concerns about crime are being used as a rationalization to advocate for particular set of political beliefs (like we need to go scorched earth like El Salvador did) or to bash the straw-man that we have stopped arresting people or putting them in jail. One tell is that when people do concede that crime has gone down, they immediately pivot to concerns about “disorder,” further feeding the likelihood that it is nothing but a rationalization to begin with.
Well we did have a very big crime wave that lasted several years.
2.5 years, right? Or are you starting with 2015-16?
The Democrats, on the whole, will probably adopt the advice from this post, focus on affordability, and still get their butts kicked, then wonder why once more. Not because a focus on affordability is wrong but because a) it's less important than the culture war and b) because Democrats are perceived as wanting to increase affordability for all the people who already piece together thousands of dollars in transfer payments every month and don't seem to care specifically about people who work for a living. Hence they're perceived as the champions of slackers (and illegal immigrants, trans people, Hamas fans etc, you name it) and not the champions of working people. Abundance is going to get card-carrying Dems excited, not anybody else.
The only way to get it done would be to partner with Republicans. They would be neutral to in favor of plenty of stuff on that list. If 10 Democrat senators got behind NEPA reform it would pass tomorrow. You wouldn't get any of the tax items, though.