This is the bi-weekly visible open thread (there are also hidden open threads twice a week you can reach through the Open Thread tab on the top of the page). Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. You can also talk at the SSC subreddit or the SSC Discord server. Also:
1. Comment of the week is by AlesZiegler, answering the question “What parts of Piketty’s book have stood the test of time?”
2. But also, see the discussion about the border in the last Open Thread, where people on every part of the political spectrum hash out their differences about Trump’s border policy with an emphasis on “if we’re going to enforce immigration laws, how can we do it more humanely than the current system?”. Especially interesting to me was this comment questioning the idea of “enforcing” vs “not enforcing” immigration law. And also this thread arguing border walls are ineffective at stopping migration, that even “successful” walls like the Israeli border wall and the Berlin Wall mostly relied on guards, and that the bare minimum requirement for a wall being even slightly useful – protection against ladders – is not in Trump’s requirements (suggesting he’s not serious about anything except the symbolism). But I don’t know how to square this with other people’s claims that the Bush-era fence did decrease immigration.
3. I went back, read the last month of comment reports, and banned several people who deserved it. I want to make this explicit so people don’t think bad behavior here isn’t punished. It is – it just takes me a long time to get around to it. Thanks to everyone who uses the report button to report comments to me.
4. I’ll probably be at the South Bay SSC meetup, 2 PM on Saturday July 7, at 3806 Williams Rd, San Jose. If you’re coming, consider emailing David Friedman (address at link) so he knows how many to expect.
As a kid, I made lists, but I think only in connection with some other play (list of all TMs in Pokemon Yellow, list of available goods when playing buy-and-sell). I don’t know if it tells anything about me.
I’m a fan of the highly specific Sci-Fi trope in which Mankind has encountered complex alien objects/systems/phenomena and are trying to extract value from them, sometimes at hideous cost, but true understanding of the internal workings remains elusive or entirely absent.
Examples: Sphere by Michael Crichton, Gateway by Frederik Pohl, Solaris, The Invincible, and His Master’s Voice by Stanislaw Lem, Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky Brothers, Hinterland by William Gibson, Rendezvous with Rama, and 2001 by Arthur C. Clarke.
Any recommendations? I eat this stuff up like candy.
Also a fan of the related archeology-in-space genre.
Was gonna say Hinterland. (Heck, I was gonna say Solaris, but that’s so central to the kind of thing you’re talking about that I assumed straight away—rightly—that you’d already know it.)
Just as a side note about my own taste, I find that though I used, like you, to be fascinated by this theme, it doesn’t hold that much interest for me nowadays. Not sure how to put my finger on what’s changed in the meantime. Perhaps I no longer feel so oppressed by the horrendous incomprehensibility of being nowadays. (Hey, sounds pretty good when I put it like that!)
How are The Invincle and His Master’s Voice?
The Invincible is my favorite Lem novel. I’ve read it multiple times now. His Master’s Voice is quite a dense read, but worth it for sheer profundity of the ideas presented.
Charles Sheffield’s Heritage Universe.
An yes, I forgot about The Builders.
Rogue Moon, by Algis Budrys.
Revelation Space, by Alastair Reynolds.
In the Ocean of Night, by Gregory Benford.
Thanks!
I’ll second Alastair Reynolds, with an added recommendation of his novel Pushing Ice. Pushing Ice is a standalone novel of his, but it’s probably my favorite of his works and fits your theme nicely.
Second for Pushing Ice.
Am reading Pushing Ice right now, by odd coincidence. Seems fun so far.
Second Rogue Moon. Ringworld, The Ringworld Engineers, Ringworld’s Children. Totally different tone from Lem or Strugatsky.
There has also been a lot of interactive fiction (text adventures) with the same trope. Legend adapted Pohl’s novels with Gateway and Gateway 2: Homeworld. Telarium adapted Rendezvous with Rama. Infocom had original stories with Starcross, Planetfall and Stationfall.
There’s also a large, active modern interactive fiction scene (see ifdb.tads.org). Some games that might scratch the same itch are Ian Finley’s Babel, Nate Cull’s Glowgrass, and Suzanne Britton’s Worlds Apart.
“Diving into the Wreck” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch sort of fits. The ship they find and explore is made by humans, but it’s incredibly old and really not where it should be.
Connie Willis’s “Curse of Kings.”
CJ Cherryh’s “Pots”.
And a request in the same genre – a short story about investigating an old crash site on an abandoned (atmosphere compromised) world. Manipulation of a forcefield “space suit” was a major plot point. There was a monument with the inscription “In the center of the forest, the water is always clear.”
Anyone know the story I am thinking of?
When do we get an update re: the adversarial collaboration contest?
Most games reward persistence and luck more heavily than skill. Anyone can be persistent and collect 999 toadstools in World of Warcraft, or win 1,000 easy battles in Final Fantasy. Anyone cant be lucky and win by betting on red on the roulette wheel. Or get lucky by getting the good gun or the good starting position in a Battle Royale game.
Only a few people are skillful enough to really enjoy how finely balanced Starcraft was, or (allegedly) some of the first-person shooters. And really, if you’re skillful, shouldn’t you be spending your time on real work instead? Skill-based games start to feel like work after a while.
The most exclusive (and therefore prestigious) rewards in WoW are quite skill-based. Mythic raiding/keystones requires a high amount of skill, such that you won’t even be invited to participate in it without a minimum ability to perform your role and cooperate with others. Meanwhile, the PvP rewards are entirely competitive and require you to defeat your opponents.
Less so for keystones and pvp (though some there too) but for mythic raiding one of the hardest parts is getting 20 people to consistently show up at the right time and try-hard.
Have all of the alleles of the human genome been discovered and cataloged yet, or are we still discovering new alleles at random whenever a new person has his or her genome sequenced?
Note: This is a totally separate question from whether we know what phenotypes the alleles code for.
I am quite surprised by the commenters who think that killing people to stop illegal immigration is OK. Usually, even shooting unarmed criminals is controversial.
I have never personally met any people who are in favour of killing immigrants as a dissuasive method*; is it that I live in a liberal bubble, or is it as crazy as it sounds? Is this an alt-right view?
Are there any statistics on the number of people who would rather have people dying in the border than to have people working in a farm?
*People have shared with me quite non PC views, though, such as ideas about the undesirability of Rumanian gypsies, Bulgarian gypsies, hatred towards Eastern Europeans (especially Polish), anti-Muslim views (make them eat pork; they should not cover their head in our country), and all kinds of other stuff. But nobody ever said that it would be OK to kill them; the furthest they go is to suggest mass incarceration and deportation/removal of citizenship.
It’s a fringe view in the U.S. This is a forum that attracts fringe people (myself included).
I think it’s an extreme but logical logical extension of the cultural view that encompasses, as Scott once put it, “the words “git off my land” uttered through clenched teeth while aiming a shotgun”, and signs like “trespassers will be shot”.
There is a strain of thought that territorial boundaries are not quaint lines on a map created by wierd quirks of history or ephemeral abstractions, but something very very fundamental and very very important, worth using lethal force to defend against violations. It’s an extreme extension because in this case we’re not (mostly) talking about intruders with malevolent intent towards the lives and/or property of those on the other side of the boundary, but note that so far only one person here (Matt M) that I’ve noticed has actively advocated for lethal force it as good in and of itself. Then you have other people like CatCube who basically say that while they would prefer other avenues be tried first, and think the pragmatic downsides of the use of lethal force outweigh the upsides, that there is nothing inherently immoral about using lethal force to defend the integrity of a border.
I can’t recall exactly what I may have posted that might have led you to this conclusion, but this is not my preferred solution.
You may’ve been saying it just to be edgy or confrontational at the time, Matt, but I’m pretty sure the words were along the lines of “If I had my way, we wouldn’t just have a wall, it’d be manned with armed guards 24/7 and everyone on it would have orders to shoot on sight.”
Sounds like Conrad.
If we’re going to attribute quotes to people, link them. I can’t find anything like that from Matt, just one from Conrad, like johan_larson said. Matt did respond to Conrad saying he agreed, but only talking there about the separating families part.
Also, please note I do not think shooting illegal immigrants is a “good in and of itself.” What I want is “no illegal border crossing” and not “dead illegals.” And I would hope actually shooting anyone would be a last resort, and that if they know we’re serious about protecting the border, they wouldn’t bother trying. I said:
The goal is to stop all the rest of the evil that goes along with porous borders. The rapes, crime, drugs, depressed wages, exploited workers.
And that’s just the direct results of illegal immigration. The damage to society and respect for the rule of law is also terrible. There’s barely anything culturally uniting Americans anymore. We’re still living in a society because we make laws, and then we live by them, even if we don’t like the laws. And we have methods to change the laws, so living under laws you don’t like is not entirely unbearable. But if we’re just going to start ignoring the laws we don’t like, everything breaks down. The Blue Tribe isn’t particularly interested in enforcing immigration laws, and quite often seeks to actively undermine them (while they’re still on the books), but then wants more gun laws, strictly enforced. These would be laws constraining my behavior, and I would be expected to comply with them. This sounds very much like one prisoner repeatedly defecting, while insisting the other prisoner must cooperate. That is not how the game works.
This is getting rambling, but I’ll try to make a coherent point. What Trofim said about seeing the border as very, very important is correct. It is not a squiggly imaginary line drawn on a map by quirks of history. It’s the boundary wherein we say “the people living here agree to live by these sets of rules, and this is how we’re going to keep from murdering each other so we can have a civilization.” Ignoring those boundaries and ignoring those rules undermines the entire project. If we’re going to ignore the borders we might as well not even bother having a nation. I’m still holding out hope that we can have a nation, so I’m not giving up the border.
Indeed. People keep bringing up the analogy of prison wardens shooting escapees. How many such incidents do we think occur annually? What percentage of prisoners end up shot in escape attempts?
Quite likely very few. Because the prisoners know and appreciate that the wardens really will shoot them if they’re caught escaping, so most don’t attempt to escape.
And prisoners likely have much worse circumstances and far less to lose than the average poor Guatemalan family.
The point of this policy isn’t that we’d start murdering [insert current number of people who illegally cross each year] and wouldn’t the world be better off without those non-American scum! No, the point is that you’d only have to shoot as many as it took to convince people you were serious, and then the vast majority would stop attempting to cross. And that number might very well be in the single digits.
I used to believe that, but then I noticed that it was inconsistent with casual observation. There are lots of highways where most people are driving above the speed limit. The U.S. survived prohibition, despite the fact that a large fraction of the population was routinely drinking illegal alcohol. In a fair number of states, the median age for first intercourse is below the legal age of consent. How many people do you think took their first drink of something alcoholic when they were 21?
Someone described Britain in the 18th century as a small island almost entirely surrounded by smugglers.
In most societies I am familiar with, violation of laws that people don’t believe in and that are not effectively enforced is pretty routine. Law works not because people believe that right and wrong are made by act of Congress but because laws whose breakdown would have serious bad effects are either ones most people believe in or ones effectively enforced by the state.
Did all of those things happen for the first 176 years of American history, during which time there was no effective limitation on immigration from the Western Hemisphere?
When you see a statistic like this, the first question to ask is not whether it is true but how anyone could know it is true. Is it likely that either illegal immigrants who are raped or ones who are not report the fact to law enforcement or the census bureau or some academic researcher?
In my experience, if you actually track down the origin of such numbers they turn out to be either pure inventions converted to fact by repetition or the result of bogus research done by someone with an axe to grind. Examples I have looked at include deaths from second-hand smoke, college rape rates, and homelessness figures. There is also that perennial favorite, children hungry or at risk of hunger.
@Johan, Nick, Matt M
You are correct, that link from Conrad is the one I was thinking of. That’s what you get for posting right before bed and deciding you’re too tired to dig up the appropriate linked quote. My apologies Matt, though I did interpret your agreement as including more than just the familial separation at the time.
@Trofim_Lysenko
Be careful that you’re not taking my summation of Matt’s position (re: deputizing private citizens to guard the border) as Matt’s position.
And to be fair to my interlocutors above, my position isn’t exactly “other avenues be tried first”, since that’s doesn’t square with my statement that the Border Patrol should be actively destroying supply points put out by charities to enable border crossings. The “pragmatic downsides” to a “stop every swinging dick at the border” operation to my mind is mostly that it will be very expensive for very little actual stemming of the tide, but cheap and easy ways to stop crossings, even if potentially lethal, should be entertained.
I do agree wholeheartedly with the rest about “boundaries not being quaint lines on a map” and “nothing inherently immoral about using lethal force to defend the integrity of a border.”
Yes – most of what CatCube has said is something I wholly agree with.
I’m not necessarily opposed to shooting people who illegally cross the border, but that doesn’t make it my preferred position.
Personally, I am 100% convinced that to the extent illegal immigration is a problem in the US, it is entirely due to a lack of political will to enforce existing law, NOT an issue of a lack of physical security. This includes things like sanctuary city policies, welfare state benefits, etc.
I’m okay with a wall and support it for symbolic reasons, but I don’t think it would make much of a difference at all if not accompanied by a wholesale “draining of the swamp” of almost everyone who is remotely involved in immigration enforcement at all levels of the US bureaucracy.
This is pretty much my view. I think an America with the political will to enforce border security via lethal force is an America with sufficient political will on this issue to largely end illegal immigration without resorting to lethal force.
Therefore, securing the border with lethal force is a dis-preferred policy in my mind. At the same time, I don’t think it’s beyond the pale. I don’t think it’s impermissible for a country to secure its borders with lethal force (to immigrants; I’m much more suspicious of polities that prohibit emigration).
As for why it’s unlikely to hear this view in person, I can think of a few reasons. I agree that it’s a rare viewpoint, although I think perhaps less so than might be assumed (I expect that many people would, if pressed sufficiently, say that lethal force was permissible even if it was not preferred). I also expect that many of those who would agree that lethal force is theoretically permissible wouldn’t admit that in-person (I certainly wouldn’t), since there are no real benefits and clear social costs.
I completely agree with this. The counterarguments I hear against the wall or border enforcement are nonsensical, especially given the government endeavors the same sorts of people who are against border enforcement or the wall tend to be in favor of.
The federal budget (when we actually have one) is trillions of dollars every year. And yet I’m supposed to believe $25 billion for a wall over 5-10 years is ludicrously expensive, but free college, free healthcare, UBI, etc, are totally doable. The wall is a rounding error compared to these proposals. And given the estimated ~$110 billion each year government at all levels expends on services for illegals (healthcare, education, etc) it could wind up being a net positive. And of course, we could get Mexico to “pay for the wall” by taxing remittances, imposing tariffs, charging entry fees, etc. All congress has to do is pass a law.
The government is very good at big, dumb, repetitive tasks. We built the interstate highway system. But I’m supposed to believe a wall is impossible to build? Isn’t it just a construction project? This we can’t do, but something like healthcare, which is extremely sophisticated and about as individualized and fine-grained as a domain can be, is right up government’s alley?
And that we can’t secure the border? We’re the world’s only hyperpower. We have the most terrifying military the world has ever seen. We’ve got satellites that can read newspapers from space, we’ve got AI-assisted drones with infrared cameras. We spend $700 billion each year on this stuff, and it’s not like we’re unafraid to commit it. We’ll guarantee the integrity of South Korea’s border against one of the world’s largest standing armies including nuclear weapons, on the other side of the world, but I’m to believe we can’t possibly secure our own border against unarmed, impoverished peasants dragging women and children through the desert?
No, we could absolutely do it. We could do it cheaply, efficiently, and relatively humanely. We do not do it because the people in power do not want to do it because:
1) They all like the easily exploitable underclass providing cheap labor without being concerned for labor laws and regulations because they can just deport the people who get too uppity about their “rights” and “wages.”
2) Half of them believe the resulting demographic shifts will ultimately give them permanent political power.
It’s all just evil and corruption piled on top of more evil and corruption. I do not like it, and would very much like it to end.
1. How was that estimate made? By whom?
2. Is it net of the taxes paid by those illegals–most obviously sales taxes, but in some cases social security taxes for social security the illegal immigrant can never collect?
Do you think it likely that an estimate of the net cost would get done by anyone who did not have an axe to grind, an incentive to make the figure look either as large as possible in order to argue for one set of policies or as small as possible in order to argue for another?
David, that seems like a general argument against numbers.
@Conrad Honcho
I’m going to hammer on this again, because this seems to be a common defect in thinking: TECHNOLOGY DOESN’T STOP PEOPLE. TECHNOLOGY ENABLES PEOPLE TO STOP PEOPLE.
The only thing all the gee-whiz technology you’re talking about* will enable the US Government to do is count the number of people illegally crossing the border, unless there are patrols near enough to a detected crossing to get there and arrest them. This isn’t going to be “cheap and efficient”. The single largest cost in the $700 billion DoD budget you’re talking about is payroll. People are expensive. Technology will somewhat reduce the number of personnel, but effective policing of a border will be very manpower-intensive, and therefore cost-intensive.
I’m also against all of the other stuff you’re talking about (UBI, etc.). But I’m not going to shake the pom-poms for an ineffective waste of money just because it’s nominally for a cause I support.
* ETA: I’m reasonable sure that you’re also overstating the effectiveness of some of this technology. “This spy satellite can read a license plate on Pluto!” is common hyperbole, but AFAIK, hyperbole is all it is. Plus, for satellites specifically, they’re overhead at known times. We can move them occasionally to throw people off, but eventually other nations figure out the new orbits.
TECHNOLOGY DOESN’T STOP PEOPLE. TECHNOLOGY ENABLES PEOPLE TO STOP PEOPLE.
If the thesis is:
1. walls don’t do anything by themselves, but increase the effectiveness of people
2. we are people constrained and can’t get any more people
well, I can see why people want the wall (or other technical measures). It increases the effectiveness of our limited reagent.
It does seem that we should get more people, but other commenters have said that this just won’t happen. If it won’t happen for the same reason that the wall won’t happen, then it doesn’t matter and we can debate it the same way we debate space travel. But if the problem is that we have resources and cannot put them into manpower because people refuse to do the work
then let’s get illegal immigrants to do the job Americans won’t dothen improving the effectiveness of the wall has obvious attraction to better use the existing workforce.I’ve asked once already about current patrol techniques, and I thought I would get an answer from the very high-confidence way that lots of people on both sides were responding, but nothing was answered. Maybe it’s a boring question the same way my question about EVerify got like 3 responses and then people moved back to more fun things like fighting about guns.
So I’ll try again. How is the wall enforced today? What would 10% more people mean? What would 10% more motion detectors mean? Are border agents already going out constantly to respond to high-confidence signals (of whatever sort) and getting better signals wouldn’t help?
I’m not convinced about Conrad’s specific example technologies, but it seems very obvious to me that we could have very low levels of illegal immigration into the US without spending a huge amount of money. Nearly all the illegal immigrants are economic migrants–they came here to hang drywall for a lot more money than they could make back in El Salvador. That’s perfectly reasonable and laudable at a personal level, and there’s certainly an economic argument that they’re probably making the world a better place by doing it, but if we want that sort of thing stopped, we absolutely can do so by making it economically unwise to hire illegal immigrants.
So what we’re really running into here is:
a. A problem of political goals–we don’t all agree on what goals we want.
b. An agency problem–a lot of voters would like to elect people who will actually enforce immigration laws, but once in power, those people have incentives not to enforce those laws in an effective way.
@Edward Scizorhands
As a general rule, to make an obstacle effective you need to be able to respond before the people breaching it can make it through. To take a toy example, think about a bank vault. You can get into a huge, finely-constructed bank vault with a cheap drill and bits that you can buy from Home Depot–eventually. Just sit there and keep drilling holes around the outline of the door. Now, this would take about 8 years, so when the bank workers come back after being gone for 12 hours overnight they’re going to have some serious questions about what you’re doing so it’s not actually a practical method of getting in. But if there’s an 8 year interval between somebody checking up on the vault….
Coming back to the border, for security to be effective it has to do two things: 1) detect intruders and 2) slow intruders down for long enough for the nearest patrol to get there. (A third possibility is for the obstacles to be dangerous enough to result in serious injury or death, but see above for a sample of the pearl-clutching that will result.)
Note that I’m talking about border security as a system, including personnel. So “detect intruders” doesn’t mean that you necessarily need to have some technology doing the detection; it could very well mean that your obstacles take so long to breach that a patrol comes by before your opponent makes it through. If you have a patrol that comes by every two hours, and it takes 2.5 hours to breach, you’re going to catch them even with no alarm system.
Now, if you have a technical method of detection, then for success: detection time + patrol arrival time < time to breach + time to run to safety. Let me pull an example out of my fourth point of contact to illustrate the analysis. Say you have a wall with cameras on it watched continuously. Let's assume our opponent is a group of people in a pickup who want to make it to the wall. The detection time will be how long it takes for somebody to get to the wall from the first time the camera can see them (and be identified as an attempted breach). If you're in broken or rolling terrain this can be very short, because it doesn't take a truck too long to make it to the wall–let's assume the terrain is pretty rough and they can only make 25 kph. If you detect the attempt 1000 m from the wall, they can get there in about 2.5 minutes. Then, taking a ladder out of the back of the truck, setting it up, throwing a piece of carpet over any C-wire on the top, and dropping a rope over will take a few minutes to set up, plus the time it takes for the group to climb the ladder and slide down the rope on the other side. Let's be generous and say this takes 15 minutes–and I'm being really generous, since drilling can make this a much quicker process than you'd think. So call the time to breach 20 minutes. Now, the question is how long it will take to make it to safety. In this toy problem, say they coordinated to meet a truck on the other side (who started driving from cover as soon as the breach started). If it's 10 km from terrain that's "safe" (i.e., the Border Patrol either can't find them–e.g., ravines and hills–or can't pick them out of a crowd–e.g., a town.), You're talking less than an hour between the first inkling of an attempted breach until its too late to do anything other than file a report that 9 people came over.
Obviously these times are going to vary greatly. In pure backcountry, you might be able to detect them well before the wall, and have many hours of them wandering in the desert to pick them up. However, here the wall isn't doing much of the work–the distance is. Similarly, if you're in a heavily-urbanized area, you might have only a few yards between cover on the far side and the wall, and only a few more yards between the wall and cover on the near side. So any detected attempts there might only have minutes of response time available.
I haven't sat down with a bunch of topo maps and areal aerial photos of the border to analyze specific areas, so I can't answer your question with specific numbers. However, let's at least get a ballpark estimate of personnel requirements to even come within spitting distance of "sealing" the border.
I'd guess that a planning factor would be not less than a three-man team per 10 miles of border, 24/7. There might be some closer spacing in cities, and further than that in areas near cities, but I think that's reasonable to get a 30-minute response time in the back country, because you're not going to count on doing 60 cross country. Given a 1900-mile border, that's 190 teams times three shifts, so you need 1710 people doing nothing with their time but patrolling the border. Add in more people because you're going to have vacations, sick time, etc. Let's call it 2000. Taking a guess at compensation of $150,000/head (to include salary, leave, sick leave, etc.) you're looking at about $300mm just for patrols. So just patrolling the $25 billion dollar wall is going to be in the rough neighborhood of a third of a billion per year. Plus the people to watch cameras, further quick response teams, repair broken equipment and infrastructure, etc.
This isn't to say that walls are useless. Depending on terrain, targeted construction in consultation with the people responsible for patrolling the border will be a force multiplier for them. And I’m in favor of that! But starting your analysis with “A wall will solve all of our problems” is going to be throwing a lot of money at the problem for less effectiveness than other solutions. You must start with analyzing where you’re going to place your personnel, and tailor the wall to that.
Edit: I’m assuming some moderate leakage. If you really want to ensure that there’s no possibility of crossing, you’re looking at patrols within sight of each other to keep eyes on the wall, Inner-German-Border-style. That’s going to start approaching manned watchtowers 1/4-1/2 mile apart, so multiply this analysis by anywhere from 12 to 25.
@albatross11
I agree. Any “solution” that doesn’t include holding employers responsible for checking employability is just dick-waving. IIRC somebody linked a Cato report above that said that mandatory E-Verify would cost the US Government something like $50mm/year, which is way less than my costs discussed above, and will do a lot more to cut down on illegal immigration.
However, this gores the oxen of both Democrats and Republicans (including our swamp-drainer-in-chief–notice that he talks a good game about immigration, but doesn’t even head-fake towards something that would require him to clean up his own company’s act)
@CatCube, are geosynchronous satellites too far away to be useful in surveillance?
Thanks for those numbers. $300 million in personnel is noticeable, and it gives me kinda an idea of just how much an additional 10% for personnel (or walls) would help.
@Harry Maurice Johnston
As far as I know, all imagery satellites are in low earth orbit. I think you run into angular resolution problems in geosynchronous orbit, but that’s not based on any deep understanding, just a Wikipedia-level understanding of spy satellites. I know that DSP satellites are in geosynchronous orbit, but they are just looking for the IR flash from nuclear weapons or missile launches, and don’t have to resolve at the couple of foot resolution you’d need to image personnel.
@Edward Scizorhands
To reemphasize in case I wasn’t clear in my last comment, but that’s just a Fermi estimate of personnel costs, and people can (and, I suspect here, will) quibble with the numbers. For example, by going to a two-man patrol, you’d cut it to $200,000,000 by the terms of my estimate. But I think it’s useful for talking about what kind of effort a wall requires, and illustrating that obstacle effort is only a contributing part of any actual physical security plan.
Also, consider that I made a glaring math error in my edit to my last comment. Going to a 1/4 mile – 1/2 mile spacing would multiply my estimate by 20-40, not by 12-25.
@Harry Maurice Johnston
Yes, they are. As CatCube says, imagery satellites are LEO-only.
This doesn’t strike me as an area where satellites are going to be particularly helpful. A KH-11 costs $2-3 billion. You’d need a lot (I don’t have numbers offhand) to cover the border continually. Yes, it has to be continuous. There are people who track satellites for fun, and taking their ephemeris data and turning that into “when will there be gaps” is trivial. I could do it by hand if I felt masochistic. And they’re flummoxed by bad weather. Also, that kind of image processing is non-trivial, particularly with a bit of work put into camouflage by the other side.
Okay, no satellites. So how about AI-assisted drones? IR cameras. They patrol the skies above the border, and when they detect someone coming across they alert the monitoring station. Maybe they swoop down and a loudspeaker blares in Spanish “Halt! You are illegally trespassing on United States soil! Border Patrol agents are en route! Turn back now!”
I still find it impossible to believe that if you told the military “secure the border using a small fraction of the budget we use to secure everyone else’s borders” they couldn’t do it.
Also, to handle the incentives aspect, yes, I would like there to be a great big beautiful door in the wall, where migrant workers can come in legally to “fill jobs Americans won’t do” but in keeping with our minimum wage laws and labor regulations, not be raped, receive documentation, pay taxes, maybe get a punch card where after 5 – 10 years of useful migrant labor without committing crimes they can apply for permanent residence / citizenship, and harsh penalties for companies that hire undocumented workers.
I think if you put all of these ideas together we could put an end to the lawlessness.
@Conrad Honcho
To quickly discuss one of your scenarios, what happens when your AI robot catches a group of people and they split up? At that point it can only track one. Plus, swooping down and nattering about how the Border Patrol is coming will quickly be ignored once they realize that the nearest Border Patrol officers are an hour away in this sector, and they can get into terrain that the AI bot can’t track them (if it’s a huge, energy efficient drone that primarily cruises) or that it’ll run out of battery (if it’s a small, maneuverable one).
Will these increase the catch rate somewhat? Yeah. But at a cost wildly out of proportion to the benefit.
For the “we secure other countries borders!” thing, it’s important to remember that the US military isn’t securing other countries’ borders against smuggling or infiltration; they’re securing them against invasion, which is a very different problem. For example, on the Inner German Border, we didn’t have much concern about individuals sneaking across*, we were worried about the 8th Guards Army sending 100,000 individuals across simultaneously. When people are only trickling through, they could easily cross the border in the Vogelsberg mountains at any time, but a full-scale tank invasion requires the use of the Fulda Gap. So stopping individuals requires providing security along 100% of the border 100% of the time, where stopping an invasion requires only securing the ~35% of the border with terrain that will support large-scale maneuvers and their logistical support. Also note that in Korea and West Germany, the main “securing” forces are well back from the border. Only reconnaissance elements are right on the border to detect an invasion attempt, and the actual fight to beat back the invasion will be well inside the border. Like I said, totally different problem.
* East Germany was very concerned about that, and the amount of money they spent on the border and border guards reflects that.
These all still seem like problems that money and technology can solve, and we have lots of those. Combine with immigration reform to make it easier for foreigners to come in and work legally, crackdowns on employers who ignore employment laws and regulations and cooperation from state and local agencies instead of sanctuary city nonsense and it doesn’t have to be this way.
Interstate highway system? No problem. Man the moon? Been there, done that. Spy on every electronic communication of every American? Just another day at the NSA.
But intercept impoverished illiterate women and children in a desert in our own country? No way man. Impossible.
This does not pass the smell test. I would very much like to try before throwing up our hands and declaring open borders.
@Conrad Honcho
I agree with both your increased legal worker program and your crackdowns on employers. That’s what’s going to dramatically reduce our illegal immigrant problem.
If you do those things, and no border wall, you’re going to eliminate a very large fraction of illegal immigration. If you do the border wall (as currently proposed) but not those things, you’re going to eliminate a small fraction of current illegal immigration. Therefore, doing those things is what’s doing the work, and the President’s border wall is just an expensive distraction.
Doing actual, effective border control to do the same fraction of reduction as the employer crackdowns will be much more expensive than the crackdowns, and if we can’t muster the political will and money to do the crackdowns we’re not going to muster the political will to spend sums of money that are relatively vast in comparison.
That’s not to say that we should rip out border obstacles or disband the border patrol. As currently constituted, they slow what would be a flood to a relative* trickle. But getting from that trickle to near-zero is going to be very expensive. We’re firmly on the diminishing returns portion of what “moar border control” can get us.
Look, you seem to be saying that there must be some technological solution that will enable the Border Patrol to solve most of our problems cheaply. No, there really mustn’t. Time and distance–and the necessity of people near enough to do something–will rule all physical security plans.
* Relative to what it would be in their absence.
@Conrad, I would imagine blimps (ala Google) would be more efficient than drones for always-on surveillance. But I suspect the problem with either is that it would be a lot cheaper to shoot them down than it would be to replace them.
We have aerostats on the border already, though they’re more for spotting planes using radar.
I have first hand experience securing a border in the desert using UAVs to track and guide in ground forces, w/ both UAVs and ground forces cued from high tech surveillance. It was in northwestern Iraq on the Iraq-Syria border. We were getting cued for vehicle intercepts from JSTARS (sort of like AWACS but capable of detecting and tracking vehicles on the ground instead of the air), flying our UAV to the area to get a visual and actively track any “hits”, and then radioing to forces on the ground who were supposed to intercept.
Bottom line: It did not work particularly well. Even for that border, relatively small compared to the US-Mexico border, the lag in response time from detection->direction to UAV->UAV flight time->communication to ground team->ground team travel time made it mostly a wild goose chase. Could it work? In theory, assuming you had sufficient UAV coverage to have one bird up every 20-30 miles or so, 24/7 with border patrol forces every few miles apart all the way along the border…
The words “Cost overruns” spring forcibly to mind.
OK, so the logical question is: how frequently do illegal immigrants at shooting range of border patrol agents manage to escape? Do they even try, once they are caught?
It would have to take a very big percentage to justify shooting to kill.
And if what you are worried about is the people the border patrol does not find, why bother suggesting killing somebody who is not there? What makes you think that vigilantes will be better at finding illegal immigrants than border patrol agents? Why can’t they just detain the immigrants?
Is your viewpoint like the child separation policy, where the point of the cruelty is partly to scare people before they try to cross the border, instead of convincing them it would be pointless?
I had not seen it here before, either, that I can recall. It’s a fringe view, and deservedly so. However, I’d be leery of supposing that mass deportations are somehow less extreme: historically, mass deportations correlate with large numbers of dead people, sometimes they directly cause them, and they usually don’t happen when there’s a great deal of concern for the people being deported. Mass-deporting and shooting people frequently go hand in hand.
I think “shoot all the illegals” is a position sort of like “abolish the police department” That is, it’s a slogan that signals how dedicated you are to some ideology, but isn’t actually something many people believe literally, and is a policy that has almost no chance of being supported by anyone in practice.
At any rate, it seems to me that most people responding to the “shoot the illegals” ideas here have been disagreeing rather intensely with it, probably because we’re mostly literal-minded people who take ideas too seriously when they’re expressed to show how edgy and dark someone is.
It stands to reason that if you say the extreme thing when what you really want is a more moderate thing, but “find a variety of means to keep a strong border while seeking to reduce to zero or as close as possible the number of people who get shot, keeping that as the final recourse” or “we need to seriously change how policing works, and look at ways to change what happens in potentially-violent interactions” or whatever just aren’t sexy enough, you push the Overton Window more than you do if you call for something more moderate. It seems irresponsible to do public discourse with the same standards as you’d use to vent in personal conversation.
Alt-right isn’t a term with a great definition. But I imagine both the edgelord faction and the unreconstructed white supramacists would be happy to endorse it.
Or those of us who are neither.
Of course, depending on how you want to define “edgelord”, you could try to make that fit. However, I’ve not said it for the purpose of pissing people off which is what I understand “edgelord” to usually mean. If you’re using it to mean “has a view outside the Overton Window on SSC at the current moment” that would fit. I’ve even stated the “Border Patrol should be slashing water points” here on SSC in the past, and IIRC it was well before the last election when the border wall was being kicked around. Didn’t attract much comment then.
I was wrong about the timing of my last comment saying pretty much exactly what I said above. It was the week after the election.
Well, it’s an interesting question.
What if we installed a (magical) ten-mile wide strip that would unfailingly electrocute anybody who stepped on it or drove over it? (Magical, I said.) We announce it loudly before we install it. Is that inhumane?
What if we hired a million-man army to form a human barrier, politely using non-lethal force on anybody trying to cross but escalating to lethal force for anybody not dissuaded? Is that inhumane?
So then what if we reduce it to a thousand man army trying (with mixed success, obviously) to do the same thing? Each soldier has a lot of ground to cover and might have to resort to lethality rather more often, and a lot of immigrants would probably slip through the cracks. Is that inhumane?
It seems that what you’re running up against is the libertarian observation that the State is always ultimately about lethal force. Yes, if you exceed the speed limit, they don’t just kill you immediately. But if a cop signals you to pull over, and you don’t, he will escalate, and at some point you either submit or you get shot. It doesn’t usually get that far, but the possibility is the foundation on which everything else is built.
There are people (I’m not really one of them) who observe that the 10 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. is a really large number, completely dwarfing the number of soldiers involved in a typical “official” invasion (e.g. it looks to me like D-Day fielded about 160 thousand), and wonder why they aren’t treated as an invasion. (My answer: They aren’t equipped as well as an “official” invasion. And they probably aren’t equipped even a hundredth as well, so maybe even the largeness of the number doesn’t matter. Could a hundred hungry Mexicans overpower an armed American soldier?)
Firstly, this isn’t really the same category. I believe what ana is reacting to is the perception that people are advocating lethal force as a first or second line response to unauthorized border crossing. This is like being aghast that cops would just shoot a shoplifter fleeing police, or the coast guard would just sink (and not rescue survivors from) a fishing boat not complying with fishing regulations. This isn’t a thing unique to or characteristic of libertarians, this is simply being surprised by (in their opinion) disproportionate enforcement/punishment.
Secondly, what exactly does it mean for a state to be “about lethal force”?
Although I recognize that you aren’t necessarily expressing this view, I want to contest the notion that the people positing the acceptability of using lethal force to defend the border are doing so “as a first or second line response to unauthorized border crossing.”
Let’s imagine that it’s morally permissible to use lethal force to defend your border after you’ve tried a dozen other policies in good faith. Now imagine that you see a person say, “I think we should try policy X to secure the border, and then if that doesn’t work, it’s time for lethal force.” Is that person acting morally permissibly?
I don’t think there’s enough information to say. If we’ve tried eleven other non-lethal policies in the past, then proposing the use of lethal force when the next (and twelfth) policy fails is just fine. If we have only tried two policies previously, then it’s not morally permissible (in this hypothetical).
2018 isn’t the first year America has faced the problem of how to secure the border. Nor is Trump’s presidency. This issue dates back decades, and numerous proposals have been advanced and largely failed. I think it’s quite reasonable for people to disagree with the notion that we’ve reached the point where resorting to lethal force is justified, but it’s bordering on disingenuous to act like lethal force is being proposed as a first or second line option. There are decades of history being ignored by that viewpoint.
I don’t know if you and I mean the same thing when we say “first or second line response.” What I mean is that, for example, illegal crossers get maybe a couple verbal warnings before being shot (or shot if fleeing an arrest attempt, etc). Here we’re talking about what is actually tried during the attempted border crossing – the first “line” is a warning, the second is lethal force. Compare to the coast guard example I gave – the first “line” is hailing the ship and ordering it to comply, the second is sinking it and sailing away. I want to be clear that I don’t know if anyone in this OT has actually expressed such a position re:border control, but I think ana’s comment above comes as a reaction to that idea.
The way you’re using “first or second line” you seem to be referencing previous systems as previous “lines.” E.g. if the US tried building a wall, then demolished it and tried electronic surveillance, then let that fall into disrepair and tried e-verify, then defunded that and built watchtowers where snipers shot illegal crossers with no warning, the snipers would be the fourth “line.” I’m not under any impression that ana or other commenters here think no one’s tried anything but lethal force to secure the border.
Similarly, I don’t know that you actually hold this position (or if you think I do, or if you think I think someone else does…), but it seems strange. Primarily, what trying other policies can do is give you information about how well that policy (and others like it) works, if it works at all. Regardless of the outcome, you’re still selecting your future policy based on some combination of what seems most ethically acceptable and what seems likely to work.
That is to say, I don’t think a policy’s position in the long succession of attempted policies intrinsically makes it more or less acceptable. I do think whether or not you try less-lethal tactics before shooting people is something relevant to how justified shooting them is (though sometimes you just have to shoot, even without warning from a sniper hide half a mile away).
Every law we have on the books is ultimately enforced by the threat of deadly force. Go steal a candy bar from the local grocery store and you’ll engage the whole huge justice system. And that will involve people using force against you, and if you keep resisting, they’ll escalate till they’re pointing a loaded gun at you with the safety off and demanding that you surrender right now.
So it’s kind-of silly to object about this when we’re talking about immigration law. It’s an isolated demand for nonviolence.
If someone says “Anyone who steals a candy bar from a store should be shot,” I’m going to think they’re a bit of a nut. But if you steal a candy bar from a store, the police show up to arrest you, and you (say) pull a knife to convince them to leave you alone, you may very well get shot for your troubles. Getting shot by a policeman or prison guard is not the intended punishment for stealing the candy bar, but it is a possible outcome. Similarly, if someone says “let’s shoot all the illegals coming across the border,” I’m going to think they’re a nut. But if you are trying to cross the border and the border patrol arrests you and you fight with them, you may very well end up getting shot.
@albatross11
Taking your “every law is eventually backed up by lethal force” idea as true*, one is still allowed to object that the proposed path from a particular crime to lethal force is much shorter and easier than one thinks it ought to be. This is the complaint I am talking about.
*I regard it as rather misleading. It’s true in a sense, but “continuing to resist” is hiding other more serious crimes. If the only thing you do contrary to the laws of the land is steal a candy bar, even if you don’t turn yourself in you will not actually be on the receiving end of lethal force (in a hypothetical land where police are responsible and don’t choke random citizens). If they find you, they will arrest you and you will go to court where you can plead your innocence. This argument could go on at great length, and I’m simplifying a little, but this is already kind of a self-indulgent footnote.
If you also have a magical way of ensuring that everybody knows that entering the strip will definitely kill them, and of preventing people from doing so involuntarily or while mentally incapacitated, then probably no. Seems kind of overly hypothetical though?
I think motive is perhaps more important?
That seems like an unreasonably strong constraint. Would you similarly argue that it is immoral to build a bridge unless you have some way of making it impossible for someone to jump off it while mentally incapacitated? High buildings similarly?
There is a legal doctrine of the attractive nuisance, such as a pool of some dangerous chemical that looks enough like a swimming pool so a kid might climb over the fence and jump in. But I don’t think the magical killing zone qualifies.
I was aiming more for a sufficient constraint than a necessary one. Too tired to think about that aspect further right now, might have more thoughts tomorrow.
I do think the fact that the hypothetical strip is unfailingly effective is doing more work here than it should. “Unfailingly effective” means nobody (modulo the ignorant, coerced or mentally incapable) is going to try it. Changing that to “moderately effective” adds the desperate to the list, and unnecessarily killing desperate people strikes me as inherently inhumane.
A natural intuition, but I’m not sure a defensible one.
Assume, for the moment, that you are in favor of immigration restrictions, would vote for an impenetrable non-lethal wall if that option was available. Going from that to a moderately effective lethal wall feels inhumane. But from the standpoint of the people potentially killed it is an improvement, assuming they are themselves making a rational choice. It replaces a zero chance of either being killed or getting across the border with the option of either a zero chance of both (don’t try to cross) or a gamble–risk of death against opportunity to cross. Those who choose the latter presumably believe the benefit is worth the risk. The only losers ex-ante (if any) are the current inhabitants who don’t want the immigrants–but they are not the ones you feel are being treated inhumanely.
To put the point rhetorically, your “desperate” are people whose situation if they don’t cross is even worse than the risk of being killed if they do–and you prefer to keep them in that situation. Rather like arguing against permitting people on the third floor of a burning building to jump.
If that argument feels unconvincing, consider the equivalent in a different context. Imagine some people are suffering from a severely disabling but not immediately lethal disease. Someone comes up with a medicine that cures the disease–but has a significant chance of death. Should people be allowed to take it?
Is the only difference that you are implicitly assuming that in the former case nobody would rationally take the risk, hence the only ones killed are the ignorant or irrational? If you don’t make that assumption–assume a low quality killing barrier, which arguably is what we now have–does it still feel inhumane relative to the (hypothetical) perfect wall?
Interesting, but IMO uncompelling. But then I’m not a rationalist.
… my immediate objection is to the assumption that the person making the gamble is typically going to be analyzing it rationally, particularly given that they have no way to accurately estimate the risk involved in crossing. But I’m not sure to what extent that’s a rationalization on my part.
Just paint the ground red and use automated armed drones that shoot anything that moves.
Yes, obviously it’s immoral and inhumane, because it will kill people desperate and/or stupid enough to try going through and you could have prevented those deaths by using less lethal means.
If you consider different things to be the same, then you can wonder about anything you want. I myself wonder why the 74,000,000 cats in the US aren’t treated like the 1.5 x 10^-15 g of carbon atoms at the tip of my nose.
Fools who restrict themselves to only considering things to be the same if they actually so may still wonder about “unofficial” invasions of the US, however. There are about 320 million people who are plausibly one.
I call that uncharitable. Not to me, as I don’t actually espouse this equivalence. But if you seriously don’t see why some people might, you are more unfeeling than I expected.
I of course completely grant the 320 million people. But those are the people you’re trying to convince; you can’t seriously expect them to agree. If anything, the success of their “invasion” is evidence that they should take the new one really seriously.
Some of us here have unconventional moral views. Here is my reasoning, which I think is fairly common among libertarians:
It’s never worse to give someone two choices (A and B) than just one of them (A). Even if B is much worse than A: then people will just choose A. It should be assumed that whichever they choose is the better (less bad) for them.
Most of us who don’t want unrestricted immigration would say it would be OK to install an insurmountable obstacle along the border (ignore the cost or environmental effects for now). (Similarly, if there was an ocean between us and the rest of the world, and we only let in immigrants in a controlled manner, there wouldn’t be any particular moral problem with that.) In this case, if you are on the other side of the border, you only have one choice: to stay there (unless you get the permission to immigrate legally). If we shoot anyone who tries to cross the border illegally, you have two choices: to stay on the other side, or to die (with a certain probability). Therefore it’s not any worse than the insurmountable obstacle.
This requires that prospective immigrants know that they get killed if they try to cross: have a fence and put very visible warnings on it. Also note that none of this is only relevant if you want very low or no immigration: you may want immigration, but want your country to decide who can get in (those who are the most beneficial for the economy, plus refugees who need asylum the most).
Another way to look at it: if you jump in front of a train, you die. How does this compare with having border guards shoot illegal immigrants? If you look at it from the perspective “does anyone do something unvirtuous?”, the latter looks worse: the train driver doesn’t intentionally kill anyone, while the border guard does. But if you look at it like “does it harm anyone? (how much? can you ensure you don’t get harmed?)”, they are morally equivalent: if you don’t jump in front of the train, and don’t try to cross the border illegally, you don’t get killed. IMO that’s the only thing that matters.
If it’s trains vs. landmines or automatic sentry guns, you don’t even have the difference of someone intentionally killing someone. The only difference is a symbolic one: with the landmines/guns, you install devices whose only direct purpose is to kill. However, the intention of the person who installs the devices is to prevent illegal border crossing, not to kill (though killing might happen if someone still tries to cross) – just as the train driver’s intention is to take people from one place to another, not to kill (though killing might happen if someone jump in front of the train).
Yes, and as has been explained a couple of times in this thread, if you have other, less-lethal means to ensure the same outcome, you’re morally obligated to use them first.
By your reasoning it’s a-ok to respond to jaywalking with on-the-spot executions, because everyone has the option not to jaywalk. The rest of us realize that this picture is missing something.
Yes, it’s missing the long list of negative effects that accompany the jaywalking, like rape, murder, drug/gun/human trafficking, fraud, labor exploitation, taxpayer expense, cultural fragmentation, demographic replacement.
Also, no one is seriously suggesting the first or second response to jaywalking is on-the-spot execution. First we would expect the police officer to stop the person and give them a citation. I suppose it’s possible if they violently refused the citation after several warnings, they might wind up getting shot, but even then probably not because jaywalking isn’t a big enough deal to bother shooting someone over. But if jaywalking were a part of all the bad stuff I mentioned above that illegal immigration is, then…maybe?
Could you please do the same? How much “rape, murder, drug/gun/human trafficking, fraud, labor exploitation, taxpayer expense, cultural fragmentation, demographic replacement” does illegal immigration produce, how much do other instances of those things cost to reduce, and how much money should/would be spent on reducing illegal immigration?
Well, 80% of the women and girls crossing the border illegally are raped, so I think we’re well within the “worth the expenditures to stop the raping” zone.
With the exception of the last two, those are all effects of the laws making immigration illegal, and it isn’t clear that all of them are even real–that, for example, the murder rate by or to illegal immigrants is higher than by or to other people.
The last two are likely real effects of immigration, legal or illegal, but it isn’t clear they are bad effects. Is America clearly worse for the addition to its culture and population of Irish, Italians, Ashkenazi, Mexicans, Japanese, Chinese, … ?
Can’t seem to find a link back the original study in that article Condrad linked for 80% of migrants being raped.
Are you equally credulous about unsourced Huffington Post articles on the rape epidemic in colleges? From skimming the Amnesty International article linked in your article’s source (which doesn’t appear to support the figure of 80% other than by saying “shelter directors said so”), the only numbers it gives (on pages 6 and 15) imply rates of 25% and 5%.
Both the 80% and the 60% figure look like they’re pulled out of the air.
The 80% figure:
The 60% figure
The 60% figure in turn cites some reports from 2002 and 1999.
Is Breitbart any better? Rape trees. It’s happening. 60%, 80%, who knows, but somebody’s definitely doing the raping. And then there’s the coyotes who rob the migrants and leave them for dead, or murder them. And everybody who lives along the border has stories of robberies and home invasions. “But you could have been robbed by somebody who was born here.” Who cares? That has nothing to do with the crime from the people who shouldn’t have been here at all.
Crime rates are less important than crimes themselves. If your kid gets killed by an illegal immigrant who shouldn’t have even been in the country it’s no consolation that other illegal immigrants aren’t killing people. We have a rule that people that we don’t know can’t come in, and then the government lets them come in anyway. We’ve got people who commit crimes, and we deport them, and they walk right back in and murder somebody and when the cry goes up for the government to do its job we get a big old “but y u mad tho?”
The problems all around illegal immigration are a lot worse than jaywalking, or speeding, or bike thieving or whatever. We do not have international drug cartels intimately involved with jaywalking, speeding, or bike thieving. Can we stop with the “but if this crime were a different crime would you care then?” analogies? They’re not effective analogies because these are different crimes.
Is it any consolation that your kid wasn’t killed because the citizen murderer killed an illegal immigrant instead?
If immigrants commit fewer murders per capita than citizens then, unless for some reason illegal immigrants are particularly unlikely to be killed, the probability of a random citizen being killed is going down, not up. Some of the ones who are killed will now be killed by illegal immigrants, as per your example, but some of the ones who would have been killed are now not being killed because an illegal immigrant is being killed instead–that being necessary to make the overall murder rate lower, not higher, than before.
Sure, my argument is also an argument for having the death penalty for every crime.
Here are my reasons not to support that:
(1) Usually we can’t prove guilt with 100% certainty. The death penalty is irreversible. If lesser punishments are enough to deter the crime, we can limit the harm to the wrongly convicted.
(2) If you’ve committed a crime, you’d have an incentive to do whatever it takes to avoid getting caught, such as shooting cops or witnesses, since there is no bigger punishment than death.
(3) With some (usually minor) crimes, you might be unaware that it’s a crime. Some crimes may be vaguely defined, so you may not be 100% certain if something is a crime.
(4) Some crimes can be committed inadvertently.
(5) Some infractions (e.g. jaywalking) we want to be able to occasionally commit. We only make them illegal so that people don’t do them too much, or so that people don’t do them when they would actually cause a nuisance.
(6) It could allow cops to get away with murder by killing someone and then claiming he jaywalked.
Obviously that depends on one’s moral axioms. I support using less lethal means if they aren’t significantly more costly or less effective, though I wouldn’t call it an obligation.
In practice, so are other penalties. What fraction of people wrongly convicted and sent to jail, or even fined, do you think eventually have their conviction reversed?
There is one other, somewhat odd, argument against the death penalty. In a society that takes it seriously, such as 18th century England, the death penalty is cheap. If the people controlling the legal system are not the sort of people likely to be convicted and executed, it may be in their interest to overuse the death penalty, since almost all of the cost is being born by someone else–the person executed. Imprisonment is an expensive penalty for the legal system as well as the convict, which gives some incentive not to overuse it.
I can go into more detail if you are interested–you seem to be coming from an L&E background but may not have considered the implications of public choice theory as undercutting the Posner conjecture.
In theory you can at least offer financial restitution to an individual wrongly convicted and imprisoned, which is a qualitative difference from offering financial restitution to the family of a wrongly executed person.
Yes. The main point is that even if the sentence is fully served, a jail sentence or a fine causes less harm than an execution.
Indeed, it would be a good idea if we took the probability of wrongful convictions into account, and attempted to minimize the total harm caused by crimes and wrongful convictions. (Perhaps it may even be useful to make the punishment depend on the certainty of guilt?) Currently the criminal justice system formally claims to have a standard of “beyond reasonable doubt”, but I don’t think that’s what happens in practice. (Of course trying to estimate the harm caused by crimes and punishments, and the probability of wrongful convictions, would cause an extreme amount of controversy for politically controversial crimes.)
(Also, in the way you analyze things, it may not even matter if the conviction is wrongful. Of course my intuition would be that wrongful convictions matter more in most respects. Though, thinking about it, reducing the threshold of evidence, while increasing the percentage of wrongful convictions, may increase deterrence, and thus the occurrence of the crime, perhaps in some cases so much that the absolute number of wrongful convictions decreases. This is affected by whether wrongful convictions come from the wrong people convicted for an actual crime, thus they are proportionate to the number of crimes, or people being convicted for a crime that never happened.)
Yes, though it’s also a benefit if we currently don’t punish some people who should be punished because it’s too expensive. (Of course overuse is more dangerous at the extremes.) But is it more workable to oppose the death penalty along this argument than to only oppose overuse? Quite possibly. Though, while it’s hard to convince people to force the government to adopt specific measures to prevent overuse, it’s also hard to convince people to oppose the death penalty along your argument. A lot of people oppose the death penalty, but mostly for different, moral or emotional reasons.
Nope, mathematics.
You can, and very rarely do. But if, as I suspect, only a very small fraction of wrongful convictions ever get discovered and reversed, it’s still almost always the case that the error is never corrected.
I’m with you. I played a couple rounds of Fortnite, then put it down and didn’t come back. Lots of the game, to me, was aimless wandering, scavenging for equipment, and keeping an eye out for other players. The few fights I had were briefly amusing – it was fun to stalk someone and set up an ambush, or to have to react myself when I got ambushed – but generally it was a sharp, frenetic ten seconds or so, punctuated by long minutes of tedium.
Team Fortress 2, on the other hand, I still love many thousands of hours later (I never migrated to Overwatch – TF2 feels perfect to me, so why change?). All 9 classes play differently and interact with each other in all sorts of intricate ways every match, and rounds are usually 5-30 minutes, with a beautiful ebb and flow of map control across Payload maps. You’ve always got to be aware of what class you are, where your teammates are located, what the enemy team is up to, and what the objective is. Learning to navigate each match is a joy once you’ve mastered it – “We have 60 seconds left on the hill, but it looks like most of my team is dead, I need to try and distract and delay BLU team long enough for my buddies to respawn” or “sentry on the ledge covers the payload path, need to outflank it using that path over there to the right, gotta clear out this pyro and soldier first…” Basically, you’re always making interesting decisions about where to go, what objective to pursue, and how to best help the team.
I also really enjoy being able to just drop in as any class I want, at any time, without having to hope that the RNG gives me a sniper rifle this time, for example. If I want to be a spy and try to sow chaos behind enemy lines, I can. If I just want to goof off as a jetpack Pyro and swoop down on unsuspecting victims with a phlogistinator, I can do that, too. Maybe I want to be more relaxed and just be a support engineer, trying to find a solid teleporter spot and to set up a lethal sentry nest. If a particular playstyle ever gets stale, you can change up weapons and have a whole new way to play (I believe Overwatch does this with different heroes, which is why they have a roster much larger than 9). If that gets old, then you change classes and it’s a brand new game entirely.
I dunno, I think of arena shooters like Overwatch and TF2 as multiplayer shooter perfection – at least for my part – and I really don’t get the appeal of the battle royale genre. Takes all sorts to make a world, I guess.
And now the news from 1971.
“Who’s Next” by The Who is a groovy LP and you should get a copy and put it on the Hi-Fi right away.
That was the news from 1971. Good night.
I think the right way to do this is:
I checked out “Who’s Next” by the Who. I thought the record was . . .
[whips off sunglasses]
. . . groovy!
[YEAAARGH!]
Agree. I only moderately like The Who in general, but I love that album.
The other news from 1971 is that Electric Warrior has just appeared and is one of the grooviest LPs of all time.
Sigh so a friend of mine who is unfortunately an antivaxxer posted a link on Facebook today. It’s your standard “RECENT STUDIES SHOW UNDENIABLE PROOF VACCINES CAUSE AUTISM!!!” piece with links to studies.
Here’s my problem: as far as I can tell, the studies look legit, but I don’t trust my level of expertise to say one way or the other if this is good evidence.
I know some stats and enough basic experimental procedure to not see any obvious cheating, but these studies have titles like IL-4 mediates the delayed neurobehavioral impairments induced by neonatal hepatitis B vaccination that involves the down-regulation of the IL4 receptor in the hippocampus and are full of high level medical tests and terms I don’t know anything about.
Anyone with a medical research background (or even Scott if he’d care to weigh in) want to take a look and give a credibility rating?
If you don’t feel confident enough to evaluate the studies, why does your friend?
He’s not a part of the rationalist community and at face value the titles are pretty convincing if only for the hepatitis b vaccine. The only thing really keeping me from updating heavily on these studies is that no one else is reporting on them that I could find, it goes against the current scientific consensus, and they’re recent enough to not have any replications or refutations. This is why I’m turning to you guys, so that hopefully someone more knowledgeable about these things can weigh in about what, if anything, the experimenters did wrong.
Holy crud, my wife might be a genius.
In both studies (the one here, and their 2016 study that they cite), their vaccine dose was 1 mcg. Neonatal rats typically weigh about 5-6 g [source]. This is a dose of 0.2 mcg/g
The vaccine dose given to a human neonate is 10-20 mcg [source]. Neonatal humans weigh about 3500 g [in my experience, also source]. This is a dose of 0.003-0.006 mcg/g.
They gave their rats the equivalent of 35-70 HBV vaccine injections. I’m not sure what conclusion we’re supposed to draw from that drastic of an immune challenge delivered to a non-human organism.
—
They state “Furthermore, our recent study revealed that neonatal hepatitis B vaccination led to impairments in mood- and cognition-related behaviors, neurogenesis and hippocampal long-term potentiation in mice.” This is not the whole truth.
Yang et al 2016 immunized mice on day 0, day 7, and day 21 with the above dose. They performed neurobehavioral tests at week 4, week 8, and week 12. The immunized rats showed decreased performance on week 8, but were indistinguishable from sham-immunized rats on weeks 4 and 12.
It’s also worth noticing that the escape latency and swimming path on the Morris Water Maze test show differences that are statistically detectable, but not all that bad in actual magnitude. It’s not as if the immunized rats stopped swimming, or failed to find the platform at all (like in Greg Holmes’ optogenetic studies). For a brief time, they were a step behind the other rats. Pfft.
In fact, this study demonstrates that you can massively overdose neonatal rats with immune challenge, and they’ll turn out just fine. To the degree that it is generalizable, this study demonstrates that HBV vaccination probably doesn’t cause neurodevelopmental disorders.
When they cite the 2016 study as evidence of “mood- and cognition-related behaviors” as though this constituted a genuine neurodevelopmental disorder, it’s either a lie or a delusion.
ETA : I just noticed that in the 2018 study, they subjected the mice to the Morris Water Maze at weeks 4, 8, and 12, and briefly describe that “At 4 or 12 weeks, there were no significant different performances in the MWM tasks between mIL-4-mice and the control (Fig. S3),” but while they give a nice color graph in the body depicting performance at 8 weeks, they bury the less-impressive graphs in supplemental figures. This is very disingenuous.
—
(As with all this speculative neurodevelopmental-immunology shit) their paper rests on their claim that exposure to certain cytokine profiles influences brain development, as determined by comparison to rats without said exposure. That’s fine. Therein is some plausibility.
But no one should care about that. Cytokine exposure is universal, for the unvaccinated become the infected, and infected rats will expose themselves to cytokines. The comparison between cytokine-(+) and cytokine-(-) rats has no external validity.
They needed four groups of rats :
1. Vaccinated / HBV-exposed
2. Vaccinated / HBV-unexposed
3. Unvaccinated / HBV-exposed
4. Unvaccinated / HBV-unexposed
My guess is, many of the unvaccinated / HBV-exposed rats would be killed or would be neurodevelopmentally harmed by their severe infection, confirming the benefits of vaccination despite mild, transient adverse effects that occur if you stab someone with a dose that is an order of magnitude too large.
—
tldr : they gave baby rats massive immune challenges, they wildly overstated the adverse effects thereof and falsely implied those effects were permanent, and their results lack external validity. So yeah. Trash.
Anybody CMWIW.
This is a new one to me. “Correct me where I’m wrong”?
You got it! Shooting for humility
Thank you this clears things up beautifully.
The only note I have is that depending on how vaccine dosing works, that might not be as insane as it looks. I know that for a lot of drugs if you look across species of different sizes, the appropriate dosage scales sublinearly with size (on average, there is a lot of variation across species). For example, if you dose an elephant with LSD at the same mg/kg as a safe dose for a human, the elephant will drop dead pretty quickly.
But the mechanism of how a vaccine works is obviously different from something that just blocks a receptor in a lot of ways. So I could image the dosage relationship even being superlinear. Which would make the dosage even more insane than it looks.
Someone correct me if they know the typical scaling of vaccine dosages across species of different sizes.
I didn’t know that, thanks!
Allow me to correct myself on the details of the elephant example, my memory or original source (which was something discussing dose responses as they scale with body size) was off. Wiki gives a dosage too high to be a reasonable recreational dose in mg/kg for a human. Too high by a factor of ~10 if I did the math in my head right. Humans have taken higher doses than normal although maybe not that high but it has much more dramatic effects than normal. Rather they dosed the elephant as if it were a rhesus macaque or a cat that they were trying to induce a violent reaction in according to the paper.
And wikipedia says some people dispute if it’s possible that the elephant actually died due to another drug or drug interaction when they attempted to revive him.
I’m still reasonably confident about the scaling rules not necessarily being linear, but no longer sure the dosage could have been concluded to be reasonably safe for an elephant (although you’d think that the scientists involved would’ve tried to pick a safe dosage, so their decision to jump straight to an enormous dose seems careless to me).
Edit: rahien.din beat me to it and actually read the paper. He deserves many kudos.
Edit 2: I wrote down the wrong numbers.
I have a little real work to do and a barbeque after that, so I’m not going to read this today. I downloaded the paper and will read through it eventually, and I’ll pass it along to my girlfriend who has a background in neuroinflamation.
Right off the bat though, I’m very skeptical of their methodology.
They injected these mice with virus at a concentration of 1ug/50uL or 20ug/mL. This is double the concentration of HBV vaccine given to human children, 10ug/mL according to Google. I’m not a pharmacologist or an immunologist but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that a two-fold increase in how much of any medicine you inject will mess up your day.rahien.din covered this better than I did. I’m in too much of a cell mindset, calculating concentration hides the actual difference in dosage.It also looks like they only did one behavioral assay, which is not recommended in mice. You usually want to do at least two or three different assays to make sure that you’re measuring the behavior that you think you’re measuring. My girlfriend’s roommate is using this same assay to look for memory impairment, but she’s also doing novel object recognition in combination with it for this reason.
I can’t comment on the rest of the paper without reading it but that’s what jumped out at me in the methods.
Thank you that makes sense
Aside from what everyone else has been saying, there’s a big gap between the two claims — if HB vaccination downregulated the IL4 receptor and thereby caused autism, then we could cause autism whenever we wanted by antagonizing those receptors. Obviously, we can’t. We don’t know how autism works in that kind of detail, and it’s very unlikely to be a regulation issue on one receptor — there’s too much going on with it for that.
Wait a minute, infants in the US get vaccinated against hepatitis B?? Why? Do children regularly get exposed to blood?
No.
As near as I can tell the reasons are (a) it’s a very safe vaccine and the risk of chronic hepatitis B infection is especially high in children and (b) doctors don’t reach teens in sufficient numbers to vaccinate them. Also, (c) apparently vaccinating babies works to eradicate the disease.
An observation, which I am curious for feedback about:
Corporate IT isn’t about improving worker efficiency anymore, it is about improving workflow efficiency. The difference is small but critical: By and large, most of what I do isn’t destroying jobs, but rather restructuring them such that highly paid specialists offload non-specialized duties onto lower-paid non-specialists. I transmute high-paying jobs into a lower number of even higher paying jobs, plus several low-paying supporting jobs.
So if I were coding IT support software, I would write a program that gave a script with prompts for telephone operators, with the comparatively low number of issues needing specialist support getting escalated to the specialists via some scripted criteria. Supporting this software would involve improving the script, either to reduce unnecessary escalations, or escalating as necessary sooner.
This creates low-paying, low-skilled jobs, at the expense of a higher number of specialist jobs. (While making the specialist jobs even more specialized). This looks like it would carve out the middle class on a societal level, pushing the more skilled higher, while pushing the marginally qualified into the lower classes.
Does this sound right?
Only slightly related, but I wanted to vent:
A really embarrassingly large part of my job involves (metaphorically) wandering around after BI people and developers and high-level managers and whatnot and simply automating the remaining low-pay-low-difficulty tasks they left as part of the workflow chain after they “transmuted” the high-paying-high-difficulty jobs into more low-pay-low-difficulty jobs in the way that you describe.
As a basic example: Last week I literally automated away a task that was about 10 hours/week of a close-to-min-wage job that consisted largely of clicking the same button on the front-end of a highly-complex tool that did all the real decision-making, that had replaced perhaps 80 hours/wk earlier workflow. It took me a few hours, and was frankly much simpler than the work the initial developer had done building the tool. In a way, I felt like a parasite- I did an easy thing that took advantage of someone else’s hard work, and made it look amazing because I removed humans entirely from the workflow- but really the dev had already removed 8/9 of the human involvement already!
It feels to me like most of my coworkers are all too happy to heavily simplify/transmute/make-more-efficient tasks up to that 75-90% threshold, and are characteristically unwilling to automate away that last small fraction. Perhaps it’s a trust issue- leaving it 100% machine-ran requires trusting the automated processes to not make more mistakes than the human. Or perhaps it’s the old joke about the factory, the man, and the dog…
I made fictional CDs/albums with fictional band names and tracklistings. My main early-childhood hobby though was mazes – drawing, solving, staring at mazes. If I gave a maze to a friend and they crossed a line or went outside the perimeter ‘illegally’, they quickly found out just how serious this was to me.
Yep, lots of mazes and castles in my case. Also ‘levels’ for made-up videogames, mostly Sonic the Hedgehog derived.
I also enjoyed to draw mazes. I also liked to add keys / doors / creature encounters to them.
Last time I saw you talking about this, you said the long-standing bug with the report button was preventing reports from getting through to you. I think someone in the thread even tried it, with the “log out and back in” workaround for the “Cheatin’ uh?” dialog, and that you said it didn’t work.
So, what’s up with that? I still do it, because I am full of spite and it makes me feel better when I see something really egregious, but it would be nice to have some more clarity on this issue.
I too had believed the “report” option was not working.
I too want clarity on this. All I know is that I do get reports, sometimes.
I reported a comment just now with both buttons and got “cheating, huh?” on both. I tried it after changing my url to https and both buttons said they worked. Tried another comment exactly once and that also said it worked. Did you get any of those reports? Does https make a difference for other folks? Is it supposed to make a difference for something like this?
I always use HTTPS and get the “cheatin’ uh?” message unless I’ve recently logged out and back in. Maybe switching to HTTPS cleared some state for you?
“Cheating, huh” isn’t supposed to mean the comment was reported twice; it means the comment ID in the report request was invalid. However, I just reported your comment and got “Cheating, huh”, and the comment ID looks fine:
comment_id: 644290
sc_nonce: 4bef7f84ec
result_id: 4979
action: pmcc_report_comments_flag_comment
xhrFields[withCredentials]: true
or raw
comment_id=644290&sc_nonce=4bef7f84ec&result_id=4979&action=pmcc_report_comments_flag_comment&xhrFields%5BwithCredentials%5D=true
The response was
{“code”:”invalid_values_message”,”errors”:true}
which should mean the comment ID was either empty or not an integer. 644290 looks pretty integer-like to me.
This is a test comment to try the report feature.
Leftmost “report” turned into red circle. Rightmost report resulted in text being added at the bottom of the comment reading, “The comment has been reported.” I’m going to say this seems to be working fine, twice over. (up-to-date chrome browser with mostly default settings)
Also, I realize now that unless we’ve been asked to test the feature, it might be a good idea not to overwhelm the report inbox with lots of people trying it out.
I received your report.
This is what it looks like on my screen:
https://imgur.com/a/YNld7PE
The ones on the left now apparently work (i.e. turn into the red circle checkmark rather then cheatin’ when clicked) without doing any login/logout dance.
I reported this comment as a test.
This bothered me. Am I unreasonable? Looking over the discussion, it feels like an overreaction–am I alone here? Can someone explain to me briefly why what he said was so unacceptable?
I am biased in that I have greatly enjoyed Chris’ contributions across several fora for years. He is consistently bright, informed, data-driven, and insightful. I admit he’s somewhat confrontational, and in particular greatly likes to present contradictions in people’s professed and revealed preferences in a way that I guess maybe comes off as aggressive, but I think it adds a lot of value to the discussion. In particular I’m very much not seeing his interaction with FdB as violating norms here: yes, he was explicitly calling out FdB’s beliefs, but he was directly part of the discussion and on the same topic to boot. It was certainly true, and I think reasonably necessary.
Am I, in my limited ability to analyze situations, missing why this is so unacceptable?
I’m surprised at the 30 day ban for that offense, but that could be because of prior incidents. I would speculate that the cause was writing an inflammatory post aimed at a poster who had gotten a 1 day ban. Coming back from a ban and seeing what could easily be construed as a personal attack isn’t conducive to reasonable discourse, and directly addressing a poster who can’t respond (for a limited period) is also a little iffy when done that way.
Also, I had a few versions of this comment eaten by the filter – are banned commenters’ names banned words?
Yes. I gather that’s how the actual banning of the person is effected.
I think it’s because he continued to take shots at Freddie after Freddie had been banned and couldn’t respond.
Freiddie might have started it, but Freddie already had eaten a temporary ban and couldn’t even respond. When you see this result, the correct thing to do is be an adult and be satisfied that the banhammer has come down on someone behaving badly. Not start flinging mud.
St____’s post was obnoxious ad hominem involving actual details about Freddie specifically. Rather than the normal generic nonsense about leftists or rightists that is mostly given a pass. Ignore Freddie because Freddie is X therefore his arguments are invalid. And St____ couldn’t let go. He continued on in this vain at length for multiple posts.
It was not behavior that should be allowed unless we want to risk every discussion here devolving into ad hominem about the people here brave enough to use their own name. I highly disagree that it added any value to the discussion. It subtracted a lot of value though.
It was obviously not kind, not even vaguely necessary, and only debatably true.
I think Scott has decided to crack down on personal attacks on other commenters. All four bans were for gratuitous personal attacks, and there’s a definite correlation between the gratituitousness of the attack and the length of the ban. I was very surprised to see a neo Puritan get 3 months for insulting me when I said that I thought War Nerd was not a good source. Honestly, I’d forgotten about that incident entirely.
In this particular case, it’s less personal than the others, but FdB had just been banned, which should have been a signal that the particular issue was closed.
1. It’s free
2. A lot of popular sports and rap guys got in on it early and kept talking about it on social media
All your theorycrafting about mechanics is thinking about it way too hard. It’s not in the Overwatch/DOTA sphere of games appreciated for the interaction of their systems, it’s in the Angry Birds/Farmville/Minecraft sphere of normie network effects
Imagine you live in a big city. Suddenly, every artificial light source in the city goes out (including streetlights car headlights, and emergency backup lights). Would all the stars of the Milky Way be instantly visible, as they are in rural areas, or would the stars still not look as bright?
Why?
Roughly as bright. The Milky Way was visible from NYC in 1977 (but not other blackouts because the moon was too bright) and from Los Angeles in 1994.
https://timeline.com/los-angeles-light-pollution-ebd60d5acd43
“Roughly” because other pollution isn’t going to go away, especially in LA.
You mean, after your eyes adjust to the dark? I guess it would depend on the amount of air pollution.
No, only once the remaining light from the streetlights etc that’s already out there evaporates, duh. Wait, what? 🙂
I’ll lead with a caveat that anything I say here is indeed back-rationalization as per Hackworth’s comment. This is all also from an analytical perspective, as I myself tried Fortnite with some friends and don’t enjoy it at all.
Battle royale games had been around for quite some time before becoming really popular. I still remember seeing streamers play the open world version of H1Z1 and then becoming really confused as it all converted into H1Z1 battle royale, which had stone nothing to do with the zombie apocalypse premise. There apparently was a DayZ mod even before that, and PUBG led to a noticable spike in popularity afterwards, but the popularity explosion only seems to have happened with Fortnite. So this might be better answered in two parts – one for how battle royales got to League of Legends/CSGO/Hearthstone levels of popularity (I’m using Twitch viewership as a gross approximation) and one for how Fortnite blew the top off to make battle royales even more popular than existing games.
Ketil hits on one of the more unique things battle royales introduce, which is the tension. Between there being a much higher variance on outcomes in battle royale games (1st to 100th place vs win/lose a match in Overwatch), and no respawns, it makes for a very different feel than other game modes have provided to date. Death kicking you out of the match is a feature here and makes you play very differently. The closest analogues I can think of are hardcore mode in Diablo where you lose your character permanently when they die or sudden death mode in various other games.
Battle royale games are also super understandable at a glance. Get guns, shoot people, don’t die. Compare to Overwatch where there are all sorts of specialized abilities whose functions aren’t obvious to an untrained observer. This aspect in particular I think is key for how battle royale games got big. They can appeal to the actual mass market – not just people who already play games, but also people who wouldn’t have played video games otherwise. That’s why you see things like MLB players playing Fortnite on the jumbotron or Actual Celebrities like Drake and some NFL guy playing on stream with Ninja. That sort of popular culture buy-in would have been unthinkable with any of the other popular games of today.
Strongly tied in with the last point is that battle royales have been made super accessible. They’re on PC, consoles, and critically, mobile. Starting to bleed into Fortnite specifics, they also made their game free-to-play (and actually well-made), which removes a huge barrier to entry. As someone who regularly checks, it’s shocking how low the quality of most other top played games on mobile are, so Fortnite stands out like a sore thumb due to its production quality.
While I agree with you on the incentive structures rewarding hiding in theory, in practice it seems like people get bored and go for big flashy plays instead. This thread gives a (possibly non-representative) sampling of player attitudes on the matter:
https://www.reddit.com/r/FortNiteBR/comments/7rzqji/why_does_everyone_hate_campers/
This kind of makes sense. You yourself imply that turtling isn’t fun and that the game would be better if it incentivized racking up kills. My interpretation is that by what may be a lucky accident, the act of getting kills themselves is already rewarding enough to the playerbase that it doesn’t end up being an issue in practice. If losing in a game of Fortnite had a steeper cost, we’d probably see different gameplay.
As for Fortnite specifics, I think you’re taking the wrong angle for the building aspect. There’s a definite joy of improvisational MacGuyvering that it gets at. I remember a very old Broodwar map called “Archon Tag” that has since evolved into things like “Cat and Mouse” and “Island Defense”. The basic premise of all of these games is that a few big monsters (Archons, originally) are trying to chase down and kill small helpless builders within a time limit. All the builders can do to stall for time is throw up forests of buildings to delay the monsters as they smash a path through. The real fun comes once the chase loops back to the ruins of earlier forts, as there’s an improvisational aspect on both sides to make use of the existing ruins to box in/box out the other side. The building aspect of Fortnite seems to capture some of this same fun of on-the-fly map editing.
A much floofier point I can’t qualify well but still intuitively feel is important is that Fortnite has a more cartoony style. I think that broadens the demographc appeal and makes the action more cartoony violence rather than “holy crap, you just blew that guy’s head off in a bloody explosion”. This, along with the wide platform availability, free-to-play model, and genre’s ease of grokkability to even non-gamers are what I think made Fortnite in particular unprecedentedly popular.
On the demographic appeal point, don’t underestimate the importance of not being expected to win. Most people don’t deal with competition well, losses are emotionally stronger than wins, and that has been a big limiting factor in broadening the appeal of games. Battle royale is a nice workaround for that issue as it makes winning very statistically unlikely anyway, reducing expectations and freeing less competitive players from performance pressure.
Yeah, I looked a little more into Fortnite after that post and fun while not winning definitely also seems to be a part. The devs play into this (as opposed to the hyper-realism of PUBG) by making goofy items like a plunger bomb or a disco ball bomb that makes your opponents dance. More fundamentally, the building system also allows for this in a Minecraftian sort of way. These outlets for creativity allow for players to “win” in their own way by making their own fun subgames instead of all bashing themselves against the 1 in 100 odds of actually being the last one standing.
About fences and border patrol. There are two Spanish cities in Morocco, which are surrounded by fences. This is an image of the fence of Melilla.
By the way, funny fact: some of the advertising by Trump against illegal immigrants was about people jumping the fence in Melilla (23 sec).
So, in 2005, the Spanish government had the brilliant idea to put concertina wires on top of the fence. These wires created these injuries in the people jumping them. A guy died. The government had to process and cure these people, and pay for their medical cost, before deporting them. There were protests by the Human Rights comissioner of the Council of Europe, as well as the European Comission. Finally, after an order by a Spanish judge they removed the wires, with all the cost of that (around 10 million euros).
There are cameras along the whole fence; plenty of police, too. The border is just 12 km long, and easily patrollable due to roads along the border. This is how it looks after they remove those wires.
But immigrants still manage to jump, mainly by grouping themselves into massive groups of hundreds of people and jumping en masse, because even though the police will come, some of them will manage to escape. Preventing those mass jumps is quite costly, especially because it is very hard to do without shooting people, and that is a non-starter. A lot of the people who jump are kids; there is actually a big problem with unaccompanied minors, and nobody knows what to do with them.
The thing is, this 6m double fence does not work that effectively. Of course, if it weren’t there, things would be much worse; there are entire colonies of people who settle around melilla, preparing themselves to jump the fence in one of those mass jumps; individuals doing it are not effective. So far, the best strategy seems to be to pay Morocco to stop them before they reach the border, and not look too carefully how they do it. Why cannot the US do that? They could then pretend that whatever atrocities the Mexicans comit are not their fault, while paying Mexico off with some kind of state aid. Then you can give asylum to those few who pass through the brutal Mexican border, and pretend to be the nice guy.
Edit: I added the name of the concertina wires. Turns out they are called the same in English and Spanish.
I also first stated that the case was taken to the ECHR, but I was confused.
Someone else will give you details, but the U.S. very much already pays Mexico to prevent people reaching its border, and to please not videotape how it accomplishes this.
Well, then that means that the people who do reach the US border have already gone through all of that. What makes the people who advocate for the US to commit those atrocities think that they would be more effective?
The US does have a history of commiting atrocities, but that is mostly on foreign soil where they can have plausible deniability, by secret services. Having the border patrol shoot people would probably make a lot of people become pro-immigrant.
Concertina wire.
I’m also rather astonished that the ECHR has a problem with wiring a fence. I get the problem with say, mines, but if you jump into a wire obstacle you’re kind of accepting that bad things are going to happen to you. At that point it’s on the jumper.
Thanks, I couldn’t find the translation, because it kept referring to the musical instrument.
It wasn’t the ECHR, I did not remember it correctly (it happened 10 years ago). The case was struck down by a Spanish judge. There was a lot of pressure from the EU, though.
That case had very bad optics and there was a big fuss. The thing is, once they jump and they are injured, it is our responsibility to cure them.
I am pretty sure that the ruckus in the US would be similar.
This is probably a dumb question, but if there are a crowd of people gathering on the other side of the fence why don’t they just hit them with tear gas or hoses?
There are a lot of options in between live fire and letting people through. Hell, when I was looking up minefields earlier today I was pleasantly surprised to see that there are non-lethal tear gas mines. Not practical for an unpatrolled border but if it just needs to slow someone down it sounds ideal.
The current conventional wisdom is that there’s no such thing as a non-lethal weapon, only a less-lethal weapon. People can and do get killed by tear gas grenades and beanbag rounds.
A lot fewer people than if live rifle ammo had been used in the same situation, but there seems to be a scale-insensitivity towards deaths and serious injuries in crowd control situations. And even without deaths or serious injuries, using force and inflicting pain to clear an unruly crowd still tends to looks bad. So even though tear gas and firehoses might cause 1% of the deaths of live ammo, they’ll still get you 30% as much bad PR (numbers made up for illustrative purposes).
In a border-fence scenario, there’s also a question of national sovereignty. If the fence is hard against the border, the other side of the fence is Moroccan soil, and Spanish soldiers firing tear gas grenades at them would technically be an act of war. In order to make a “tear gas when you approach the fence” policy work, you’d need a two layer fence: a symbolic fence at the actual border and the actual barrier a few dozen yards back from it, and a policy of lobbing tear gas at any large groups that cross the first fence and approach the second one.
Police in European countries use tear gas against rioters all the time, and it doesn’t cause much of a scandal or sympathy (except perhaps by those who already sympathize with the rioters), and very rarely does anyone die.
Sure, when you use tear gas on people who are on firm ground, it is not too dangerous. However, when you do it with people who are on top of a fence, some will die or at least get badly injured. Besides, we want to avoid them stepping on Spanish soil; if they step on the ground between the fences, they have stepped on Spanish soil.
Nabil ad Dajjal talked about using tear gas on the people gathering on the other side of the fence, not those up there. The likely reason they don’t do this is that that’s Morocco’s side (another reason Eric said).
Do they? US police also use tear gas and other LLWs against rioters, but it tends to be met with significant disapproval by anyone who sympathizes with the rioters.
They already use two wired fences. The problem is, once you jump the first one, you are on Spanish soil, so stopping you from jumping the second one is pointless, because once you step on Spanish soil you have to be deported by the proper procedures.
The Moroccan police collaborates with the Spanish police; you still get cases like this (minute 1:35 shows immigrants in the inside of the two fences, clinging to the upper part).
That’s not a problem because if they get deported with proper procedures, that means they don’t actually get into Spain (except for a brief time in a jail). And if it gets known that everybody who tries gets deported, few people will try.
Also, if it’s a problem, they could change the law which says they can’t just put them on the other side of the fence once they have set foot in Spain (and they could’ve not put vague bs in the constitution that might allow judges to strike it down).
No, an EU country cannot make a law that contradicts a sentence by the ECHR. We accept the jurisdiction of the court, and it can overturn a decision made even by the highest Spanish court.
Also, it just costs a lot of money to deport them. We don’t have the cheap US system where toddlers appear in deportation court without a lawyer.
Court cases in Spain take forever. This would mean that a lot of money is spent on this, which is really my main objection about illegal immigrants.
The ECHR is actually an organ of the Council of Europe, not the European Union. All EU countries are members of the Council of Europe; I don’t know if that’s actually a precondition of EU membership. AFAIK some countries have defied ECHR rulings, and the court can’t do much about it; I don’t know if the EU would do much about it.
Isn’t this basically what East Germany did?
Yes, East Germany did have a double (in some places, triple) fence system on the Inner German Border. But they used machine guns and anti-personnel mines instead of tear gas.
It was quite effective (there were still escapes, but a tiny fraction of the escapes before the border was fortified), but not in any way humane.
Well, this is a video of the Spanish police trying to make people on top of the fence come down. This is another video showing their violence.
My guess is that if you use tear gas on people sitting on a fence, some of them will fall and get injured, and you get blamed.
The Spanish police does not like to show too much how they prevent people from jumping, because it causes them loads of problems.
The thing is, once they are on the other side of the fence, you have to deport them, with courts and everything. There was a practice called “devoluciones en caliente” “hot returns”, where they would jump the fence, and the police would open the door of the fence and shove them outside. This was deemed illegal by the ECHR. This is an illegal practice for which the head of police was removed.
So, once they jump the first fence, they have stepped on Spanish soil, and you have to legally deport them. Meanwhile, human rights defenders will complain you are keeping them in detention centers awaiting trial.
Which shows the idiotic results of symbolic, emotional thinking on part of the electorate.
(1) We could let in just about everyone who wants to come legally. Anyone can get a visa at the embassies in Morocco and other African countries, buy a plane ticket (or we buy it for them if they can’t afford it) and fly safely to Europe.
(2) Or we could say we don’t let in anyone, even if they are in danger. We advertise with posters and speakers on the fence in every African language that we’ll try to kill anyone who crosses, and actually do so (or perhaps fire warning shots first); if you don’t want to die, you don’t try to cross. We may decide on less harsh treatment if those are enough to reduce illegal immigration to a minimal level. The point is if harsh methods are needed to reduce it, we apply them, and we don’t consider them inhumane (or don’t care if it’s inhumane).
(3) Or we could decide that we are willing to let in and help a given number of people. Try to determine who need it most, let them apply for a visa at any embassy or legal border crossing and come in legally as in (1), and apply (2) to anyone who tries to cross illegally.
Instead what we do is we let in a bunch of people who are willing to and manage to cross illegally, while we don’t let in a bunch of people who would deserve it more. If they manage to cross illegally, they can apply for asylum, while there is (I guess) no way to apply for asylum at embassies and come in in a safe way. We pay African countries to do the dirty work, and then treat those who manage to evade them much better.
All because governments have to appease left wingers who support refugees (and would be outraged if we applied brutal methods against them, but care much less if we’re not the ones actively preventing them from coming in), and right wingers who don’t want them here (and would be outraged if we actively helped them immigrate, but care much less if the border control is imperfect). Coppenhagen interpretation of ethics at its best, from both sides.
In the US there are separate systems for refugees and asylees. Refugees are mostly picked from among people living in refugee camps. Asylees are people in the country that apply.
I’m pretty pro immigration but there’s a ton more outright fraud in the asylum system than the refugee system, and even where the asylee claims are legally sufficient they very very rarely as compelling as even the median refugees claim.
The thing is, with legal immigration we end up with this charming guy coming to Europe (the family of the Equatorial Guinea dictator), whereas poor people are not allowed to come. The unemployment situation in Spain is bad enough (15%) that even undesirable jobs are filled by Spanish citizens, and then there the Portuguese are Eastern Europeans. Besides, for reasons of cultural fit, when we want poor immigrants, we invite Latin Americans in.
There is no reason whatsoever to let poor, uneducated legal immigrants, unless they are refugees. And if they are refugees, why did they not stop at Morocco? Besides, they tend to be strong young men, so they are a lot less sympathetic than other refugees.
The current fence situations where there are regular mass attacks and the police tries to stop then by nothing more than batons is the best equilibrium that can be reached.
I am pretty sure that if Trump builds the wall, people camp on the other side of it, and then launch massive coordinated jumps of hundreds of people, nothing will stop them (well, nothing that will look good on a recording on CNN, which you can be sure there will be).
Relevant column from Pat Buchanan.
Chapter 7 of TM 3-34.85 is probably the quickest one-stop source for US mine warfare doctrine. Current executive order is more or less to follow the Ottawa Treaty except for on the Korean Peninsula, so there’s not much actual training in this anymore (I’ve never done a live minefield), but it’s still in publications.
AFAIK, Mexico actively helps people migrate to the US. They have agencies that provide information, supplies, etc. I don’t know if they’re doing it for the remittances, to slough off surplus population, or to take back El Norte, or simply because too many Mexicans want to migrate to the US, and it would be unpopular to stop them effectively. At any rate, it seems to be their policy to favor migration into the US, so they may not be willing to change it even for a lot of money.
I don’t mean to pay them off to stop Mexicans from coming; I mean to pay them off so they stop the rest of South America.
That would leave you just the mexicans to deal with, and it is my understanding that the demographic situation in Mexico is such that there are much fewer young people than a decade ago.
Iiiiiinteresting. Do you have a single Spanish-language source on that? I’ll wait.
The New York Times is owned by Carlos Slim, so do they count as a “spanish-language source?”
A Mexican Manual for Illegal Migrants Upsets Some in U.S.
If you do a google image search for “mexican manual for illegal migrants” you can see the pages themselves.
Alright, that definitely increased my opinion of the Mexican government. Cool of them.
Lol.
Anyone watching Love Island?
Never heard of it and I guess that’s because it’s British, but I’d be fascinated to know what percentage of SSC has ever watched it or something equivalent…
My favorite Trashy Reality TV Show was “Young, Dumb, and Living Off Mum”, a show broadcast on BBC3 a few years back. Put a group of never-held-a-job 20-somethings in a house together, give them a dole budget, and set them “challenges” (eg., go to the supermarket and cook a meal without spending all your money on booze, or survive a day at “work” cleaning up animal muck on a nearby farm) to try and learn to survive independently. Their parents watch the footage and vote the most useless off once a week.
I also enjoy the odd episode of Duck Dynasty and Dog the Bounty Hunter.
Was that the crossover episode where the ducks escaped into the city, or where the bad guys went hiding in the bayou?
When it comes to reality TV, I was always a sucker for Gordon Ramsay shows. I was also surprised to find I liked American Pickers. (There’s a Frasier episode where Frasier finds the one thing he and his dad both like is Antique Roadshow.)
Gordon Ramsay is good too!
No, but mildly shocked by how many of my peers (my housemates, my lover’s housemates) are.
Seems incredibly trashy but from the few fragments I’ve seen/overheard I kinda see the appeal. Gossip is fun, televised gossip even better, televised gossip about sex utter dynamite.
I made tons of lists as a kid and still do.
It’s hard to remember all the ones I made as a child, but some were attempts to plan out my life and future salary and income based on very optimistic assumptions about me joining the military and quickly working my way up to four-star general.
I also fantasized about becoming dictator of a Third World country, which I’d use as a starting point for taking over entire regions of the world and eventually challenging the U.S. for global power. Again, I tried calculating what the eventual populations of my empires would be based on then-current national populations plus population growth rates.
“If so, what, if anything, do you think it “said” about your cognitive style- that is, is there any part of your adult personality/ability set/tastes that in retrospect seems clearly linked to that childhood tendency?”
It was an early manifestation of being an INTJ, which some have aptly nicknamed “The Mastermind.”
http://www.personalityperfect.com/intj-the-mastermind-personality-type/
The act of gathering and organizing information like this was mentally soothing as it calmed the anxious streak in my personality. Go further down the spectrum, and it bleeds into useless obsessive-compulsive behavior other people have, like having to go through an elaborate ritual before leaving the house each day.
Also, I keep lists out of fear that I’ll forget something I learned or that I need to do. It’s such a waste to forget things learned through assiduous effort. For this reason, I understand why AGIs will be necessarily superior to humans: even if they can’t learn new things any faster than we can, they’ll never forget anything and will be able to recall knowledge instantly and without distortion.
Predictions on when the next U.S. recession will start and what the primary cause(s) will be?
Helpful links:
https://legacytrustcompany.com/charts-that-matter/u-s-output-gap-business-cycles/
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-01/as-u-s-expansion-hits-endurance-milestone-here-s-what-s-next
Shortly (within a year) after the fed funds rate hits 4.00.
What’s the best way to prepare for a recession? Get out of the stock market? Buy bonds?
Don’t worry about the stock market, it will recover before you retire. What you should worry about is your job (and you spouse’s if applicable). You want to be in a secure position for a company that can weather a recession fairly well. Bonus points if they are adverse to layoffs. Probably not a good time to be working for a startup, unless it is either already cash flow positive, or has a very long runway and a likely path to get there soon.
Increase your savings.
Timing the stock market is the best way to kill your stock market returns.
Agreed. In order to time the market effectively, you need to be better at analyzing the stock market than financial institutions with entire staffs of full-time employees trying to analyze the stock market. You might get lucky, but you also have a huge risk of getting unlucky and selling near the trough and buying back in near the next peak. And the most likely case is your market-timing attempts wind up uncorrelated with the stock market’s performance and you wind up making average returns while you’re invested but little-to-nothing when your uninvested, while taking increased costs due to trading fees, and while taking regular short-term capital gains tax hits every time you sell for a profit.
If the medium-term volatility of the stock market is a concern to you (because you expect to want to cash out some of your investments in the next several years, or because you’re psychologically risk-adverse), the standard recommendation is to re-balance something like 20-50% of your investments (depending on your risk tolerance and investment horizon) into bond funds. This reduce volatility through a combination of levering-down (mixing a risky investment with a relatively safe investment) and hedging (bond prices tend to rise when stock prices fall, and vice versa). You lose some on average-case returns due to levering down, but much less so than if you’d attempted to time the market.
Note that investing in a mix of markets, and rebalancing to keep the proportions fixed, results in a bit of market timing.
Brad’s advice is great, and baconbits9’s advice to start saving has the benefit of reducing your spending.
Look at the money you are spending right now. If you or your spouse lost your job, could you cover the spending you need to do?
If you are a single-income family you cannot realistically prepare to survive without that income, but if you are dual-income you should be prepared for one source of income to disappear. Do not take on mandatory payments like mortgages or debt that cannot be covered on only one salary.
Brad and ADBG are right about timing the market. On the other hand, if you have suddenly discovered that you cannot tolerate the market risk you previously thought you could, it’s prudent and good to reshape your portfolio to one that is more inline with your risk tolerance. Some people cannot sleep if their portfolios lose 50% of their value, and while learning to accept that risk is preferable, if you cannot learn to accept it it’s better to go lower-risk. A good night’s sleep is undervalued.
If you are concerned with this and are willing to take on some active responsibility for the portfolio I (as a non professional with no credentials who is totally not legally responsible and should not be listened to) avoid this by setting a small position with OOTM puts on major markets. If there is a major crash the options should cover a portion of my “losses” and provide cash in the event that the crash lines up with other financial issues for us (say job loss) and prevents short term forced selling. If there are no financial issues at the same time then the plan is to reinvest, so I get to ‘buy low’ after the crash.
There are some serious issues with the approach that I am aware of, so don’t jump in with just this description as a guide!
You aren’t wrong. But people who have trouble sleeping because of their market positions are unlikely to be appeased by adding more complex financial instruments that they don’t quite understand.
I partly agree, but I think there are multiple reasons for people who make the decision to sell on the way down, despite many of them knowing (or at least having heard) not to sell at the bottom. A brief list.
1. Need. Financial crashes often go hand in hand with lower earnings and sometimes higher real expenses. Having a time dated instrument that you can sell to cover a need would prevent selling of actual stock.
2. Psychologically seeing ALL of your holdings in the red day after day makes it hard to imagine ever turning it around. Having just a few bright spots can really ease the mind of some people.
3. Herd behavior. Its hard not to sell when everyone is selling, having a unique strategy from the start (even if it is just nominally unique) sets it apart and gives you space to say “its fine that they are selling, my portfolio works differently.”
I guess literally betting on decline is the exception to the all correlations go to 1 in a crisis phenomenon. At least unless clearinghouse default risk becomes an issue.
It’s a very expensive safety blanket, but if the other option is selling on the way down, maybe not a bad idea.
AFAIK none of the early indicators have even started turning yet, so barring some sort of extraordinary event (eg war, oil price shock) we’re at least 2 years away. Start worrying when the yield curve inverts.
I’m assuming plenty of things that haven’t previously been early indicators will turn out to be early indicators of the next one. Black Swans and all that
Every comment backed up by “conventional wisdom” is “ready to be Black Swan’d”. But black swans are rare; most of the time the conventional wisdom _won’t_ be Black Swan’d.
(quotation marks refer to an earlier version of the parent comment)
(Apologies for editing that parent comment text, did it cause I didn’t see anyone respond yet)
True enough and I realize the phrase has been robbed of all meaning at this point. But I don’t have a sense that economists have been good at predicting recessions, and so my thought would be that relatively uncommon events like recessions are especially prone to “Black Swans” in that they falsify indicators that were useful all the way up until they weren’t and perhaps instill a falsely scientific sense of confidence.
But hey IANAEconomist so have at me. Maybe economists have been wrongly villified and are actually excellent at predicting recessions.
The recession will officially begin on January 21, 2025, when we stop cooking the books.
For those of us who are interested (and/or know something about) the current state of our military, what do you think of War College? I recently came across it and have been listening. They strike me as obviously left-y, but not in a disqualifying way… but I have no way to judge the content.
(If you have better suggestions, I am all ears.)
Making orderly lists and arrays of information has always been my primary leisure activity, both as a child and as an adult. However, I am autistic.
Edmond Ironside (owner of the best name ever) was followed by King Cnut (great king, hopeless name) who had two wives both of whom affected to believe the other was just a mistress. So I learned at a history festival last week. I also learned that if you turn the map of northern Europe on its side you can see just how tempting the coast of England was to the Vikings.
“I am like the Danes’ king; I cannot turn the tide.”
And of course there was another Edmund Ironside significantly later.
Which side? Why?
Æthelred
King of the English
Reign 18 March 978 – 1013 (first time)
Predecessor Edward the Martyr
Successor Sweyn Forkbeard
Reign 1014 – 23 April 1016
(second time)
Predecessor Sweyn Forkbeard
Successor Edmund Ironside
Born c. 966
Died 23 April 1016 (aged about 50)
London, England
Burial Old St Paul’s Cathedral, London, now lost
Spouse Ælfgifu of York
Emma of Normandy
Issue
Detail
See list[show]
House Wessex
Father Edgar, King of England
Mother Ælfthryth
Religion Christianity
Æthelred II (Old English: Æþelræd, pronounced [æðelræːd];[1] c. 966 – 23 April 1016), known as the Unready, was King of the English from 978 to 1013 and again from 1014 until his death. His epithet does not derive from the modern word “unready”, but rather from the Old English unræd (meaning “poorly advised”); it is a pun on his name, which means “well advised”.
My sister cataloged the entire Legion of Superheroes on sortable index cards. Now we have Wikipedia to absorb all this.
I did quite a bit of wargaming starting in about middle school, and that definitely involved an element of what would later become known as spreadsheet-fu. I don’t think I ever did that sort of thing for its own sake, but I did rather more of it than required by the mechanics of the game, and I did enjoy it.
And, yeah, a lot of my day job turns out to be very much like that. Including the part with the massively complex linked spreadsheets for producing optimal spaceship designs that are way better than the other guy’s spaceship designs. Hey, the spreadsheet says so, and spreadsheets don’t lie.
Are your spaceship designs based on known physics (e.g. – light speed barrier and inertia) and on realistic assumptions about the limits of materials and power generation?
Designing spaceships is his day job.
Actually, that whole thing about a “light speed barrier” is
[REDACTED]
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[UNIT “J. SCHILLING” EXTIRPATED, REBOOTING FROM BACKUP]
OK, let’s try that again. I support a group very similar to NASA/JPL’s Team X, doing conceptual design studies like this, but mostly for DOD and TLA customers that don’t like publicity. Though we have done a few manned-spacecraft studies for NASA.
We do adhere to the laws of physics as we understand them. And I don’t think it is a coincidence that the tools and techniques are similar to those that hard-SF gamers were playing with a generation earlier. Much better developed, and with an emphasis on collaborative team play.
When we were kids, my brother and I would go over a mutual friend’s house and play one of the EA Sports NHL video games. In those, each athlete can be viewed with a histogram, along one axis of which were discrete categories (speed, passing, puck-handling, shot accuracy, show power, etc.).
Inspired by this, my brother once made “trading cards” of all the kids on our bus, with a similar array of stats on the back (numbers according to his own judgment of course). I don’t remember what the stats were for but I think it was stuff like how good each kid was at various sports, how smart they were, how artistically talented, how funny, etc.
I believe my brother did it mainly because he was scratching that “orderly lists of information” itch, to which I could relate, though the other kids were not amused when they found out.
I don’t know that it says anything about our cognitive style that isn’t obvious. My brother grew up to be an artist, and doesn’t work anywhere near numbers of science, but while I would not say he is a big proponent of “orderliness” the way, say, a typical conservative might be, he is a pretty well-organized guy, as in he has his shit together and keeps his home and his workspace reasonably tidy.
I can’t speak for my brother but I make lists all the time and use them for all kinds of things, and find I don’t get nearly as much done without them.
This Simpsons bit hit uncomfortably close to home…
I have a folder on my computer for the fun graphs I’ve made.
https://kotaku.com/fortnite-rocket-launches-cracks-the-sky-1827260601
So in Fortnite, there was an event where a rocket launched up into space and… cracked the sky. Is someone over at Fortnite a fan of Unsong?
Or Mastodon?
For the world is hollow…
Is Fortnite worth trying out if I’m old?
Economics in Science Fiction More questions than answers.
I didn’t know marginal revolution was a thing before it was a blog title.
Even if you’re not interested in science fiction (is anyone here not interested in science fiction?) there’s an interesting bit towards the end about people getting very worked up about the UK deficit without knowing what it is.
The article does raise an interesting point about a cashless society; I didn’t know that in The Handmaid’s tale, they started by freezing all female accounts, but it does not seem technically impossible in a cashless society. A cashless society gives surveillance opportunities that not even the most repressive governments (USSR, GDR, Venezuela, Hitler’s Germany, even North Korea) have. Black money creates all kinds of problems, and getting rid of it sounds very tempting. However, even in science fiction it frequently ends in disaster, and history has a way of bringing completely unpredictable results.
It is incredibly convenient to always use bank cards to make payments, and to keep all your money in the bank. So I sometimes make a point of paying in cash, because I don’t want the government to think “nobody is using cash, and it costs a lot to print, plus you have the black economy issues”.
I also think that black markets have their advantages. Most people cannot afford to hire domestic help for their elderly relatives legally, so they hire illegal immigrants. If this option is gone, a lot of people would have to quit their jobs and the government would lose their taxes.
In Russia, from what some businessmen have told me, almost all businesses operate on a semi-legal basis, because it is too costly to follow all the laws. This is done on purpose, so if you do something against the regime, the government will always have something to pin on you (like they went after Al Capone for tax evasion). So some degree of black market facilitates trade and job creation, especially in areas with high unemployment and inflexible rules on employment.
How traditional; that’s one of the best lines from a well-known Russian-American writer.
— Ayn Rand, _Atlas Shrugged_.
This is one of the primary worries that is fueling the idea of Bitcoin and other crypto-assets.
I think people knew what the deficit was – Jo means that he thinks he has some good arguments why the deficit was not an obstacle to spending that he supports, and people either weren’t familiar with those arguments or didn’t find them convincing. Can you find someone somewhere who refers to the debt as the deficit or vice versa? Sure. Is it true that no one understood what the deficit was? I strongly doubt it.
PS – wasn’t David Friedman collecting suggestions for econ in science fiction a few threads ago?
In short works of literature more generally. I looked at what was linked to a while back and didn’t find anything useful.
What I’m looking for are not descriptions of radically different economic systems but works the embed interesting economic insights–which such a description might do but might not. Examples so far include sf by Poul Anderson and Larry Niven, a supervillain story, two Kipling poems and one story, a Sommerset Maugham story, … .
Economics, for me, isn’t about the economy, it’s about a particular way of understanding behavior, a way that can be demonstrated in many different contexts.
It’s not fiction, but if you haven’t seen the Evolution of Trust by Nicky Case, you are missing a great study-of-rational-behavior-given-incentives teaching aid. Link: https://ncase.me/trust/
It seems to my mind that there’s also probably something in Catch-22 that might be useful for broadening people’s thinking… there’s the bit where Yossarian and another officer have an exchange like this:
Y: Of course I don’t want to be patriotic–that could get me killed!
O: But suppose everyone else felt that way, and no one wanted to fight for our country?
Y: In that case I’d be a damn fool for thinking any differently!
Our host may not feel comfortable being linked in with the likes of Maugham and Kipling, but “You Make My Blue Eyes Blue” is an enjoyable deep dive into game theory.
There might be useful things in Catch-22, but I’m not including extracts from novels. Ideally what I am creating is a collection of works of literature worth reading for their own sake, which happen to also have interesting economics that I can discuss. An extract from a novel isn’t a work of literature on its own–that’s why people write a novel at the length they write it.
I want something that people would read for fun as an interesting selection of stuff, not something they read because their professor assigned it in order to prove that economics shows up in literature.
I wanted to suggest you the “Tale of the Troika” by the Strugatskiy brothers, but it seems to be ridiculously expensive to buy the English translation, as the edition from 1978 has become some kind of antique. But if you have it in your local library, it is very good.
It is a novel about a fantasy world based partly on Russian folklore with a ridiculous bureaucracy that has magical powers but is at the same time inept.
The link is to a book that includes the tale, although they don’t give the description of the tale. You can find the description in the Wikipedia.
“The Poisonwood Bible” by Barbara Kingsolver is a novel rather than short, but it did a better job of bringing home the extent of first world/third world inequality than anything else I’ve read.
My second novel (in progress) involves an underground civilization dependent on a magical source of artificial light to grow food. This has a bunch of odd implications for their society, including a variety of (in some cases rather nasty) population control mechanisms, most obviously eugenic infanticide because inbreeding is also a risk with isolated populations. The women who tend and control the magical fires can’t marry, but their families are compensated with an increase in social status and dowry-compensation money. To prevent skewed gender ratios in the marriage market, the civil service is restricted to eunuchs, who likewise grant a certain amount of privilege for their families.
This is mostly deep-background because most readers aren’t obsessed with this kind of thing like I am. Also, I’m trying to make my second novel more accessible (you may recall that my first, last summer, was very dense and hard to get into). But is that the kind of thing you’re thinking of?
Tangential, but can you link your first novel?
https://www.amazon.com/Curse-Life-Brayton-Cole/dp/1537163191/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1499090164&sr=8-1
It’s free to read with Amazon Prime. And about as complicated as Anathem. I still feel it’s a good book, but not really great for establishing my name as an author.
No. I’m not thinking of novels at all.
What I am trying to create, either in print or as a web page, is a collection of interesting short works of literature–mostly short stories but also poems and essays–that in addition to being enjoyable to read contain economic insights. To that I add essays discussing each work in terms of the economics. The current draft is webbed, and provides a better picture of what I am trying to do than a post here. The introduction sketches the nature of the project, which I have also discussed on my blog.
The advantage of doing it as a web page is eliminating most of the hassle of getting copyright permissions, since most of the in copyright works are already available online. But I could also do a print version which contains the text of works which either are out of copyright or are by people willing to give me permission, as several authors I have corresponded with are. For other works that are webbed I just include the URL, or perhaps have a web site with links that the book points readers at.
Ah, I missed the part where you had a very specific project in mind. Apologies.
The anime Spice and Wolfv yes an excellent primer on Renaissance-Era economics, set in a fictional world with some magical elements, as seen through the eyes of compellingly rendered characters.
How long is it?
Is it available for viewing online?I found what seems to be it on Crunchyroll. It appears to be lots of episodes–novel length. I viewed part of what seemed to be the first.
Are you specifically referring to episode 5?
Asimov’s foundation series was originally short stories. Gotta be some good stuff there. I read them as collected into a nove–but my impression is they’d hold up okay, read separately.
A short story that goes a long way to explode the idea that people are “perfectly rational” might be the titular story in The Girl with Curious Hair by David Foster Wallace
Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life and Others has a story following the political battle around an emerging technology where you can opt to see people’s faces with all attractiveness modulated to be the same, so nobody gets the weird bump of being extra attractive. Some people only want to date people who can see their “true” attractiveness, other people want to uninstall their own shallowness and require others to do the same.
There’s a Sherlock Holmes story where Sherlock gets a woman to reveal the location of a very valuable item by creating a false-alarm of fire. Believing her apartment is on fire, she immediately goes to the location of the valuable thing. Something something revealed preference, maybe?
I haven’t read them in ages, but the G.K. Chesterton Father Brown stories have to have something useful like this.
Would you consider Shakespeare an acceptable choice for modeling “Imperfect information”… Romeo and Juliet not knowing each other still live. All the twins/look-a-likes. Everyone in A Midsummer Night’s Dream who is bewitched.
Maybe you’d get more helpful suggestions if you suggest a concept from Economics, or a whole list of them, and let people try to think of stories that illustrate those concepts? (A story that illustrates “imperfect information” is so easy it’s trivial. A story that illustrates the benefits to trade from comparative advantage even when one trader has an absolute advantage in all production… that’s harder to think of, but thinking of that might be helpful to you, whereas thinking of “Romeo & Juliet” doesn’t seem likely to have helped you much.)
No no, the woman!
@yodelyak:
Thanks for the suggestions. The first one doesn’t seem to be webbed and the Kindle free sample doesn’t include that story–I’ll see if the local library has the book.
Economists don’t believe that everyone is perfectly rational. At most, they believe that rationality is the predictable part of behavior, hence models that treat everyone as rational get closer to the correct answer than the alternative, and that such models do better than one might expect due to a number of factors, such as random errors averaging out.
What I need isn’t a story that shows that people are irrational or information imperfect–that’s obvious, so the reader doesn’t learn anything from them. What I need is a story that shows a non-obvious implication of imperfect information, such as adverse selection, or something interesting and useful about irrationality, such as Thinking Fast and Slow—except, of course, it isn’t a story but a non-fiction book.
The things in the webbed draft and the linked comments should give some idea of what I am looking for if you want to read them. The first thing there is an old Poul Anderson story whose point, illustrated three times in three different ways, is that in order to stop someone from doing something you don’t have to make it impossible, just unprofitable—you can leverage his rationality. That is the central idea of deterrence, but it’s not obvious until pointed out because people imagine conflicts as chess games, where all either side wants to do is to defeat the other.
The short explanation of what I am looking for is:
I. Economics is that approach to behavior that assumes individuals have objectives and tend to act to achieve them.
II. I am looking for short works of literature, worth reading on their own merit, such that reading them, perhaps with my comments added, can result in someone understanding something about economics he did not understand before.
I hope that helps, and thanks to you and others for your efforts.
I don’t have any short works of literature to recommend, but I have always liked the description of the changed behavior of the rabbits in Strawberry’s warren in Watership Down from an economic point of view.
I assume you’ve looked at The Midas Plague, but just in case you haven’t, I think that asking “why don’t they just stop” is a good exercise around the Keynsian “war is good for the economy” analysis.
I’m not sure what the lesson is, but on a similar note, I enjoy Zach Weinersmith’s short story Scarcity.
I hadn’t looked at “The Midas Plague.” I have now read a good deal of it, and while it’s an entertaining reversal of some cliches I can’t make any sense of it as economics.
It’s much longer than I remembered. I had mentally edited it down to just the set-up and the ending.
Set-up: Va gur qlfgbcvna shgher, jrnygu vf fb cyragvshy gung gur cbbe ner erdhverq gb pbafhzr guebhtu n dhbgn flfgrz naq gur evpu ner crezvggrq (guebhtu fznyyre dhbgnf) gb unir fznyyre zrnyf, ohl yrff wrjryel, rgp.
Punch-line: Qrfcrengr gb cyrnfr uvf jvsr, jub terj hc va n jrnyguvre snzvyl naq pnaabg fgnaq gur tevaqvat cbiregl gung erdhverf ure gb npprcg fb znal guvatf, gur cebgntbavfg nffvtaf bar bs uvf freinag ebobgf gb ortva jrnevat bhg uvf tbbqf gb vapernfr uvf pbafhzcgvba. Jura gur cbjref gung or qvfpbire uvf fpurzr, gurl ernyvmr gung gur frperg gb jbeyq unccvarff vf sbe rirelbar gb nffvta n ebobg gb qb nal pbafhzcgvba gurl qba’g jnag, gurerol xrrcvat gur rpbabzl ehaavat fzbbguyl.
I’m not an economist, but I’m reminded of the Keynsian idea that any economic activity, no matter how wasteful (like war or alien invasion) can be an economic good. Of course, that depends on the idea that it is necessary to activate slack labor and or increase monetary velocity by repairing confidence (I think), and Pohl’s idea is a bit less flushed out.
What about the Mexican Election?
Or more specifically, what about the extra-ordinary amount of violence in the Mexican Election?
NY times article
Vox Article
That is, hundreds of politicians have been murdered, a lot dropped out of fear, and we will never the number of possible candidates who decided not to run out of fear.
Can you call this kind of elections “Democracy”? Even if the one of the candidates got murdered or scared off or bought off?
I don’t know what is the proper response, but just going on with the election like nothing happens seems not like democracy at all.
Is the new guy AMLO supported by the cartels?
Well, I guess the impact of the violence on the top candidate is much lower. He can get all the security he needs.
But a candidate for a small town mayor?
It seems like every presidential election, the libertarian candidates get quite a few votes; so many it should be enough to get a couple of representatives in Congress, if the system was not territorial.
2016 was probably an unusual year, where Johnson got 4,489,235 votes, or 3.27%. If we take 3% of 435, that would be ~ 12 Congress representatives, quite a few.
2012, Johnson got 1,275,971/0.99% of votes. That would still give you 3-4 senators.
In 2008, Bob Barr got 523,715/0.40%, which would be 1 Congress representative.
Considering how tight a lot of votes in Congress are, the Libertarian party could hold considerable sway in a more proportional system, moderating the social and military policies of Republicans and the money spending profligacies of Democrats, all in all a very good thing. So why is there no single Libertarian Congress representative? Is it that they are too spread across the different states? How could this be fixed?
There are several reasons, there are no Libertarian congress people.
The Libertarian candidate is the primary recipient of voters who really would rather vote “none of the above” but don’t have that option. Who may not support libertarian policies, but want to choose the most popular alternate option. That’s still true in congressional elections, and most people are happier with their congressional reps than the president.
Congressional representatives derive most of their power from committee membership, and a 12 member party would likely struggle to get placed on the important committees (which vary by location). For this reason, independent candidates often caucus with (join in supporting major legislation, and are awarded committee positions from) one of the two parties. As examples, Bernie Sanders and Joe Lieberman are independents, but both caucus with the Democratic party.
The solution that has gotten the most support so far, is to concentrate libertarian votes in a single, low population state. The Free State Project, picked New Hampshire, which is a smaller state, that’s long been more amenable to libertarian policies. They’ve had some state level office success, which is impressive considering that they’re campaigning for people to make a long distance move, which is a fairly costly commitment.
The disadvantage of the FPTP system used in the US (and many other countries) is that it makes easy (and even encourages) the domination by two parties, leading many feeling dissatisfied with their choice. FPTP has two upsides though: it isolates extremists and makes it much harder for them to win seats, and it tightly couples politicians to their constituency, ensuring they care about and fight for local issues.
It’s the second advantage that should be looked at – while the Libertarians don’t have much influence nor chances on the national stage, if they worked hard at the local level, they may be eventually able to take state and federal seats.
This is how it’s done in the UK, which also has a straight FPTP system in parliament, and has eight different parties represented in Parliament. Four of those are regional (Scottish National Party, Party of Wales, two Northern Irish parties), and the Greens only have one seat, but the Liberal Democrats, despite recent losses, still have enough seats and relevance to influence bills and votes — they were even the kingmakers in the 2010 election with the two main parties unable to secure a majority alone.
As I understand it, the LibDems managed to build up their party by working hard in local politics. Councils in the UK use a form of proportional representation, which does make it easier to get seats – but I don’t think this would be impossible in the US – many local positions are uncontested or secured by local reputation(well known businesspeople, lawyers, church members, etc). If the Libertarians persued a long-term local strategy, in a few years time (either by improved reputation, or by local politicians going national) they could begin to see State-wide and Federal seats.
These impacts already happened and did not require the existence of an independent libertarian party. The outgrowth of the Reagan Revolution in American politics was a lot of deregulation and cuts in top marginal tax rates, and the response was Third Way Democrats instead of the New Deal and post war Democrats. I know everyone screams about the “Religious Right” but they barely exist as a thing and have been totally swamped by America’s social liberalism.
As for foreign intervention, America has practically no appetite for military conflict. Iraq wasn’t a trivial conflict, but it had a substantially smaller footprint than Korea or Vietnam. The US isn’t super-eager to intervene compared to prior imperial powers.
I know moderate people like to whine about the two major parties, but the fringes would be a LOT worse in the eyes of most moderates. Out of the frying pan, into the fire.
There is a bit of dialogue in Incredibles 2 that suggests the films have shown us 17 powers for the character Jack-Jack:
I’ve tried to list them, but could only get 11:
Laser eyes
Body of flame
Beast-boy
Walk through walls
Alternate dimension
Many bodies
Levitation
Body of rubber
Body of metal
Growth
Teleport
Anyone have more of them?
You left out the rocket-sneezing. I think he briefly displays some kind of electrical power right before zapping the furrow in Bob’s hair, too. But I think they picked an arbitrary number and you’re overthinking it a wee bit.
This post is about PUBG, since I have neither played Fortnite nor Overwatch.
Ketil is definitely right that PUBG has lots and lots of suspense. Combat in PUBG never feels save, there can always be another player in a superior location who messes up your day. In general, the gun play from PUBG is just really good. They took the realistic gunplay from a military simulation like ARMA and made a game around it. This makes long distance shots much more skillful, since you have to account for bullet drop, the time the bullet takes to reach the target and the movement of the target. This is a novelty in an accessible multiplayer shooter, Call of Duty, Counter Strike etc. only have engagement that are at most 100 meter or so, and then they are much more arcady when it comes to the long distance.
Another thing is that PUBG has great pacing. The beginning is action packed, you jump from a plane, you must orient yourself and if you’re in a hotspot there are 10 other people that want to murder you. After that, you need to travel across the map, where you never know when there will be a fight, but the fight could be everywhere. This section greatly needs you to have situational awareness. It also gives you many opportunities for failure that is fun. You can take a car and race over the map, and get killed by crashing into a hay stack, then immediately getting sniped, and you will watch the death cam and laugh about how stupid you were. This is even more true when playing with friends, it becomes a game of goofing around and maybe sometimes not doing the stupid thing. I remember playing a game with a friend, where we took a buggy and drove it into a hall where we knew an enemy squad was. We got sprayed down immediately and the buggy exploded, but at least we made the day of the enemy squad.
I think Overwatch is a much more faster, stressful game than PUBG. From what I know, it’s a combination between DOTA and Team Fortress 2. The worst thing about DOTA is the pressure that’s on you. If you do one stupid thing, your team will hate you, and there a million tiny things where you can fail . It’s a skill game where you suffer when you have no skill, while in PUBG you can still get a cool experience.
“It’s a skill game where you suffer when you have no skill, while in PUBG you can still get a cool experience”
I would have said the same thing with the games reversed. I’ve not played DOTA, but in Overwatch at least, I’ve found that a) the amount of griefing and trolling is overstated and b) the learning curve for mastery is steep but it’s actually pretty easy to get to the point where you are contributing to team victory (and feel like it). You have a lot of chances to learn and experiment and get better.
While in PUBG/Fortnite it’s wait wait wait wait INSTADEATH back in the queue wait wait wait wait wait hey a cool gun! INSTADEATH watch guy who killed you sit in a shrub for 5 minutes then kill everyone with your cool gun wait wait wait…. the learning curve is a cliff and there’s little fun to be had at the bottom of it.
I feel like I learn something from most matches and most deaths in Overwatch. Most matches, even if you lose, you have a few good moments. I feel like I get better when I play. Battle Royale is 5 minutes of doing nothing followed by immediate permanent death the first time you screw up, and I rarely learn anything other than “the RNG gave that guy a better gun, and I still suck at twitch shooters”. Experimenting or practicing is brutal, because every death is followed by minutes of interminable waiting and wandering.
I think your comment may have been unintentionally revealing of why I don’t like Battle Royales much – the most fun you have is getting together with friends and basically goofing off, because the core mechanic gets old fast (particularly solo).
What is better for your future career and socioeconomic status – to graduate from Harvard or Princeton with the minimum acceptable grades, or to graduate summa cum laude from a lesser university.
I think that for jobs that do not require postgraduate school, Harvard is better. However, a lot of government programs do look at grades, so maybe having better grades is better. Which professions would do better if you have better grades?
The marginal difference in the benefit of the qualification is going to be lower than the other benefits you get from attending. If you go to harvard you spend 4 years talking to and building connections with other people at Harvard, which is extremely useful for networking and connections. On the other side there’s a tradeoff of increased costs
Well, the reasons that Harvard would be better are the connections and the prestige. But there is the monetary cost (if you are barely passing, you probably don’t get a full-ride scholarship to Harvard), and the fact that connections matter more in some jobs than others.
Besides, not everybody has the capability to make those social connections – some people have trouble socializing.
Your terminal degree should be the most prestigious.
Or: order your ponds from smallest to largest.
Are you assuming the same intelligence/capabilities in both cases?
I think you’re overestimating Harvard/Princeton (CIT/MIT maaaybe for their tougher/more competitive majors) that a bottom rank (or even low mid rank) would be the top rank for a “lesser” university.
If something particular is causing the difference (ie. depression from not being the top/able to handle a tougher environment), that’s probably going to be more influential in the long run.
Generally speaking – even if some jobs look at grades, not all of them are going to, even in the same field. As long as the same intelligence thing holds, the more prestigious one will probably be better all else equal. (including other concerns like networking, student debt or research opportunities)
Top university with lousy marks, absolutely.
Anecdatum:
I studied a hardmode STEM field at my country’s equivalent of MIT, and graduated with average marks [1]. I was offered a full time job at a top-tier firm before I even graduated, and have never been unemployed or underpaid since. None of my employers have requested an academic transcript, just the certificate of completion. My situation depended on a strong demand for professionals at the time I graduated, and my university being very well-aligned with the industry.
Graduating from a really good university says so much more about you than a stellar transcript from WhoCaresUni. First of all, good unis have selective intake and they selected you. Then you spent 4+ years among a high-achieving milieu, probably had good teachers and mentors, and you voluntarily accepted a challenging course, all of which signals ‘this person has potential’. The rest is taken care of by good resumes and interview techniques.
[1] Too busy fraternizing, working part-time to pay rent, and experimenting with mind-altering substances.
So overall, I am just confused by the extreme popularity of battle royale games, and would appreciate any insight that people can share about this phenomenon.
Now, I haven’t really played these games. But I fondly remember playing a submarine game – 688i hunter killer, maybe? – which mostly consists of…waiting. So you are trying to sneak up on some target, past enemy destroyers and whatnot, and you never know if they’ve heard you yet. Until suddenly there’s a loud ping, your sonar guy exclaims “torpedo in the water, and all hell breaks loose.
The point being that you are constantly on your toes, holding your breath, making the game incredibly exciting, even if nothing actually happens. Perhaps PUBG etc have some of the same appeal?
There is no discernible reason for why things suddenly become popular, neither on a global nor on a personal scale. Every attempt to explain is just rationalization after the fact. If someone really had a working theory that could explain the underlying mechanisms of what makes things virally popular to a certain audience at a certain time, you could use that theory to crank out hit after hit forever.
Instead, companies and individuals constantly try to create the next big thing; most of them fail, but every now and then one of them succeeds by dumb luck. Some products/genres just scratch an itch nobody knew they had, and they take off.
In general the cycle goes like this: Newly discovered (or rediscovered) genre has a breakout hit, other creators jump on the bandwagon with minor variations on the same theme and flood the market with more or less innovative derivatives, people get their fill and then some, they start looking for something else to consume, GOTO 10.
About immigration.
Most of us probably live in some kind of welfare state, where being a citizen confers a bunch of privileges. Social security, health care, access to education, or just infrastructure. These privileges have a substantial value to the individual, and they are one important reason why so many immigrants are lining up to enter western countries.
I think most people would agree that completely open borders would wreck havoc with our current societies, it would lead to an influx of millions of people, many without skills needed to contribute in a western work market. As far as I can tell, statistics support this – immigrants from less developed economies tend to end up as welfare clients. So we do what we can to make immigration difficult, have strict criteria for qualification (only the “deserving” should be given entry), deportation, internment, border walls, and so on.
I wonder, should the value of welfare be made explicit? And could we replace current immigration laws with a price tag? Say the cost of being a citizen is $50000¹, could we simply charge that amount to let people enter?
Now I expect better from this crowd, but people usually react rather violently to this suggestion, arguing that it would only let in rich people, which is at least unfair, and possibly outright evil. My counterargument is that whether it is explicit or implicit, there is a cost, and we could still let in exactly the same people as today by spending the same amount of money from our aid budgets to buy people access.
Having a price tag solves some problems. The need for everything from pro-forma marriages to people suffocating in airtight vans and leaky dinghies crossing the Mediterranean would drastically decline – just pay the price (to the officials, not to some smuggler) and book an airline ticket. Police could chase criminals instead of escorting immigrants back to their country of origin. And so on. And of course, it’d do much to reduce opposition to immigration if they’re no longer seen (by some) as free riders and gold diggers.
Depending on how aid is distributed, this could radically alter the flow of people. If you give some guy in a refugee camp such an amount of money and an option of purchasing entry to Norway, do you think he would come? Or would he move to somewhere he already has family living, where he speaks the language, holds useful skills, the climate is less hostile, and where now can afford to bring his entire extended family and buy a house for them? Likewise, if you give $500M to UN HCR, would they send 10K refugees to Norway? Or would they give fifty times that number in refugee camps schooling and health care?
One of the main (and often overlooked) benefits of capitalism is the difference between price and value. If I buy something, it is because its value to me is greater than the price. The difference is a direct profit for me, and probably constitutes a very large fraction of total value creation. When somebody else decides how money is being spent on my behalf, I’m likely to get much less value for money, and often I get something I probably didn’t really want at all. I think our current system for immigration is probably one of the least efficient and effective ways to spend money. By making costs explicit and moving the decision down the chain (whether to HCR or to individuals), decisions about expenditure are likely to produce much greater benefit.
PS: I realize this is just a thought experiment. Immigration and aid is not really about helping people in need, it is about feeling better about ourselves. It is not about statistics (millions suffering in various bad places), but about narratives (we helped one individual to a better life). It is not about effective use of resources, but about demonstrating our willingness to sacrifice.
¹ This is probably a way too low estimate, here just the direct costs of settling an immigrant is supported by the state with over twice that amount. And actual value of welfare – if you ask people how much cash they would take to relinquish their citizenship privileges, I’m pretty sure they’d name much larger sums. On the other hand, many people would work and pay taxes and thus contribute back.
We basically already do. It’s expressed in terms of investing ~$500K rather than sacrificing $50K, but the financial industry is pretty good at making those two pretty much interchangeable. It’s not enough, because:
1. There are some would-be immigrants who both have less and are genuinely willing to settle for less, and can usefully participate in our economy at less than the $50K/full welfare state level, which lots of Americans think they should be allowed to do. And will conspire to help them do, even if it’s against the law, by e.g. offering them sub-minimum-wage work off the books.
2. There are some would-be immigrants who are more than willing and able to participate at the higher levels of the American economy, but will never be able to come up with a $50K up-front payment so long as they are stuck living under a government that takes away their money as fast as they earn it. Seems kind of off for a nation that champions free-market capitalism to tell these people, “Go back to your commie homeland, commie scum! If you were a true capitalist you’d have lots of money to prove it!”
3. There are some would-be immigrants who are so telegeneic or otherwise sympathetic that we just plain want to help them even if, on purely economic terms, that’s a losing proposition.
4. There are some would-be immigrants who will reliably vote Democratic for the next generation or two if we make them citizens, such that we don’t ever have to worry about President Trump and the Deplorables ever again. To a lot of Americans, that service is worth way more than $50K (particularly if it’s paid with someone else’s money).
So, yeah, we’ll take all the immigrants who show up with a suitcase full of cash. And we’ll be taking most of the other ones too, for the foreseeable future, legally or otherwise.
@John Schilling
Could you share a link or anecdote to explain your #4 claim? I don’t have a strong prior on this, but it’s just my general sense that the reaction against immigration is often stronger than the supposed partisan impact of immigration, so that on balance, the best guess is that it is a wash.
Let’s take a town of 100k people. I think the town’s politics are as likely, overall, to shift to the right as to shift to the left if 20k new immigrants from our south move there. Overall, sure, more of the newcomers start out inclined toward voting something left of center… but they are mostly nonvoters (even if they’re legal immigrants–if they’re not, they *definitely* don’t vote), and the rest of the town moves rightward to a degree roughly sufficient to compensate (is Albuquerque trending left or trending right? I am not sure.) and the next generation mostly figures out its politics afresh–all of them in relation to each other and the economy and etc–and the center often stays about where it was.
Even if I were persuaded there was a predictable leftward swing… I also don’t think it’s a major factor in Dem party policy toward immigration. (Nor did it figure, or counsel against, Reagan’s amnesty.) I haven’t run across anything nearly that long-term or strategic in Dem thinking–and I have seen 5-year-out plans for low-stakes gerrymandering fights, so it’s not like I’m just not walking in circles where long-term Dem planning sometimes takes place. Share your thoughts?
California was a red state before amnesty.
Yeah, this pretty much covers it. And while the Demographic party may not be big on detailed long-term planning, they’ve incorporated “demographics are destiny” into their generic hopes and dreams for decades.
Maybe I’m just being snippy. Demographic change does seem very likely to cause TX to vote D inside the next decade.
It’s not people who can afford $50,000 that are crossing the border in hot vans. If that’s really the price tag, I wouldn’t expect your proposal to lower illegal immigration by more than 1%.
As some data points for you, there are a handful of countries (concentrated in the Caribbean) that offer Citizenship by Investment Programs. Prices are mainly in the $100,000 – $250,000 range. This article lists those programs (along with other countries where there’s an option to purchase residency but not citizenship).
As to the lifetime cost per citizen, here in Canada I’d estimate at least $200,000 for education (approximately $15,000 per student per year), $300,000 for healthcare (based on the fact that it’s the largest department by budget for each province ahead of education), and another $200,000 or $300,000 for everything else (use of infrastructure, etc.). So my back-of-the-envelope calculations align pretty well with the price for the Canadian program in the linked article. Someone needs to have around $2 million in lifetime taxable earnings (perhaps a bit less once all the taxes aside from income tax are factored in) before the public purse comes out ahead. And for individuals who have run-ins with the justice system all bets are off.
Wow. Do you realize that 1) if they work a job, they typically create value far in excess of their salary – that trickles up, enriches capitalists and leads to supply-side growth (something that conservatives never shut up about when it’s native-born workers!), 2) they’ll consume most of their earnings domestically, which means direct profits, rising aggregate demand, paying VAT, etc?
Did you think for one damn minute about your comment before just assuming that oh yes, taxes perfectly capture an individual’s economic contribution? Because Laffer and Keynes respectively just turned over in their graves.
Of course there is more–and plenty of non-economic contribution is possible as well. This was just a first-approximation look at it.
I get the impression that Citizenship by Investment Programs are set up for the host country to come out ahead whether or not the immigrants who come in through them ever work another day in their lives.
Immigrants don’t necessarily come because of welfare, but because salaries are much higher in the same job. Illegal immigrants generally can’t get welfare anyway (though you have a problem with amnesty laws, anchor babies and family unification etc.).
Your proposal doesn’t solve the problem, since people will still try to jump the border to avoid paying $50000 (particularly since most illegal immigrants don’t have $50000). If paying is the only way to get in, you also have the problem that you exclude many high-skilled people who would be beneficial for the economy, but don’t have $50000.
You also seem to conflate refugees (whom we let in to help them) and other legal immigrants (whom we let in because it’s in our interest, at least in theory).
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/06/sexism-racism-never-diminishes-even-everyone-becomes-less-sexist-racist.html
Is this dot blue? Is this proposed research unethical? Does that guy look like a terrorist?
Thanks! Here is the link to the full paper, btw. It’s very short and readable, as it is written for Science magazine/lay people.
This shows why purity spirals happen and why tolerance of edgelords is important to prevent this.
It also demonstrates why activists tend to stick around even if their initial demands have been met.
Marculiu asked a good question on /r/SSC’s version of this thread that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately:
This especially bothers me because when I was younger I used to experiment with suicide methods because I was depressed but it was either too difficult or I just wasn’t able to do anything drastic because it went so much against my baser instincts. I gave up on it and resigned to letting nature take its course when it’s time. I doubt I will be able to do it even when I’m old and I fear the kind of slow painful deaths described in those articles.
Active euthanasia is illegal in my country, Swiss euthanasia clinics are really expensive and I’m not sure how ill you have to be to qualify to those. Maybe the best option is not going to a hospital or a nursing home when you’re sufficiently old and ill, but even then someone might send you there against your will when you have a sudden attack or a bout of illness. And living alone when you’re old sounds difficult and dying like that is still painful even if it’s not as prolonged as in a hospital.
And btw, I’m a pessimistic realist so I don’t think this issue will get much better during my lifetime nor do I think that there will be a singularity or advanced technology to save us from this.
Until this week, I had a favorite story to tell about the Brexit/Trump/Bernie big political swings of the last few years: the liberal democracies were splitting into camps of “undemocratic liberals” and “illiberal democrats.” Jedediah Purdy relates Yashca Mounk’s version of this story about liberals vs. democrats:
In the U.S., the Blue Team pinned its hopes on the Rule of Law, embodied in the white-shirted Special Prosecutor, various Bush-era ethics officials, injunctions by the federal judiciary, and an omnipresent but terribly woolly concern about “eroding norms” or Russian interference.
In Europe, the line was a little sharper. Instead of a prosecutor’s white dress shirts and courthouses, it was straight-up aristocratic ermine. Remainers made desperate appeals to the House of Lords to stay, modify, or overturn the Brexit decision, and the new leader of France declared himself a “Jupiterian” figure and called parliament to Versailles to hear all his great ideas.
Voters, meanwhile, were not to be trusted. Expert after expert opined that they voted the wrong way because of a critical mass of stupid racist rubes or Russian dupes. The voters were also beyond being convinced. Even when they were poised to deliver the right result and, e.g., make marriage equality the law in Australia, giving power to them was a dangerous accident or, perhaps, a form of bullying.
That story explained a fair amount of 2016/2017 behavior from people whom I’d thought of as allies on the left. I was getting used to modelling the world in those terms. The (nominal) left had control of the institutions and the morals or the moment, but it had thoroughly lost the voters and didn’t seem to want them back. Meanwhile, the right jumped out to become the (nominal) head of the populist rage.
Then, in the same week, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old socialist Latina, trounced a powerful incumbent Congressman, and Anthony Kennedy resigned from the Supreme Court. Now the norm-defender talk is out the window for the (nominal) left, and we are back to fire-breathing populism of our own. My twitter—including pretty mainstream figures—is talking about abolishing ICE, and packing the Supreme Court with friendly justices.
Now this might just be a one-week change because people are terrible at having consistent beliefs beyond the object level. But I bet this shift is good for more than one news cycle. For all the panic now that Trump gets to replace Anthony Kennedy, the Ocasio-Cortez surprise seems like the bigger one, and has certainly inspired the more interesting conversations. Kennedy’s retirement (or RBG’s death) was already pretty much priced in as a risk from ~2014. But Ocasio-Cortez is a different level of shock, like the teachers’ strikes or the Bernie campaign. When it comes back to power, it seems to me now like the left will come back in that sort of democratic socialist way, and it will not particularly care about norm talk or the good God-fearing public servants at the FBI. The normcore, uh, phrarty of the Blue Tribe will wither and die, at least in the US where there is so much space off to the left, and the Berniecrats will sweep in. But I have extremely low epistemic confidence in this. If we’re all back to Jupiterian special prosecutors in a week, never mind.
I wonder what if anything readers here make of these developments. Is this wishful thinking? Is this at all applicable outside the U.S., e.g. to Jeremy Corbyn? I will take any and all reading recommendations, as I am now deeply confused.
It sounds like you’re drawing a trend from one data point.
Radical or just oddball candidates winning primary elections is generally more of a Republican issue than a Democratic one, but it’s not really unprecedented. There’s even a verb to describe it; getting “primaried” by your opponent. Especially in the primary for a mid-term election of a congressional seat that is entirely within the range of what’s expected.
The liberal circle I’m stuck in hasn’t really gotten any more democratic lately. They’re still viscerally offended at the idea of anything important being up for a vote or even discussed. Which would be a very reasonable attitude if they weren’t also filled with genocidal rage towards the majority of their fellow citizens.
Ah, but it isn’t just one data point. There’s the other DSA electoral wins, most notably in Pittsburgh and Virginia. (Another is coming up in Hawaii.) There’s the teacher strikes in AZ, WV, OK, and KY—the AZ teachers just got their unaddressed demands on the November ballot, where they look set to win. And, of course, there’s the Bernie Sanders campaign, which kicked it all off.
My liberal circle is still pretty angry and antidemocratic too. My claim (my hope?) is not so much that these normcore liberal people will change their minds, but that they will be supplanted politically by a younger and larger group of democratic leftists.
I think the Ocasio-Cortez win is the Brat win of this election cycle. And he didn’t just beat an incumbent; he beat the House majority leader.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a woman / uses she/her pronouns.
Brat isn’t and doesn’t.
Huh? “He” above refers to Dave Brat (who won the Republican primary against Eric Cantor, House Majority Leader, in 2014) not Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Until I read the linked article which said no, the currently popular “’twas demographic change that did Crowley in” wasn’t true, it was gentrification that swept her to victory.
So we’ve got upwardly mobile young white people voting for a “socialist Latina”? Then I don’t expect any sweeping changes in the Democrats; give these young persons a couple of years and they’ll be voting for the Hillary rather than Bernie side of the Democrats (or whatever centrist versus social democrat wedges are named by 2020). These are college-educated white-collar urban professionals, they’re very socially democratic but when it comes to it, they expect to get respectable jobs just like their parents and even if these jobs are on the creative spectrum in the new knowledge economy, it’s the same middle-class professional lifestyle.
They will love the range of quaint ethnic restaurants in the neighbourhoods, but as they move in, the base communities will move out (and possibly that’s what is behind what the article says about Crowley actually doing better in the Bronx than Ocasio-Cortez; she may be Alex from the block but the block is old-fashioned Democrat blue-collar rather than gentrified aspirational?)
The article keeps banging on about the multi-ethnic make-up of the voters for Ocasio-Cortez, but it keeps seeping through that it’s young progressives (who, I imagine, are majority white) who are the backbone of her vote. “I’m from a poor background” plays better with white liberals than locals who go “Oh to hell with that, girl, you grew up in Parkchester and your dad was an architect” (or “small business owner”, the story varies depending on what source you read). Granted, after his sudden death without making a will, the estate seems to have been gobbled up by lawyers and her mother probably did have to work menial jobs, but moving home after graduating and setting up a publishing press is not ‘and we still live in dire straits’ levels of hardship (lots of college students and just out of college work jobs as waiting staff and bar staff).
Beware of discussing that candidate’s past – my understanding is she “destroys” people who do that.
The thing that national press doesn’t seem to want to write about is Crowley’s record of political corruption and complete disregard for his constituents. That’s really all the explanation needed.
Old-school Irish(-American) politician behaves in such a manner? I am shocked, shocked, I tell you! 🙂
See this example of the breed: kicked out of the party because the bribery and corruption was so blatant, still returned to the Dáil as an Independent by local constituents because parish-pump politics, apparently even the new improved virtuous and transparent leadership of his old party still sucked up to him for support in the contest before gaining the leadership, and recently finally convicted of some degree of tax evasion, which will probably still not seriously impinge upon his political career.
Going off the CUNY map, it seems like she still won heavily nonwhite neighborhoods like Jackson Heights and Pelham Parkway, just by a slightly smaller margin than gentrifying Astoria. Sunnyside, which is about half white, gave her safely over 60% of its vote.
So the story that goes “she won because she’s a charismatic Latina lady in a Latino district” doesn’t explain it all, and neither does “she won on the backs of white gentrifying Bernie Bros, but her Own People deserted her.”
Isn’t “populism” about doing things that are, well, popular? New poll of 1,448 voters says 69% are opposed to disbanding I.C.E., with 31% pro.
This is the disconnect between the Overton window in the media and the window among the voters. Trump won because he said things like “build the wall” and “you have to go back” that are unthinkable for people on the TV screen, but are not only acceptable but preferred opinions among the voters. 60% want a border wall. 76% want “secure borders” with only 24% wanting “open borders.” I haven’t seen any poll numbers about court packing, but I would be very surprised if any significant number of independents supported that.
So I’d say Ocasio-Cortez’s platform is not an example of populism, but the same “lost the voters and [don’t] seem to want them back” situation you described earlier. Anyone running on her platform in a purple state against anyone who doesn’t literally eat babies on live TV will lose.
Have you ever seen the “Yes Prime Minister” clip about polling? If you haven’t, go watch it now.
I don’t believe those numbers. I’m not saying that the media isn’t more in favor of loose borders than the general public. It probably is. But to claim that 60-70% of the nation is firmly behind Trump is kind of extreme, given the exceedingly narrow victory he had. Who did this poll, and were they trying to prove that Trump’s immigration policy is in line with the country?
I’m not saying they’re behind Trump. I’m saying they’re behind Trump’s immigration policies. Lots of people don’t like Trump for other reasons. Given that Trump himself has an approval rating hovering around 45%, another 10-15 percentage points for a specific policy does not set off my bullshit meter.
Similarly, it’s easy to find x% of Republicans (x > 50) who say they’re against “big government” and “the welfare state” and “handouts.” But then ask them “Should the budget for [Medicare|Medicaid|food stamps|etc] be cut?” and get (100-x)% of responses saying “no.”
76% want “secure borders” with only 24% wanting “open borders.”
This smells really bad of biased polling, especially as the numbers add to 100%. And there’s a lot of space in just what “secure borders” means but if it’s “do you support the war, or are you a terrorist?” people will choose to support the war.
Conrad Honcho – Literally eating babies isn’t so sure a thing either, Roy Moore was credibly accused of being a child molester and the Dems still had to squeak a victory. (Our chances of finding out whether Roy Moore actually abused children is prett low, but I wouldn’t vote for him).
I don’t think so, unless you have very loose definitions of both child and molestation.
He was credibly accused of an unsuccessful attempt to seduce a fourteen year old. Also of trying to make out with, I think, an eighteen year old he was supposedly giving a ride home to, against her will. Unattractive behavior, but not child molestation.
Of course, I might have missed something.
Your phrasing is more accurate, but given the stigma around pedophilia that is abound (or even pedophilia adjacent. It is a criminal offense in the United States for a minor to possess pornography they thsemselves made, of themselves)) I think the “literally eating babies” comparison still holds.
That’s inaccurate (assuming Wikipedia is reliable about the facts). Possibly “seduce” is a fair description of his behaviour on his first date with 14-year-old Leigh Corfman — he “told her how pretty she was and kissed her”., but the accusation is that on the second date he “took off her shirt and pants and removed his clothes… touched her over her bra and underpants… and guided her hand to touch him over his underwear”.
The car incident was with a 16 year old who said “Mr. Moore reached over and began groping me and put his hand on my breast. I tried to get out and he reached over and locked [the door] and I yelled and told him to stop”. She also said that Moore then put his hand on her neck and tried to force her head down on his crotch, which seems quite a bit worse than “trying to make out with”.
Look at the popularity of socialism before vs. after Bernie Sanders. People look to politicians as thought-leaders. Ideas have to be advertised and propagated.
If popular Dems start saying “open borders is good”, then expect that dial to sharply move. The base is already primed for it, given the recent media attention to immigration, and Trump making it his signature policy.
I suspect part of what helped socialism become more acceptable as a political label in the US was the eight-year constant campaign to call Obama a socialist at every opportunity. That campaign probably weakened Obama a bit, but it also weakened the hell out of the stigma on someone being a socialist, since apparently that just meant “Obama’s economic policies.”
I imagine there are plenty of parallels with activists calling every Republican a racist and a fascist, and then finding that those accusations didn’t seem to have as much impact as they expected when they tossed them against Trump[1].
[1] Who is neither a fascist nor probably all that much of a racist, but at least the accusations are a little closer to plausibility for Trump and his followers.
In both cases, you’ve got “you’re gonna call me X? Fine, I’m X!” which then leads people to become more X-y. Although it should be noted that in the US, a lot of “socialists” would be social democrats in many other places.
“You’re gonna call me X? Fine, I’m X!” is definitely an alpha move. I think Bernie kind of stumbled into “owning the insult”, though.
“Populism” is an ill-defined term, but I think if you’re going to call something “populism” it probably needs to be something that already appeals to people, and is not something you’re trying to convince them is good against their current prejudices. Otherwise, anything you ever advocate for and want majority approval of is “populism.”
Also, I think of “populism” as “appealing to the self-interest of ‘the people.'” So I could agree that, say, “Medicare for all” in Ocasio-Cortez’s platform counts as “populism,” but not open borders. Joe Six-pack might be sold on “Medicare for all” because he thinks he might get better healthcare out of that, but I don’t think anyone is even trying to persuade him that open borders will make his life better. It’s a moralistic appeal to improve the lives of foreigners who want to come here, and probably to his detriment.
Is populism “stuff that’s popular” or is populism “stuff presented as being for The People”? For example, take the recent Ontario election, because Cancon. The Conservatives ran a campaign where the slogan was “for the people” or something like that, every proposal was justified as being good for working- and middle-class families, etc. They got a tad over 2/5 of the vote – was their campaign populist or not?
I think of populism as giving the people what they are asking for, when a wise leader would know that it is a bad idea, and resist the urge to do so. Implicit in this notion is the idea that people sometimes or often don’t know what’s good for them.
I would say both? I don’t know enough about Canadian politics to comment on the Ontario election, but I would say populism is “an appeal to ‘the people’ via either things they already broadly support, or you think they would want if you offered it to them.” This doesn’t always work because sometimes voters disagree that what you think they would want is actually what they would want.
But you can’t just call anything with fiery rhetoric “populism.” “Abolish I.C.E.” or “open borders” are not populist appeals. No one is voting for those policies thinking “this will make life better for me or people like me.” People voting for those policies are voting against their self-interest, but for a perceived higher moral purpose. That’s the antithesis of populism.
@johan_larson Approx. what I wanted to say. A useful definition of populism is campaigning for a policy you know is harmful (or at least not beneficial) in order to be popular. Especially so if you don’t just respond to an existing demand (that’s often inevitable in a democracy), but actively create or increase the demand for the policy, so that you can then be popular by fulfilling the demand.
It’s not relevant whether you actually succeed to become popular, nor whether the policy is popular because it appeals to self-interest, or because it appeals to solidarity. Also, this definition implies that a policy can only be populist if it’s a factual question whether it’s wrong (or whether it is good or bad for the goal it claims to achieve), rather than a question of morality and worldview.
Harmful to whom? Perhaps I’m naive for extending the principle of charity to politicians, but when Bernie Sanders makes a pitch for universal healthcare, I think that’s populism, and I don’t think Bernie secretly knows it would fail catastrophically but who cares because maybe the rubes will vote for him. I think he and the people voting for it earnestly believe universal healthcare is doable and beneficial.
Similarly, when Trump says “build a wall and deport illegals,” he and his supporters earnestly believe citizens will be better off without competing against cheap illegal labor driving down wages, crime, drugs, lawlessness, etc. They don’t “secretly know” that illegal immigration is great for the working class but lie about it for popularity.
Harmful to whomever the politician claims (and his voters think) it’s good for.
(Or perhaps very harmful to someone else, so much that the voters would think it’s a bad trade-off if they knew it, but they don’t, and the politician does.)
If Bernie / Trump honestly think that universal healthcare / the border wall is good (which I agree is likely), I wouldn’t call them populists for these policies.
@Conrad Honcho
Except farmers/companies that want cheap labor. People of foreign descent who want to bring over family. People who like multiculturalism. Etc.
You might have a point with the latter referents, but I don’t think companies get to be counted in populism.
There are a decent numbers of small companies, like farmers. Why can’t appealing to them be populism?
I think of “populism” more as “here are some ideas our base wants, instead of the ideas the elite think will work out in the long run.” So free stuff, tariffs, etc are populist (to me) because they’re driven mostly because a whole bunch of people want them.
What do you call it when elites promote policies they think “the people” want something, or that they should want it? Whether or not they actually carry them through once in office.
That sounds like disconnected (if wrong), paternalistic, and disingenuous (unless they try and fail), respectively.
Ocasio-Cortez isn’t running nationwide. She’s running in the Bronx and Queens, where political opinions differ from the national norm in certain respects.
Citation for 60% of Americans wanting a wall?
Lying is bad.
It’s in the survey I linked in the post. Page 69 of the report, which is page 71 of the PDF.
Accusing me of lying about it is neither kind, necessary, nor true.
The survey says “a combination of physical and electronic barriers across the U.S.-Mexico border”. I don’t think that implies a wall that stretches across the entire border.
Physical barrier across US border is a wall. Trump has never said the wall would extend across the entire border, and has said repeatedly that there are places with natural barriers that do not need a wall.
The point is that a strong majority of Americans want immigration enforcement. Running on “abolish ICE” is a losing proposition. You cannot win a majority of voters on an issue where the majority disagrees with you.
This has support for Trump Wall at around 40%. It is true (assuming your survey is reliable, which is somewhat dubious since it implies there are some Republicans who want to build a wall and also disband the ICE) that around 60% of Americans agree with generic “be harsher on immigration” statements, but a lot of them (from both parties) are turned off by rhetoric from Trump.
That’s from February.
So?
Fair enough that “abolish ICE” is not (yet) the majority view–I could’ve gone with clearcut, more important examples like marijuana legalization or medicare for all, which are (i) way outside the respectable center of the views of elected officials, (ii) extremely popular, and (iii) part of the AOC/Bernie Sanders/DSA platform.
I took “abolish ICE” to be less like a concrete policy suggestion that people have thought through and decided to support and more like a rallying cry in opposition to the unpopular Trump/Sessions deportation/detention/child separation practices. So it’s populist in that it gives voice to a widely shared anger, even if it doesn’t poll well.
It would be helpful if “abolish ICE” were also an effective means to end the “unpopular Trump/Sessions deportation/detention/child separation practices.” ICE does internal deportations and has nothing to do with the border separation practices. That’s US Border Patrol snatching babies from their mothers’ arms and chucking them in the child extermination facilities (with pizza parties, video games and pool tables) run by those goose-stepping fascists at Health and Human Services.
“Abolish I.C.E.!” is both unpopular and incoherent, so I’d be very glad if the Democrats made it their rallying cry for the midterm elections.
ETA: Also, the separation practices have ended. Now Trump’s locking up the whole family, likely in violation of the Flores decision.
I did not say that ICE did conduct the infamous child separations, which (i) were never required by law, even assuming the Flores consent decree is law, (ii) were extremely unpopular, and which (iii) Trump abandoned in a rare about-face after audio of distraught children emerged.
But none of this means ICE has not itself had its share of misconduct and wanton cruelty.
I imagine ICE makes a better target than CBP because most nations have some sort of customs agency to regulate the movement of people and goods over the border, but a dedicated immigration enforcement agency for the interior is rare.
Yeah, I think it’s the left-wing version of “build the wall” in the sense that it’s not particularly well thought-out, isn’t likely to be the best solution to the various problems people object to, etc.
But for signaling purposes, people will claim quite seriously to support it. And they probably do support it, as compared to the status quo.
Perhaps, but if “build the wall” is merely code for “seriously, we want the border enforced” and “abolish ICE” is merely code for “we want something more lax than the status quo for immigration enforcement” then it’s still pretty clueless rhetoric. Enforcing immigration laws is unpopular on TV, but popular among voters. Not enforcing immigration laws is popular on TV, but unpopular among voters.
The media amplified Trump’s message because they didn’t like it and then were then shocked when he remained popular with voters. If the media (and the Dems) amplify the “abolish ICE” message they’re going to be shocked when…most people disagree with them and don’t vote for them.
“Build the wall!” has the advantage as a political slogan that it’s an easily-shouted three-sylllable chant. I wonder if right and left favour different kinds of chant. The “one-two-three-four something-something-rhymes-with-four” I can only think of left-wing examples?
@The media amplified Trump’s message because they didn’t like it-
Yes, that’s part of why they amplified it. But Trump gets an amazing amount of press. Sure he’s good television, snappy patter, guy you love to hate, compared to to ‘show biz for boring people’ politicians. But Trump gets an amazing amount of press. He’s got money. He’s got decades of infotainment connections. He could have just flat bribed a bunch of TV people to give him coverage. Perhaps I am uncharitable to Trump, or to infotainment people.
Packing the Court seems like the reasonable next play. McConnel established in 2016 that norms regarding Supreme Court appointments no longer matter, the only thing that matters is the raw exercise of political power. The Constitution allows the majority party in the Senate to block the appointment of a judge until they get a member of their own party in the White House – fair enough, but it also allows for packing the court. Or impeaching Gorsuch and summarily replacing him with Merrick Garland. Or whatever else you can muster up the votes for, really.
As a practical matter, I think it will be a good long while until the Democrats have the votes to do any of that – but they’ll have 60 votes eventually, and I really think the game has fundamentally changed.
They don’t need 60 votes to pack the court. Just half of the Senate & House plus the White House.
They would need to change the law from the 19th century that sets the cap at nine, which would require the usual 60 to break the filibuster (unless they decide to remove the filibuster of course.)
That law is why FDR failed – the (Democratic) head of the Judiciary Committee refused to advance the bill to a vote.
The filibuster is a dead man walking. I don’t expect it to last to the end of the Trump administration.
I’m actually not sure. I think if they were going to pull that trigger they would have done it for Obamacare.
The current Republican majority may be unwilling to nuke the legislative filibuster, but in a court-packing scenario we’re talking about a hypothetical Democratic majority.
Edit: nm, I just noticed you were responding to Brad’s post, not to MrApophenia’s.
They probably also need the existing Supreme Court, which can if it wants find some penumbra that says the particular court-packing scheme du jour is unconstitutional and refuse to seat the new justice(s). This would get really ugly, really fast, and I’m pretty sure you won’t get any plausible Senate to pull the trigger on nuking legislative filibuster just so they can pull this trigger immediately afterwards.
If packing the court is an acceptable strategy, why should Trump respectfully wait for the Democrats to do it after he’s out of office? Why not start right now?
If he could, I have no doubt he would.
Why do we believe that he can’t, right now, with control of both houses, but that future Democrat President definitely will be able to?
She won’t be. It’s outlandish wishful thinking from the same kinds of people who thought the Electoral College would refuse to elect Trump or that the Mueller investigation will lead to impeachment.
He doesn’t control both Houses. A future Democratic President might not either, FDR couldn’t do it after all.
But MrApophenia’s point, which I rather agree with, is that while Garland is still fresh Democratic voters are far less likely to punish their representatives if they do decide to go along with a President that wants to do that.
If Bork had been ten years ago instead of thirty maybe Trump would have already been able to pack the court.
It just strikes me as weird for Democrats to be writing articles right now about how court-packing is totally justified.
Like, maybe wait until Trump is out of office to start loudly agitating for that to be a thing?
I saw one tweet. Did I miss other links?
Trump has too narrow of a margin to pull it off. He may not even be able to replace Kennedy, if another Republican senator defects along with Susan Collins.
It would be a messy legislative fight, and would require removing the filibuster in the Senate to do it with the current majority.
That’s a lot of trouble to go to when they already control the court, and in all likelihood will get to replace at least one more justice before Trump’s term is up just by waiting.
Not to get into “you started this” territory, but this strikes me as a bit rich given reid’s abolishing the filibuster for nominations. I actually side with reid on that particular count, the nomination process is horribly broken and getting rid of filibusters was a good first step, but let’s not pretend it had anything to do with anything besides naked power.
Agreed. In addition, the Garland situation was much less of a “naked power grab.” McConnell rolled the dice. For all he knew (and what every pundit said), the Dems were going to take the White House and the Senate. President Hillary could then ram through a genetically-enhanced-to-live-150 years Ruth Bader Ginsburg clone with no problem.
Abusing parliamentary procedure for 9 months to get a shot at a better judge is not nearly as large a naked power grab as “we’re going to overturn 150 year old law and add 6 judges to the court.” And of course then 4-8 years later the Republicans get the senate and White House back and add another 10 judges…
I still think McConnell blundered by precommitting to “no hearing no vote” – he handed gave Obama the opportunity to nominate a sympathetic candidate and the Dems a powerful rhetorical card.
What the heck did McConnell gain vs. giving Garland his hearings, and then just voting no? Hell, he’d have been much better off saying “here’s a list of candidates we’ll approve, otherwise we’re probably going to keep voting against your nominees”. He could even put a temptingly moderate candidate on there that Obama just might go for if both sides decided to hedge their bets.
End result is probably the same, except Obama probably ends up looking weaker after he runs out of candidates willing to be sacrificial lambs, and Dems lose the card of “the GOP blew up political norms!” Well, they’d try to play the card anyway but it would be much less convincing when the complaint was that the GOP senators had simply voted “no” for nominees they didn’t like.
I think the intent was to attempt to signal “we’re not objecting to the specific ideology of your nominees, we just want to establish that these things shouldn’t be done so shortly before a Presidential election.”
I agree with you that the optics look bad, particularly in hindsight, but as others have mentioned, the pretty overwhelming consensus was that the next President was going to be a Democrat anyway…
What was the Senate makeup when McConnell made that call? Were there moderate Republicans who would have voted for someone like Garland?
“I agree with you that the optics look bad, particularly in hindsight, but as others have mentioned, the pretty overwhelming consensus was that the next President was going to be a Democrat anyway…”
If he was really convinced that Hillary was going to win, that seems like the WORST time to give away your option to approve a suitably moderate pick. E.g. Garland was probably as good as they’d get from Hillary, and better than they could hope for if they lost the Presidency and the Senate.
Only good reason I could think to do that would be sort of conspiracy theory – maybe he’d been approached by Hillary’s team, Hillary wanted the splash of making a Supreme Court pick, and she was willing to nominate a palatable centrist in exchange for an easy confirmation. Might have made sense for McConnell if he was convinced it would be Hillary but that he could hold the Senate.
In 2010, in the lead-up to the nomination of Elena Kagan, Orrin Hatch — not a particularly moderate Republican — had this to say about Garland:
(At the time, the National Review said of Garland that he “may well be the best that conservatives could reasonably hope for from a Democratic president”.)
In 2016, just days before Obama nominated Garland, Hatch claimed that the refusal to consider Obama’s SCOTUS nominee was just “the chickens coming home to roost”:
If there was any judge that Obama could have nominated who had a chance of making it through the Senate, it was Garland. But McConnell correctly calculated that any political heat he took for refusing to schedule a vote was worth the chance that Trump won the election. If Clinton had won, the speculation was that McConnell would have put Garland through during the lame-duck period, so he didn’t have much downside risk.
54 – 46 (or 44 – 2). If McConnell had put it up for a vote the principled True Conservatives (TM) like Flake, McCain, Lee, etc, would have voted for Garland. He probably would have gotten in.
ETA: Ninj’r’d. I agree with everything Iain said.
Expanding the court to get the desired results has been done by a previous president.
If there were the 60 votes to confirm Garland, would there have been enough votes to demand that the Senate hold the vote? What would be the parliamentary procedure for that? Voting to replace McConnell as the Senate Majority Leader?
@Edward
I’m not sure, but then you’re talking about Republicans blowing up their own party over it.
If that’s the answer, it makes sense. I just didn’t know if my answer was right.
@gbdub
There were probably plenty of members of his caucus who were preferred not having hearings to voting no. If there had been a vote, there would have been pressure on members to vote a certain way. Straight up saying no hearings, no vote eliminates the possibility of that working, and thus reduces the incentives to pressure. sure, there can be pressure to hold a hearing, but not having hearings means that anyone getting pressured can say “majority leader said no hearings, so stop bothering me.” Some members might also have been happy obstructing the nomination, but didn’t want to do so publicly.
@Iain
Although, Obama could have withdrawn Garland’s name after the election if the Dems won, preventing McConnell from settling for him. It would have been mean to Garland, but perhaps worth it to the Dems to see McConnell hoisted upon his own petard. “Hey, Mitch, I agree with you, the incoming President should have a chance to appoint the next justice!” And then Hillary appoints Genetically Modified RBG.
I think there is a lot more inertia in a nine-member court than in a Senate filibuster. Just because one rule was changed doesn’t mean the other will go, especially given the earlier attempt failed and is widely taught as an overreach, if not somewhat underhanded. (Weird how something can be both)
What are your favourite museums (aside from the obvious international-profile ones like the Smithsonian, British Museum, Louvre, etc.)?
A few that stand out to me are:
1. The Royal Tyrell dinosaur museum in Alberta. It has a pretty large selection of skeletons on display. And it’s in a very scenic part of the province.
2. MuCEM (Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations) in Marseille. I found it fascinating on a meta-level. A pressing issue facing France is how to better integrate citizens of North African descent. This state-run museum is basically structured around commonalities among civilizations on both sides of the Mediterranean (everything from foods to Monotheism); it felt to me like the question of integration was definitely a subtext of the exhibits.
3. The Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, Denmark. It was built around five ships from the Viking era that had been deliberately scuttled to guard the path into the fjord and were well-preserved in the cold water. The museum performs a lot of experimental archaeology: they build replicas of the ships in their collection using tools from that era to determine the amount of time and resources that went in to building them, then sail them to get data on speeds and crew requirements. Plus visitors can go on a short excursion out of the harbour in one of the replicas.
The American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore.
I really liked the National Museum of the US Air Force, in Dayton Ohio. Four huge hangar-like halls covering the history of the Air Force from its earliest days.
Seconded. This one is my favorite.
PS. I think it’s 5 hangar-like halls now. Plus a few sizeable outdoor portions too.
Seconded.
Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Dulles VA is also an excellent aviation museum.
This one is getting lots of recommendations. I’ll definitely plan to check it out if I’m ever in the area.
I’m a big fan of the Greenwich Observatory, which I visit whenever I’m in London. Old telescopes, old clocks, the original Prime Meridian, what’s not to like?
The Titan Missile Museum in Tucson AZ. An actual Titan missile silo you can tour, with the missile still inside. You get to go down into the control room, sit at the launch consoles, and “turn the key”.
The nearby Pima Air and Space Museum has probably one of everything the Air Force and Navy flew from WWII to today plus some unique one or two off prototypes like the original Vomit Comet, Super Guppy, JFK’s Air Force One, etc. Best part is the bus tour of the adjacent “boneyard” at Davis Monthan AFB, where you drive through rows of literally thousands of aircraft in long term storage and/or disassembly.
Having all of those on public view really makes one wonder about the stuff that’s still classified, eh?
The Museum of London is pretty good–more nearly daily life stuff than the BM (my favorite) or the V&A. I enjoyed the Walters Gallery in Baltimore.
On the other hand … The armory in Graz, Austria, claims to have the largest collection of antique weapons in the world, or something along those lines. It’s probably true. The problem is that the collection consists of five hundred of one model, three hundred of another, … . It really is an armory, not a museum, although until all technology post 1800 stops working not a very useful armory.
I really like the Medical History Museum in Berlin. It shows off a massive collection of medical specimens- gruesome but fascinating. Special mention to the selection of horribly disfigured babies pickled in formaldehyde. When I last went they also had a cool temporary exhibit on crime scene analysis, complete with actual historical murders from the area.
The Hieronymus Bosch museum in Den Bosch is also tiny but cool, containing copies of every single painting the guy made (the copies are bigger than the originals so you can really lean in and appreciate the detail), and it’s housed in an old church with amazing ceiling art.
The Mütter Museum in Philadelphia is similar to your description of the Medical museum in Berlin. Originally built in the 1850’s as an education tool for medicine. Very interesting exhibits.
The Museum of Telephones in Budapest might be the best museum I have ever been in. The exhibition is highly interactive, but probably the best part is the fully functioning old-style telephone exchange. Since me and my father were the only ones there while we were visiting, I’m not sure if this is always the case, but the person in charge turned it on for us and showed us how to make a call and everything that happened. They weren’t able to speak english, but this wasn’t really a problem. The museum seems to currently be closed because of some renovations, which is a shame.
A Frisian wool comber, Eise Eisinga, built a orrery (mechanical model of the solar system) in his home, between 1774 and 1781. It’s the oldest still working planetarium in the world and it is now a small museum in the north of the Netherlands.
Xanten Archaeological Park is a museum in North Rhine-Westphalia, near the Dutch border, with Roman archaeological finds, including the remains of a bath house, over which you can walk on a suspended platform. There is a park with the same size as the former Roman settlement of Colonia Ulpia Traiana, which was at that location. Some Roman buildings and part of the walls have been reproduced there as well.
That archaeological park looks fascinating.
Battleship Iowa museum in LA. My favorite place in the world. You should all go. (Biased? Me? Never.)
Besides that, I’d agree with Johan that the USAF museum in Dayton is amazing. Nearly as good is the National Atomic Museum in Albuquerque, which has a lot of actual nuclear bombs on display, as well as a variety of nuclear delivery platforms.
Two favorites, both in Vienna:
The MAK-Wien — a museum of “applied arts”. It has a room full of chairs; typical rooms from various styles and eras (an 1890’s dining room with all the furniture and tableware of the period, and so on.)
The Museum of Military History: it has everything from pikes and a manual of broadsword drills, to barriers and clubs from the 1930’s street battles in Vienna.
The Gardner Museum
I was kind of let down by the ISG; all the paintings I wanted to see more closely were tucked away in high or dark corners.
My favorite is Johnson Space Center Houston. It’s got artifacts from all the major US manned space programs, a moon rock available for touching, plenty of hands-on exhibits for kids, and tours of Historic Mission Control, Astronaut Training Facilities, and other locations on site.
The Visitor Center is a bit on the small side, and while I was thrilled by all the hardware in the Smithsonian Air&Space+Annex in DC, I think Johnson wins out for its charm and its Actually Happened Here factor.
Naval Undersea Warfare Museum in Keyport, Washington as well as the USS Nautilius museum in Groton, Connectiticut. If I had to pick, I would say the Undersea Warfare Museum because it has more items and lore that are closer to what a modern submariner deals with on the day to day.
I have hit up the science museum in pretty much every American city I’ve visited, and SF’s Exploratorium still takes the cake. I haven’t been to NASA in a while, but their quality for adults tended to depend on the special rotating exhibition.
Soft spot for the Houston Museum Of Natural Science, because the Cullen Hall of Gems and Minerals.
Recently, though, I did the Cité de la Musique in Paris, which is a really great look at the history of instrument development (even if they have a very classical music narrow focus). You get a free audio tour with admission, so that you can hear what each instrument sounded like, without disturbing other visitors.
Similarly, the Musée des Arts et Métiers was a great find. As a “Museum of Useful Things,” it charts the development of scientific tools, including that for architecture and the various engineering fields. Best of all, part of it is within Saint-Martin-des-Champs, so you can experience seeing vintage cars and airplanes (full size!) next to a mini Statue of Liberty, lit with stain glass and framed by stone arches. Both are covered under the Paris Museum Pass. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the time to try out the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie.
Back to the Bay Area, the Playland Not-on-the-Beach museum is pretty great, covering all sorts of oldschool arcade exhibits, as well as fine pinball machine collection. Perfect for a date.
Totally agree with you on Arts et Métiers.
Can second Cité de la Musique, and if you’re into that, the Musical Instruments Museum in Brussels is also good.
Also, for something vaguely in the spirit of the British Museum, the Horniman Museum in London also has some cool stuff (basically, an old-timey tea merchant used his fortune to buy a collection of interesting cultural artifacts from around the world … and it too has a musical instruments section with a lot more concertinas than you’ll find probably about anywhere, unless there is a specialist concertina museum somewhere that I haven’t come across).
I didn’t get to see the musical instruments section of the Metropolitan Museum in New York; on the one day I was visiting, on my one trip to the Western Hemisphere in many years, that section was closed.
Also, the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix. Absolutely fascinating collection of thousands of historical, unique, and famously owned instruments of all descriptions. Organized by region (Europe, China, the Americas, etc.) with a great free audio tour and a neat gallery of artifacts from famous musicians. Also a great auditorium with a nice schedule of events. Not something you’d think of as necessarily a topic you’d seek out a museum for (and in Phoenix of all places) but it’s very easy to get there and burn a whole day even if you have only a passing interest in music.
A few comments following up on the linked thread:
@Nancy, not quite what you asked for, but close: Santa Olivia.
A lawyer’s take on “natural born citizen”. Also relevant.
@Conrad, from what I’ve read at least some of the migrants the Trump administration are zero-tolerancing are in or closer to the “because tyranical government” category, not the “because poverty” category. I’m not sure of the proportion or of the reliability of my sources.
I don’t think anyone mentioned the Red Hen thing? My (original) reaction: “Yeah, you’re complicit in one little crime against humanity, and those darn liberals won’t ever let you forget it.” 🙂
Also disturbing.
@disposablecat,
Huh. Wouldn’t that work better if you had the freedom to move to whatever country did share your inclinations and skillsets? (I agree with at least some of your arguments against open borders, but I found this particular suggestion baffling.)
A great way to display that you share the inclinations of a place you want to move to might be to comply with their requested procedure for gaining approval for entry, residence, citizenship, etc.
Assuming the procedure selects for those inclinations and skillsets and is not unreasonably stingy, sure. On the other hand, is it actually in the interests of a nation to allow immigrants with the same sorts of inclinations and skills as the existing citizens?
Country Z: “Boy, we could really use more doctors and nurses, we just can’t get enough candidates from our own people to work for our hospital system! Maybe if we advertise for medical staff overseas?”
(A) “Hello, I am a trained medical professional from the Philippines, I’d love to come work in your national health system!”
(B) “Hello, no of course I’m not one of those colonialist oppressor so-called scientific method-biased repressors of native other ways of knowing shills, but I can align your chakras via homeopathic crystals like nobody else!”
So does Country Z go for the immigrant without the same skills and inclinations as its existing citizens because option A is just too boring and pedestrian? 🙂
I’m not sure which of (A) or (B) are supposed to be the same as the existing citizens. Neither, as far as I can tell?
I’m not disposablecat, but the answer to that question is that communities need to be able to exclude those who don’t fit.
Imagine that there are two towns, Pleasantville and Unpleasantville, a short drive away.
Pleasantville is a great place to live, where nearly all of the people are hard-working and friendly. If you live there you can expect your neighbors to come by and invite you to barbeques or to wave at you in the street.
Unpleasantville is a horrible place to live, where nearly all of the people are lazy and hostile. If you live there you can expect your neighbors to come by and rob you or to throw rocks at you in the street.
Even if you’re the most unpleasant person on Earth, there’s no way that you would choose to live in Unpleasantville over Pleasantville. Even if your presence makes things worse for everyone else it’s still a huge improvement for you personally. Even if enough unpleasant people move in and turn Pleasantville into Unpleasantville, you wouldn’t be any worse off than if you had moved to Unpleasantville from the start.
That seems to me to be a different argument. Pleasantville and Unpleasantville presumably didn’t come into existence because people of similar inclinations flocked together – or if they did, it undermines your premise that nobody would choose to live in the latter.
… and now I’m sort of visualizing the citizens of Unpleasantville complaining to one another about how all these horrible Pleasantville people have moved in and started calling the police on them, can you imagine? 🙂
Isn’t this basically the premise of anti-gentrification movements?
Neither gets down to fundamentals very often, but both gentrification and immigration debates raise the question to what extent people should have a say on the composition of their communities. To distinguish between them, the next question is whether that should change based on the scale of the community.
“Isn’t this basically the premise of anti-gentrification movements?”
Not exactly– one of the claims is that the police get called to prevent harmless behavior.
Exactly what Matt said. The means by which others who believe they fit our unit apply to join it, and by which we evaluate them to see if we agree with that assessment, are our legal immigration processes.
I don’t think what we have right now does a particularly good job of that, and there are many ways in which it could be greatly improved; however, throwing up our hands and just letting people in is the opposite of a solution.
Which governments would that even be, though? What nation in the western hemisphere (besides Cuba and perhaps Venezuela) is persecuting citizens such that they would have a valid claim of “asylum because tyrannical government?” And if they do have such a valid claim, why are they sneaking into the US illegally? You won’t ever get your official asylum if you’re dodging US authorities rather than submitting to them.
On the other thread, user bass pointed out that some asylum-seekers are being turned away by US border agents claiming there’s “no room.” That could be entirely true, as resources for processing asylum seekers are limited. In which case this problem is being exacerbated by people crossing illegally and then making defensive (and likely bogus) asylum claims when caught. I’d like to hear a response from the Border Patrol. The asylum-seekers in the article are from Guatemala, though, so I think this problem could be solved by their staying in Mexico, where they are presumably safe from whatever threats they faced in Guatemala. Or, they could apply for asylum at one of the 10 US consulates or embassies in Mexico.
I’m not sure what the official rules are about “first safe country of asylum.” I googled around and I could find some documents from the UN referencing this, but I don’t know if there’s any kind of official international treaty, or if states make up their own rules, probably with consideration to UN recommendations. I know the EU and Merkel specifically are having a crisis over this, as Germany wants to distribute migrants throughout member states, some like Poland aren’t having it, and the natural first ports of entry like Greece and Italy cannot absorb all the migrants. It seems to me that it’s within the rights of the United States to say to Guatemalans in Mexico who want asylum from a situation in Guatemala that since they’re in Mexico, their problem is solved. I do not think “something bad happened to me in my home country” should be an excuse to allow someone entry/residence/citizenship in whatever country in the world they want.
What “crime against humanity” would that be? If you’re talking about the detention of illegal migrant children, temporarily holding them in places like this does not seem to fit the bill. Either that or I have the completely wrong idea about Auschwitz, with the pizza parties and the Foosball tables.
I do not think this sort of hyperbolic rhetoric is going to help the Democrats in midterms, but they seem to be running full-bore with it. Just released Harvard-Harris poll (online survey, so grain of salt) says an overwhelming majority of American registered voters, 70 percent, support tougher immigration enforcement to include a border wall (60% support), deportation (64% support), and repatriation of all illegal border crossers including families with Children (61% support). Additionally 69% of voters do not support the position of disbanding I.C.E. The whole “disband I.C.E.” thing the Dems are touting is especially bizarre, as I.C.E. has nothing to do with the border separations. I.C.E. does internal deportations, and it’s the U.S. Border Patrol picking up the people crossing the border illegally and turning the kids over to those goose-stepping fascists at Health and Human Services who run the child extermination camps.
I can’t find it right now but I saw another poll from a few weeks back that when asked who’s to blame for children being separated from adults while crossing the border illegally, 55% of voters blame the adults and only 35% blame Trump, with the other 10% undecided. The whole “crimes against humanity,” “No borders! No wall! No USA at all!” rhetoric plays fine among the people on the TV screen, but not so well with the voters.
Would that be the having their cake and eating it part of the proposal? I see plenty of allegations online from various parties that Republican politicians don’t really intend to carry out [whatever] even if in power but it’s useful for whipping up the base (see often quoted in this context ‘they’re never gonna get rid of Roe vs Wade, it’s way too useful to them’).
Democrat politicians and policy makers, not being total idiots, do want some form of border control and border guards, but the current outrage is much too useful to them to not try and make hay out of it. Solution? Divert attention to ICE as the Evil Horrible Baby-eaters, demand they get shut down/disbanded/nuked from orbit, and even in the unlikely case that they are in a position to get rid of ICE and do so, they’ve still got the real border guards in place enforcing policies.
The problem with riling up the base without intending to give them what you got them riled up about is eventually somebody comes along, takes your base, and gives them what they want while knocking you out of power. For an example, see “Trump, Donald J.”
No they can’t. Per US law, you can only request asylum if you are actually present inside the US, and embassies and consulates don’t count. If you go to a US consulate or embassy and tell them you want to claim asylum, they will tell you they can’t process asylum claims and you need to go to a port of entry.
You are right. I stand corrected.
Perhaps we should amend that law, then, at least with respect to asylum seekers in Mexico. (Largely for the purpose of being able to say to, ex. Guatemalans, “no, you’re in Mexico, so there’s no reason to grant you asylum from Guatemala.”)
At this point my opinion is largely unchanged, but tinged with enough doubt that I don’t particularly want to try to defend it. But if you want to know where I was coming from at the time I first read about the Red Hen fuss, I can point you at a few links.
Theresa May.
American Academy of Pediatrics, et. al.
Also this one.
Former shelter worker.
Example of the sort of thing I’m categorizing as closer to “tyrannical government” than to “because poverty.”
See also.
Really I guess this is a third category – “official government either unwilling or unable to keep gangs/terrorists/rebels from oppressing citizens”.
Ilya Somin from the Volokh Conspiracy.
For a longer version of the argument, here’s a Vox article where Matt Yglesias fleshes out the tweet I quoted.
The obvious problem of the analogy is that it ignores the debate is all just a smoke and mirrors proxy from both sides over future voter demographics. This is obvious because most other Republican policies would be generally unaffected by a few million extra low-wage workers, whereas things like the $15 minimum wage, medicare for all, etc require adding more workers who earn above the median income, rather than below.
In that way, its more similar to the older Connecticut residents who grumble about how they left Mass to escape higher taxes, only for other Mass residents to do so as well (and then those same ones voted for higher taxes in Connecticut as well!).
You can be sure that if uncaptured bike thieves (and the children thereof) voted 70%+ Republican Mayors DeBlasio and Garcetti would be cracking down hard! Bike thievery would be a major problem constantly addressed and extremely politicized.
Yes, this. I’ve tried to imagine myself in the GOP’s shoes, being faced with an impending demographic wave from immigrants that would radically re-shape society in a direction I was morally opposed to. For example, if most immigrants were far-right, and if we let them in, the U.S. would be far-right majority in some decade down the road. It would be horrifying. I would oppose this far-right immigration with everything I had.
So, I’ve learned to embrace not having a “principled” position on borders. I support an open border with Mexico because I think their voting patterns will make the US a better place. I expect conservatives to be opposed to this, just as I would be opposed to an open border with right-wing immigrants. This isn’t to diminish my opposition to the current border policies we have: I think we should abolish ICE, grant citizenship to all immigrants, and bring charges against the most egregious enforcers of these laws. And I fully expect, if the tables were turned, for the Right to do the same against the Left. Because all politics is war, duh.
Which means, debates over immigration are largely a proxy battle for larger left-right philosophical differences. Principled “open border” lefties seem to be awful upset about Israeli’s moving into Palestinian land. And as for the “rule of law” right, the Obama years are still plenty fresh, and we all remember the support of “resisting” the bureau of land management, the issuing of gay marriage certificates, support for mass resistance of gun control laws, ect.
I think this is a misreading of the situation. In many ways, immigrants from outside of the U.S. are notably to the right of maybe even the typical Republican voter. But there happens to be a coalition between various minorities as political interest groups and other logically unrelated issues like gay rights, abortion, etc. Most Republicans probably aren’t that principled but are following incentives from their voters.
This coalition is historically contingent on the U.S. as it is now. You’d be in for a nasty surprise if you think things would stay this way if the U.S. merged with all of Mexico.
I think a United Meximerican States would look a lot more like Hungary, Poland, or Brazil than like Sweden. Notably more socially conservative than the current U.S. but possibly with bigger safety nets or more government jobs. Probably more liberal than Mexico itself though. Probably more violent than the U.S. but less violent than Mexico. More corrupt than the U.S. but less than Mexico. Dunno if this is what you want.
I could quibble that open borders and a merger of governments aren’t quite the same thing. But I’ll address your underlying point, that Mexican people are more socially conservative and economically left-wing than the average American, so their integration into the U.S. political spectrum isn’t going to shake-out exactly the way your standard Democrats would like.
For sure, there’s an ongoing intra-left debate in the U.S. about whether social or economic issues should take precedence, assuming we are forced to choose. You can place me firmly in the camp that economic issues take precedence, especially if abortion/gay marriage are the extent of what we are talking about here.
An open border with Mexico would make it less likely that they’d become citizens and vote. The US is close enough that a fair number of Mexican workers could work seasonally in the US, and then cycle back for a couple of months.
As for me, I figure we can probably take in about 2.5 million permanent immigrants a year without any serious hit to social or political stability (at that rate, it would take 100 years for the US population to double just from immigrants – meaning that most of the original immigrants would have died off and their children and other descendants would be US born citizens).
Environmental stability is another issue, though. Do you want to live in a US with a half-billion people, with all the extra strain on land and natural resources that will entail? A billion people? And given this is the US, coming here will probably increase their environmental impact a lot in a bad way.
@Guy in TN
If the Palestinians can’t move into Israel, it’s not an open border policy.
I haven’t heard of any open border advocates for allowing free migration into Mexico from the US either. Though I actually have no idea how hard it is to set up permanent residence in Mexico as a US citizen; my prior would be it’s quite easy provided you know how to pay the mordidita (and can afford it), and impossible otherwise.
Call me crazy, stupid or anything else disparaging you like, but I do actually think the major problem in this is the “illegal” rather than the “immigrant” part.
The blathering about “no person is illegal” from one side is cute, but meaningless apart from being an appeal to The Grandeur of The Human Spirit and other uplifting edification (and makes me go ‘well, you guys sure are certain some persons are illegal when it comes to abortion – or at least you redefine your terms so that they’re not persons at all’).
The other side yammering about demographic take-over and catastrophic cultural failure may or may not have a point, but they’re over-reacting in some instances – the reason that these people want to cross the border is that they want to be Americans, too! Just like the descendants of the immigrant Dutch and Germans and Scandinavians and English and Irish and French all eventually became ‘Americans’ which formed this mixum-gatherum culture that is allegedly under such threat.
I think that there can be an absorption of immigrants as long as there is a legal process which is adhered to, where everyone in the system knows what they are doing and what is going on, and people are processed in an orderly and timely manner. I think where the real breakdown comes is the ignoring, flouting, and ‘there should be no consequences’ of the law.
If you really, really believe that everyone has a right to move to the US and that there is no such thing as illegal immigration since there is no basis to make a law against forbidding people to cross borders, then I can understand where you’re coming from.
In the same way, if your objection really is “too many non-white Americans will dilute and destroy the culture and society we have built up”, okay, that’s something I can understand. I don’t need to agree with either or both points to understand them.
But I don’t think that saying “the Republicans/the administration/the Trump voters/white people not me and my class-tribe are all racists, the real reason they are anti-migrants is not because of the law-breaking” is helpful. If we can get honesty on both sides about motives, the debate might go somewhere (and yes, this includes “I’m pro-immigration because I believe in open borders, I’m not actually all that concerned if Jose who has crossed the border can only work under the table in exploitative labour jobs now he’s here” because I’m fairly sure if some racists are using this issue as a means to push their agenda, so are some globalists).
This is the equivalent of those saying “anti-abortion people don’t really care about foetuses (otherwise they’d treat abortion as murder), it’s that they really hate women/women’s free expression of sexuality and are using this as an excuse to control and punish women”. Please consider that when people say “It’s the law-breaking I find abhorrent”, it really is the law-breaking?
In the same way, saying “no no no, they’re not illegal immigrants, they’re undocumented migrants” is untrue: there is a law and a process to follow, they haven’t done this, they’ve broken the law, they are illegal just as a murderer is an unlawful killer but a soldier in wartime is not.
I think the argument you are referring to would be more like
It is a consistent view to require to put your money where your mouth is, and actually help pregnant women in vulnerable positions keep their baby.
Sure, but if it was just the law breaking, wouldn’t cutting legal immigration of family members be inconsistent with that?
Most of the people who care about illegal immigration also care about legal immigration by poor, uneducated and religious people; quite a few of them openly advocate for a Canada or Australia like system, where mostly rich or educated people are accepted.
Do they? Or do they just want to be in a wealthier Mexico/Guatemala/El Salvador? Aztlan, MEChA, La Raza, “Make America Mexico Again”? OK, the last is probably just satire, but the other three are all real, even if La Raza did rebrand.
Aztlan, MEChA, La Raza, “Make America Mexico Again”?
I do think a lot of that came out of the identity politics pushing; if you can milk the Sympathetic Party (that only wants your votes so that it can get into power to be good to you, honest!) for goodies by presenting yourself as a bloc (and the bloc part is important) that can be mobilised for votes, be it unions or Hispanics, then that is to your benefit to create, disseminate and enforce that group identity.
And a good chunk of it comes from the 60s and 70s when minority groups were flailing about looking for ‘authentic roots’; just as you got the invention of Kwanzaa (and the idea of Islam being more ‘authentic’ as a religion for African-Americans than Christianity given the false impression that Islam was somehow autochthonous to various African countries whereas Christianity had – let’s all sing in chorus here! – been imposed by white colonial oppressors), in the same way you got the academic and political cohort of Hispanic and Latino movements looking back to some Golden Age of pre-European America. That this, in the context of North America, means just as much supplanting, dispossessing and replacing the aboriginal Indian tribes by the south Americans as done by the Europeans, in order to claim a right to national territory, is somehow overlooked.
No, the argument I am referring to is a “gotcha” along the lines of “call it murder and you are a monster who hates women/don’t call it murder and you are a monster who hates women”.
Those making the argument you quote (“if you cared you’d provide good support for pregnant women and poor mothers”) never address the counter-argument that if they are the ones who really care, why are they so enthusiastic that the solution to being a poor mother is not to attack the poverty, it’s to enable the woman to not be a mother?
Otherwise they wouldn’t be so horrified by the notion of crisis pregnancy centres.
As a pro-choice woman, I think that crisis pregnancy centers actually help women make choices, so I applaud the logical consistency of those who oppose abortion and try to help women who do not want to abort but cannot afford to be pregnant.
However, it seems that they frequently lie about it, posing as abortion clinics, and try to convince women who are planning to have an abortion not do to so by either convincing/guilt tripping them or by lying to them about how many weeks you can abort at. I think that’s what pro-choice people find reprehensible, not actually giving women choices.
Could it be that political factions are diverse, and various people can oppose immigration for different reasons? You are against the law-breaking aspect. Others are opposed to immigration due to the demographic voting threat. Some people are just racist.
Likewise, its true that many people on the left (including myself) advocate for an end-goal system with no borders. We can’t say this in public, of course, due to the Overton Window. But that doesn’t mean we can’t simultaneously care about the plight of illegal immigrants working in a two-tiered system, without labor law protections.
I think when a large majority of the people coming in fly the flag of their home country, that could be reliably termed “an invasion” if you’re concerned about cultural issues. Either way, I think it’s a solid indicator that the class of immigrants that we are assimilating wind up being “Mexicans in America” and not “Mexican-Americans”. I think this distinction is of critical importance, particularly to the Right. The Right notably does pretty well among Hispanics versus other minority groups, and there are a lot of right-wing Hispanic politicians. (Weirdly, Trump is up ten points among Hispanics from before).
Re: The abortion comment, I do not think it being anti-abortion requires being pro “free healthcare for vulnerable mothers”. For an anti-abortion person, abortion is literally murder. A policy that enables murder must then be pretty high on the abhorrent list. Vulnerable mothers who would rather commit murder than raise a child should be pretty high on the abhorrent list to the same person, but since these people believe in the morality of choice it doesn’t get the same priority that illegalizing the murder does.
In my neighborhood people fly the Irish and Italian flags all over the place. A few decades ago the Slovenian church (since closed) up the road had a school taught in a native tongue, by immigrants from Slovenia! I cannot believe that we have let these invasions of foreigners go on for so long unchecked!
Well, maybe if you actually consider abortion as murder, preventing murder goes before helping somebody who is so poor that their only option is murder.
But it is the next logical step. There is a reason we have safe haven laws; because some women end up in states of mind where they end up dumping babies into dumpsters. And I see denying help to pregnant women and disabled children while denying them a painless euthanasia (which is what abortion is, really), making them suffer, as a really inconsistent view.
You cannot say “Women should carry the responsibility of their babies, and go in front of a judge and … (a lot of legal complications) to give up their baby” and at the same time say “we have to prevent babies from being dumped into dumpsters, but we should do everything except giving women a safe opportunity to do so”.
Note: I do not view foetuses the same as babies, and I do not think abortion is murder, however, I favour empowering women by giving them better economic opportunities so they can avoid an abortion and can afford an unplanned pregnancy or a disabled child.
ana:
How does this argument look different if you assume abortion is acceptable but infanticide is not? It seems like it’s the same kind of moral issue either way–sometimes a mother realizes she just can’t take care of her kid, what should we do?
I agree we should have mechanisms to let her give up her kid in some relatively low-overhead way if she reaches that situation, for both her good and the good of her child.
But I don’t think it makes you inconsistent or a hypocrite or anything if you support laws against killing your 6-month-old baby but don’t support having some mechanisms to make it easy to give babies up.
ana:
Does it actually often happen that women go to a crisis pregnancy center and don’t know whether it offers abortions? And that they somehow can’t, say, realize that they’re in the wrong place and leave and go find an abortion clinic? I really don’t know, but I’ll admit that this seems unlikely to me.
This is what pisses me off about the sanctimony on the pro-choice side: the solution to poverty is death.
And yet the conservatives are the bad guys in all this.
albatross:
Well, I don’t have statistics, but it does seem to happen. After a cursory googling, I get this: 1, 2 and 3.
I personally don’t object to a crisis pregnancy center that tells the women from the beginning that they don’t offer abortions, and then talk about the choices they do offer. Being pro-choice does mean supporting women in whatever choice they make, such as when Sarah Palin’s teenage daughter had a child, or when a young woman in a similar position decides to have an abortion. These choices should exist.
Pro-lifers have the option to steer women towards the choice they want them to make, by incentivizing them to do so, or they can prohibit abortions. Sure, banning abortions is a cheaper option, but it will not stop abortions from happening; women will just choose more dangerous black market options, or resort to self harm, such as drinking bleach or whatever. I think that no law will stop a person desperate enough to drink bleach from doing whatever they feel they have to do. So banning abortions is just inefficient, it doesn’t work, and it turns into gruesome deaths of women. So if you know that the law does not matter in the end, and banning abortions will not save the foetuses of rich women who want to have an abortion (they can afford to travel to Canada, so that won’t work), but will result into deaths of poor women, who will be pushed into more precarious situations.
So when they say “we want to stop abortions because murder, and we don’t care that when people are so desperate they drink bleach, they don’t care about jail, so we just end up virtue signalling without actually improving the lives of the foetuses after they are born, because we want to do it on the cheap”, I think it is not consistent with the stated objective of saving foetuses.
The Trump administration appears to disagree, since the policies they are pushing right now also very heavily cut back on legal immigration, as well as illegal immigration.
Over the past few months, they have revoked legal immigration status from hundreds of thousands of people who were here legally up to that point. Not only that, but the immigration bills they have been pushing for also sharply cut back on the amount of legal immigration allowable.
The standard Republican rhetoric on this has typically been that they are only against illegal immigration, and I think many traditional conservatives do actually hold that view – but the Trump administration has now quite openly flipped to arguing that the problem is immigration itself, legal or illegal.
(Of course, Trump being Trump, he has spiced things up a bit more by tactfully pointing out in his trademark colorful that he really just has problems with immigration from the *bad* countries – you know, like Haiti or any of the ones in Africa – and that he wishes we could get more good immigrants from Europe or Scandinavia.)
@Deiseach
That is not what I am saying; I am saying that if you consider abortion murder, and you want to stop poor, desperate, probably slightly insane people from commiting murder, the best solution is to help them out of poverty.
The same way infanticide is mostly stopped by providing safe haven laws, because banning infanticide does not work, because it has been illegal in the Western world for a very long time, and it still happens. You need to enforce infanticide bans, for sure. But you also need to give people other options.
So even if you somehow manage to ban abortion, you need to give people the safe haven option, otherwise you will end up with dead women in adition to the murdered foetuses.
Re: abortion, I’ve heard from multiple sources that, prior to Roe, most illegal abortions were done by licensed doctors simply ignoring the law, and that to get figures where loads of women were dying from abortions each year you have to go back before antibiotics.
Also, http://blog.secularprolife.org/2018/07/which-decreases-abortion-rates-more.html
Abortion and contraceptive access both seem to increase risk-taking behavior, at least among young white women, and the effect is substantially stronger for abortion because it has an essentially zero risk of failure.
Also, it’s not 1970; you don’t need bleach, just a supply of misoprostol. Tell your doctor, while winking broadly, that you need an NSAID but are prone to ulcers. There’s your abortion. Or just order it over the internet. I’m sure that, were Roe reversed, you’d see an explosion of black-market abortifacients, and most likely the bulk of them would be safely ordered from Canada or somewhere.
It’s really hard to tease out. I assume the pro-enforcement crowd is made up of some coalition of people who (a) don’t have a problem increasing legal immigration numbers, but think that illegal immigration poses special problems; (b) would be open to discussing immigration numbers, but currently think legal immigration is about where it should be and are opposed to illegal immigraiton and (c) want less immigration. Similarly, the anti-pro-enforcement crowd probably breaks into a few groups. (There’s also potential disputes about whether immigration should prefer skills, family reunification, or refugee assistance).
I personally would gladly double legal immigration in return for an aggressive stance against illegal immigration, but I don’t know how the polling shakes out.
ana:
I’m sure banning abortions doesn’t prevent 100% of abortions, but I would be very surprised if it didn’t prevent a substantial fraction of abortions. If you believe that less-serious restrictions on abortions (like requiring women to see an ultrasound of their baby, or restrictive licensing schemes that reduce the number of abortion clinics per state, or parental notification laws) reduce abortions, presumably you also believe that a 100% ban would reduce abortions even more.
Some of the women who couldn’t get legal abortions would make other choices. Some would travel to another state/country to get an abortion. Some might get an illegal abortion, but I suspect that wouldn’t be very common, because travel is pretty cheap[1]. Basically the cost of getting an abortion would go up by $300-400 to cover travel and lodging costs.
[1] And illegal abortions in the US in 2018 would be done by a medical professional in clean conditions, or would simply be done by taking a pill which would be legal in more than half of the US.
The standard Republican rhetoric on this has typically been that they are only against illegal immigration,
We have a motte and bailey, with several overlapping baileys.
You can have people who say “I don’t want illegal immigration, but I’m fine with immigration” who are fine with any level of immigration, up to and including replacement level, as long as the people check in as they come over the border.
You can have people who say “I don’t want illegal immigration, but I’m fine with immigration” who think that our current legal immigration levels are just about right, but want to stop the overflow that are sneaking in.
You can have people who say “I don’t want illegal immigration, but I’m fine with immigration” who think that our current legal immigration levels are just about right, for now, but worry that if we wanted to stop immigration for some reason, we would not be able to do it because of de-powering the institutions that could deal with it / empowered the people who would deny enforcement even if the country legitimately and honestly desires it as policy.
You can have people who say “I don’t want illegal immigration, but I’m fine with immigration” who want a small amount of immigration, noticeably less than we have now, but they still want some amount of legal immigration each year.
And then you have people who say “I don’t want illegal immigration, but I’m fine with immigration” who really want to end all immigration and don’t want to say so.
@ albatross
Well, strange as it sounds, I think that legally complicating something while still leaving the option on the table discourages the undesirable activity more than completely taking the option from the table. Because most people in states where they have to listen to ultrasounds are probably not aware how horrible it is to go through that, and get an abortion, so they are discouraged by that.
But if a woman wants to get an abortion, and she knows there is no legal way to do it, she will probably just google the abortifacients, and mail-order from Canada.
Consider how much more effective than the Prohibition the Swedish approach to alcohol consumption is: prices are ridiculous, you cannot buy alcohol after six on workdays and not at all on Sundays, except in bars and stuff. Alcohol consumption has reduced drastically in Sweden, without the social cost of the prohibition.
Also, tobacco: while the consumption of illegal drugs has not decreased by making it illegal, the consumption of tobacco has decreased by making it more expensive and more unattractive. At the same time, black market prices for cocaine have gone down. Last I heard, you can buy a snort of cocaine for less than a coffee in Starbucks. So keeping it legal has allowed us to control it better.
I think abortion is the same. Ilegal alcohol has methanol in it; ilegal abortions are unsafe.
@ana53294 Your arguments are applicable to most things we ban. E.g. property crimes:
“Property rights people have the option to steer poor people towards the choice they want them to make, by incentivizing them to do so, or they can prohibit robbery. Sure, banning robbery is a cheaper option, but it will not stop robberies from happening; poor people will do it anyway, resort to violence such as mugging people at gunpoint. I think that no law will stop a person desperate enough to rob people (and risk getting hurt themselves) from doing whatever they feel they have to do. So banning robbery is just inefficient, it doesn’t work, and it turns into gruesome deaths of robbers who get shot by their victim.[…]
So when they say “we want to stop property crimes because property rights, and we don’t care that when people are so desperate they resort to violence, they don’t care about jail, so we just end up virtue signalling without actually improving the lives of the law-abiding people, because we want to do it on the cheap”, I think it is not consistent with the stated objective of saving people from property crimes. […]
That is not what I am saying; I am saying that if you consider robbery wrong, and you want to stop poor, desperate, probably slightly insane people from commiting robbery, the best solution is to help them out of poverty.”
Btw I support the right to abortion, but your argument is wrong.
@10240
I actually think it applies to armed robbery too. Regions with high crimes frequently don’t offer much in the way of decent legal employment, which reinforces criminal activities.
Gunning down all of them would be less effective than helping them get a job and then gunning down those who choose not to take the carrot. Not giving any carrot will be less effective.
@ana53294 Yes, reducing poverty reduces most crimes, but most of the time we wouldn’t use this to argue that something shouldn’t be banned at all, or that those who want to ban it don’t actually care about its occurrence.
No, they quite clearly don’t. If they did, this wouldn’t be a problem.
@Matt M
You think illegal immigrants would refuse American citizenship if offered it? That is contrarian indeed.
They want citizenship sure (well, some of them. probably NOT all). But they don’t want to “be an American” in any sense other than that.
Which is really what this debate is all about. Does “being an American” actually mean something apart from “a person who is registered with and pays taxes to the US government?”
There have been a number of studies showing Latin American immigrants assimilate just as fast as every other wave of immigrants in the past.
Did existence of Little Italy mean Italians aren’t real Americans?
@Matt M
The paying taxes thing is not actually anywhere near a requirement. Children, people consuming more welfare than they pay in tax, people who make no money, etc.
In theory it might be nice if “being an American” meant more than “is a citizen due to legal rules”, but I don’t think I’m going to agree with anywhere close to enough people on what “being an American” should be that I actually want “being an American” to be anything other than “is a citizen due to legal rules”.
@Matt M
What other senses are there? Are the Amish American in those senses?
Culture. Values. Language. Among others. And no, I’d say the Amish aren’t really “American” in any meaningful sense. I’d say that they do their damndest not to be American. They don’t seem to want much of any part of our government, state, society, and they only participate in it to the extent that we threaten them if violence if they refuse.
“In my neighborhood people fly the Irish and Italian flags all over the place. A few decades ago the Slovenian church (since closed) up the road had a school taught in a native tongue, by immigrants from Slovenia! I cannot believe that we have let these invasions of foreigners go on for so long unchecked!”
The difference is that the Ireland and Italy have no claims on US territory and immigrants from those countries do not live predominantly in portions of US territory adjacent to Ireland or to Italy.
Better watch out for those French immigrants, though — maybe they want their Louisiana or Detroit back!
An Irish flag is a milder statement, like the religious symbols still present on US banknotes and in judicial proceedings. It’s not that they aren’t Irish, but that they are not militant about it and nobody cares.
By contrast, flying a Mexican flag can, depending on context (e.g. while burning a US flag next to it), be a very strong and controversial symbol, just like a host of other flags that many people consider controversial (e.g. Confederate, hammer and sickle, Japanese pre-WWII flags).
That’s a considerable exaggeration. Amish buy from and sell to the non-Amish around them–that’s participation in the society, and it isn’t done due to threats of violence.
@DavidFriedman
They have to, to pay their taxes, don’t they?
“Nothing to do with” might be a bit of an exaggeration, for the “society” part at least.
But they distinguish between Amish and English for a reason. I highly doubt that they consider themselves to be members of the same society that the English are…
@Aapje and Matt:
As best I can tell, the Amish position is that they should obey the government’s laws except when those laws pose an unacceptable threat to their principles or society. The only case I know of where they were willing to engage in mass civil disobedience was against compulsory attendance in (non-Amish) high schools, which I think they realistically viewed as a threat to their survival as a society, a way of forcibly inculcating their children with an alien system of values. The Supreme Court eventually came down on their side in a unanimous decision.
Other than that, they have generally negotiated with the non-Amish authorities to get mutually acceptable terms.
They certainly distinguish between themselves and the English, meaning the rest of us. American blacks, orthodox Jews, Mormons, Romany, and a fair number of other groups similarly distinguish between ingroup and outgroup.
@DavidFriedman, I’m not sure which was more recent, but I know the Amish also stood up to the government against getting social security numbers and paying social security taxes.
Matt M (and possibly quanta?), you sound like you’re opposed to large scale immigration from Central America even if it were to happen legally. So if I could ask — what would satisfy you that these immigrants were properly “becoming American” that you don’t currently see happening? As MrApophenia pointed to, all the studies and polls I’ve seen say that currently, something like 85% of 2nd generation Hispanics are fluent in English, and large numbers of them intermarry with non-Hispanic Americans. What more would you like to see? (My guess: “Less identity politics”. But that seems to me less like something that they’re bringing over from Central America, and more so something that they pick up from us after they get here)
Edit: Pew Research from 2017 with a few polls related to Hispanic identity among foreign-born vs second gen vs third gen Hispanics. I may have actually underestimated English fluency among second gen Hispanics, since Pew says only 6% are Spanish Dominant. And 18% of married Latinos are married to a non-Latino.
I would like to see legal immigration conducted under some sort of points system that is completely blind to ethnicity or former nation of residence.
My guess is that the result of this would be exactly what the left predicts when they tell us why this sort of program would be evil and must be opposed – significantly more immigration from European and Asian nations, and significantly less from Central America. Wealthier immigrants more able to support themselves and more interested in assimilating quickly, rather than waiting 3 generations and hoping the public schools and reality TV do a good enough job of it for us.
I see no logic in a system built to favor those who are most easily able to get here and most willing to violate our laws in the process of doing so.
Depends on what we’re awarding points for. If we reach a point where there’s minimal illegal immigration, we might need to bring in legal immigrants to fill the low skill farm worker positions. But I do agree on “some sort of points system that is completely blind to ethnicity or former nation of residence” and that the current system favors the people who can cross the border most easily — if we want to bring in low wage workers and/or uplift people from countries with low standards of living, why are we allowing Central Americans to sneak across the border and steal spots from, say, African immigrants?
But it sounds like you don’t dispute that Central American immigrants now are assimilating at the same pace as European immigrants a century ago, you just think that there’s an even better option available.
Doesn’t need to be immigrants for this, just non-immigrant temporary workers with permanent residence outside the country that they’re required to return to periodically.
@Matt M
And is the Amish lack of Americanness a problem? It seems positive/neutral to me, which means lack of Americanness is not intrinsically bad.
To clarify, no I’m not for or against. At least not without nailing down numbers. 10 million per year or more would legally would be too many people bar some crazy reason like Central and South America are sinking into the ocean so we’ve all got to huddle up in North America. On the order of 1 million per year legally might be fine. Depending a lot on the rules and who, it could be positive or negative. Not all individuals are equally desirable people to live adjacent too.
When I say it might be nice in theory for being American to mean more than the legal definition, I mean really far out in theory. Like in theory it might be nice if perpetual motion machines were possible. I mean it would be nice if Americans were coherent in a way that probably doesn’t even apply to a significant chunk of my countrymen whose ancestors have been here for centuries. It might reasonably not apply to me depending how I defined it rather than just holding a vague thought in my head.
@Quanta – I think making “being an American” be something more than the place you happened to grow up is one of the better arguments FOR immigration control. I’m not sure if I’ve made this argument here before, but if I could tell with 100% certainty that a given immigrant was extremely culturally similar to the current makeup of Americans, I would have zero problems with them immigrating, legally or illegally (although one of the cultural markers of “American-ness” is begrudging respect for the law). An argument that usually gets caught up in accusations of being a “white nativist” racist is that “we should be importing Americans who happen to live in other places, not making more foreigners who happen to live in America”.
Wait. Whut? Tell me you don’t mean what it sounds like you mean.
The far-left isn’t well represented in this board, so I can understand how such views are surprising.
Obviously, prosecuting everyone involved in immigration enforcement is unrealistic and counter-productive. But we could go after the masterminds, Nuremberg-style.
Not unless you’re going to have an old-fashioned revolution, because without that you’re violating the badly-battered but not quite dead “ex post facto law” prohibition in the Constitution.
@Guy in TN
I’m probably going to regret asking this, but what exactly are you imagining the charges to be?
Not too worried about the details. If there’s a strong enough will to act against someone, then savvy lawyers and judges will find a way. “something something Spirit of the Constitution”.
Obviously, if it gets to the point where we are bringing charges against Trump-era officials, then restrictions on ex post facto may no longer apply (probably would be for the best imho)
I’m not quite sure I understand the implications being discussed here, but I just wanted to wade in to say that not all of us on the far left believe in prosecuting people for enforcing the laws of their time. I kind of feel as though Guy in TN implied this and I want to push back on it.
I guess there’s a bit of a grey area when it comes to things like Nuremberg, but I feel as though that’s such an edge-case that we should maintain the norm that ex post facto laws are bad.
We couldn’t even get the torturers prosecuted during the Obama administration. Heck, they didn’t even lose their jobs.
This proposal seems so unrealistic to me that it isn’t even worth debating whether it would be a desirable outcome.
@Guy
I believe the term you’re looking for is “Reign of Terror”, not “Spirit of the Constitution”.
Por que no los dos?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_the_Rights_of_the_Man_and_of_the_Citizen_of_1793
Can we get the “prosecute all the ICE agents” people and the “shoot all the illegal immigrants” people together in one place, and then build a wall around them? Or at least a fence?
@John Schilling
Call it a “cage”, and we can put it on Pay-Per-View.
They occasionally gather of their own accord in the streets of large, progressive cities. Perhaps you’ve seen the recent viral videos!
Did you guys see that video of the border patrol guy dumping out the gallons of water he found hidden in the desert, that was supposed to be used as a supply point?
Give it twenty, thirty years, and this era will be remembered as a stain on U.S. history. It’ll be in the texbooks beside Jim Crow.
“It’s cool to imprison children, even kill people, if its not against the law”- This will hold up super well, definitely.
@Guy in TN
I think they should be doing more of that. We’ve got a premade “wall” in that the terrain is dangerous to cross, and having a couple of CBP guys spend a few hours driving around in the desert with a box cutter is way cheaper than building an actual concrete wall.
@CatCube: Deliberately destroying someone’s water supply in the middle of a desert is basically murder. It’s more deniable than shooting them, you can pretend that they just “accidentally” ran out of water mid-crossing, but you’re still deliberately taking an action that you know and intend will end with someone else’s death.
If you’re going to take that stance, I’d rather you just shoot them, then at least you wouldn’t be able to lie about what your goal is.
CBP is in a tough spot there. If they allow “supply pipelines” to make the natural barrier *easier* to cross (given, the rough desert is the primary barrier here) – they are literally not doing their job. Do I hold you personally accountable for murder even though your actions probably caused the death of some third-worlder?
Causality is weird, sure. Would you hold a man accountable for pulling trigger on a gun, which activates a mechanism, which sends a bullet through the air, which just happened to hit another person? There’s like, three steps of removal from the trigger-pulling.
“Taking away a person’s water in the desert” seems right up there with “slashing holes in a liferaft”, or “barricading the doors of a burning building” in the of-course-its-murder-dont-be-pedantic category.
CBP isn’t in any more of a “tough spot” than the guards at Auschwitz, caught between “following orders” and killing another person.
@beleester
I don’t have any moral problems with shooting people that cross the border*. It’s just that you have to have people nearby to actually take the shot, which is expensive and time-consuming. Destroying supplies is far cheaper and will increase the difficulty of crossing.
To make sure my stance is clear: the United States has an absolute right to defend its borders, and that includes the possibility of using lethal force. The form of lethal force is largely irrelevant, and should be based on tactical considerations.
Now, I do oppose a policy change for the CBP to start erecting guard towers and shooting at illegal immigrants attempting to cross the border. However, my objections to that are entirely practical. Truly sealing the border will be a very land-, manpower-, and fiscally-expensive process. Look at the amount of land and obstacle effort required on the Inner German Border, then multiply that by at least 4. We haven’t even come close to the cheapest, easiest, more moral**, and more politically-palatable method of reducing illegal crossing, which is to jump up and down on employers by heavily fining them for employing illegal immigrants. Physically stopping people at the border is always going to be a rounding error compared to getting them to leave voluntarily by making them unemployable. However, if we can make it even more dangerous to cross by destroying supply points, that’s a cheap gimme we should be employing.
Note, however, that if the CBP comes across a group of illegal immigrants in the desert they absolutely do have an obligation to give them water after arresting them, just as once a police officer has shot somebody they’re required to render medical attention after they’re no longer a threat.
* To make sure I’m clear on this, because there’s discussion of vigilantism in other threads, I don’t support vigilante groups manning the border and shooting crossers. However, properly-sworn border guards are another matter.
** All things being equal, I’d like to eliminate illegal immigration through the use of non-lethal methods, but that we haven’t enacted literally every non-lethal methods doesn’t foreclose the use of cheap lethal methods like increasing the danger of natural obstacles.
Well it’s a good thing that the fine upstanding coyotes who set up the depot had all their build permits in order so that the border patrol can call them up and inform them they closed it down. Since they have a rightful claim to the land they could even take the border patrol to court over it.
And I’m sure those same nice responsible citizens would never bring their customers through a desert without regularly checking that their supply lines are intact and having a plan to account for a disaster.
How about the Border Patrol destroys the water and leaves a radio so that the unfortunates can call for pickup when they find the water destroyed?
I’m with beleester here. I cannot believe we’re even having this discussion.
Unfortunately the latter hurts the wallets of rich white people, whereas the former (at worst) merely kills poor brown people and so is considerably more feasible.
There’s no need to drag race into it. Plenty of poor white people would benefit from the rich having to actually play by the rules.
But money is power so here we are.
We’ve heard a bunch in this thread about how hard it is to secure the border. What are the efforts to put the screws on employers that we should be doing that we aren’t?
I hope I don’t get shitty answers like “obviously not enough because they continue to hire people” or applause lights.
Is it just to require EVerify? Do we have anyone here arguing against that?
(edit: I found this argument against EVerify https://www.cato.org/blog/serious-problems-e-verify but if you are suspicious that it’s the big businessmen stopping EVerify a Cato source won’t be very persuasive. Is it much harder to get EVerify-proof papers? I don’t want a national biometric database, but if “just use EVerify” is the fake stalking horse we could end up empowering the people who want to create it if we go towards EVerify and it doesn’t work )
I’ve said before that I’d be fine with letting workers turn in their employers for some kind of amnesty, depending on how it’s designed and implemented.
@bean
Yeah, I don’t see why that would be a problem. It uses the terrain to our advantage and keeps people from coming over. I’m not out to kill people who try to cross illegally, I’m just indifferent to it so long as the method of stopping them is effective.
Just like the Russians have General Winter, we’ve got Border Patrol Officer Desert. Whatever lets him do his job.
@rlms
Oh, no argument that powerful economic actors will prevent any actual effective enforcement of the border. As a matter of fact, I think it’d be real interesting to do an immigration sweep through a Trump construction project and a Trump hotel and see what the results are. I’m not sure that the President’s hammering on a wall isn’t just a “Bread and Circuses” sop to his base by doing a mostly-ineffective yuge construction project that looks “good” on camera while not actually doing anything to change the facts on the ground.
@Edward Scizorhands
For the Cato article, the last reason they give (unintended expansion of the system) is the most compelling, and one I’d have to think on. Most of the rest are not terribly good.
I’m especially underwhelmed (to the point of almost laughing) about how they say it won’t be “free”–no kidding. I’m OK with the government spending money on this. Securing the border is one of the things the federal government is supposed to do, and I don’t have any problems with spending money on well-founded programs. The costs they quote are also cheaper than the wall we’re currently talking about.
For the lack of compliance they talk about: what are the consequences for lack of compliance for employers? My proposal is if they get caught with illegal immigrants as part of their workforce, they get fined (say) $30,000 per head for everybody they didn’t do E-verify on.
I do tentatively like your proposal about encouraging the employees to blow the whistle. However, I’m not sold on amnesty (assuming you mean amnesty to stay in the US). I’d prefer to go with the whistleblower getting deported, but with a large bounty in cash. Possibly go with a 50/50 split on the fine–the whistleblower would get $15,000 per head. The downside, of course, is if the coyotes found out who was informing, they’re probably going to murder them. That would push towards your idea of amnesty, but that’s still somewhat of a problem even if they stay in the US.
On the ‘Workplace enforcement’ front, the critical question is: ‘How much money does the employer save by hiring illegally vs legally?’
This is the threshold for the amount of money the gov’t has to fine or whatever per illegal immigrant.
It also opens up the other prong: making legal work (whether from citizens or immigrants) cheaper to obtain.
But I’m with CatCube on the Wall is a Circus front, so it’s really all a moot point politically.
It’s like shooting someone, then claiming it was a suicide because they didn’t think to wear a bulletproof vest. Amazing.
To be clear, I didn’t link that Cato article because I believed those arguments. I just hadn’t thought much about the negatives of EVerify and went looking for some. I don’t like the government getting in everyone’s business but EVerify doesn’t seem that much worse than “you submit your I-9 forms like you already do, but we honest-to-God check them in real time.” So your documents at least need to be based off of some legit stolen identity which seems to raise the bar.
For “amnesty” I was thinking, in very rough terms, “we forgive your initial trespass and give you a two-year work visa.” Not necessarily give them citizenship (which people have used before when talking about “amnesty” so it’s my fault for using that term). Giving them a portion of the payout could work as an alternative. It’s the standard way the government catches people who are defrauding it, and you make conspiracies really unstable if multiple parties can flip at any time.
I have been toying with the idea of passing a bill that says if you can prove you were in the country before day X you can stay forever but no citizenship. If you were <18 on day X (or prove you were in the country before you turned 18) you can be a citizen through the normal means. Figure out how much it would take to drop illegal immigration to <10 a day, and pay for it out of the military. Seems like something democrates couldn't complain to much about but I am not sure if republicans would be willing to give amensity in exchange for a "wall"
I think mandatory everify can be objected to from a libertarian stance quite easily in that the state has no business getting in the way of free and voluntary labor arrangements between consenting individuals.
“Going after the employers” sounds to me very much like the government refusing to do one of the very few things it is specifically tasked with doing, and then seeking to blame it all on those dastardly capitalists.
Let the state clean up its own mess. Greater interference into free trade is not the solution here.
In case anyone was wondering what lawful evil looks like.
How about strangling people who attempt to sell loose cigarettes without paying the proper task?
@Matt M
If they’d deliberately strangled him for not paying the cigarette tax, and this was policy, that would be lawful evil. Since they did it just because, as police, they could get away with it, I think it’s probably neutral evil.
@Nick:
Yeah. It’s kind of depressing to see how willing people are to place effectively zero value on the lives of other human beings. Like, hey, maybe a marginal reduction in the number of illegal immigrants making it into the country doesn’t actually justify deliberately killing a bunch of desperate people. Or maybe I’m just a crazy leftist hippy.
@Brad
Your lobbying for open borders is a perfect example of chaotic evil, if anybody needs an example.
@Matt M
1) That would be a lot more compelling if I was a libertarian.
2) Stopping illegal immigration at the border is difficult bordering on impossible due to the size and terrain involved. Defense in depth is really the only way, and once you’re inside the country outside of a very narrow strip that puts you on notice that the CBP can arrest you using lethal force if necessary, “defense” must absolutely be a legal process.
3) If the terminal goal is that illegal immigrants are free to contract with anybody once they make the 50-yard dash across the border, then why the hell bother to stop them? If doing the only effective thing to stop illegal immigration is intolerable, then stop trying to prevent it with huge, expensive, but useless infrastructure.
The difference is you needed to dishonestly set up a strawman but all I had to do is quote exactly what you said.
@Iain
I don’t place zero value on their lives. I just place less value on them than I do on other values. Here, that value is that the United States of America has the right and the obligation to its citizens to control entry to its territory by non-citizens. That is more important than the lives of people who want to enter illegally.
Preventing somebody from coming across the border with lethal force is no more surprising or immoral than a prison guard shooting somebody climbing over the fence. Nor does it mean that the escaping prisoner’s life has “zero value”. If it did, then that would mean that the guards should just put all of their prisoners against a wall and shoot them, to save the cost of guarding and housing them. It just means that preventing them from freely moving over that fence is more important than their lives.
Note, also, that if our prison guard shoots somebody who has surrendered, that is straight-up murder. To tie in with comments above, the purpose of the lethal force is to stop movement across the boundary (prison fence here, or national border in the larger discussion). If the movement has been stopped, continuing on to lethal force is not appropriate and should be punished.
@Brad
The argument, of course, is if it was really a strawman. My characterization was intentionally very flip, of course (as was yours, by divorcing it from the context of the discussion). But you’re going to have to argue that it was wrong. As @Matt M was alluding to with his crack about loose cigarettes, if you pass a law you’re accepting that people are going to get killed for breaking it.
If you draw a line on the southern border and tell people to defend it, some people who try to cross it are going to get killed. If you’re not willing to bite that bullet, then just admit you don’t want to stop people from crossing it. I agree that the deaths should be minimized, which is why I think the primary method of enforcement should be by reducing employment (along with the fact that primarily relying on border defense will be ineffective). However, I’m not willing to permit free movement, and I’m not going to pretend that people aren’t going to die because of that stance.
I don’t think it needs to be that black and white; you can be willing to accept one level of risk but not another. You’re also eliding any distinction between accidental deaths, having to kill in self-defense, and intentionally killing a presumed offender rather than risking them escaping.
(Personally, I have no problem with border guards shooting back if they’re being shot at, and there’s no way of preventing every possible accident. But if it really comes down to a choice between letting someone get into the country illegally or deliberately killing them, for God’s sake just let them in.)
It’d be interesting to find out if there are any self professed Christians in the group that endorses murder over having strangers sojourn among us.
@Brad, see also. 🙂
Going to back to the “prosecute Trump and company” topic:- presumably all those you would want to prosecute would have taken an oath to uphold the Constitution, and there’s that whole “cruel and unusual” thing they’re pretty much outright ignoring. Granted that this would set a terrible precedent and is an all-round bad idea, are there any laws on the books regarding the breaking of said oaths?
No, not really. It’s a political question, the remedy is impeachment and removal.
@Brad, this was in the context of later on, after Trump is out of power. Or at least that’s how I was interpreting it.
@Harry Maurice Johnston
Its true there’s not really any precedent in the U.S. for prosecuting high-level officials for things they have done while they are in power. This is to our detriment, as their autocratic power grows unchecked with each passing administration.
For example, no one prosecuting the Bush admin for torture, or the Obama admin for killing U.S. civilians overseas. If you can do that, is there any limit on what you can do? If no one is willing to prosecute the Trump administration for their handling of immigrants, then god save us from what the next Republican president has in store…
I thought we were chaotic neutral here at SSC. Except for Scott, who is neutral good. Does anyone remember that long comment thread from a few OTs back where some anarcho-capitalists were trying to defend the idea of a “chaotic neutral” ancap state?
Re: punishing employers of illegal immigrants. It seems like a fair (and possibly politically popular) punishment would be making them pay the illegal immigrants a full minimum wage salary (or possibly some multiple of that) for the work that they had done. If you do it right, the cases will come to you. And then illegal immigrants become something businesses won’t want.
Of course, we also need to provide a usable infrastructure for identifying people.
Someone was saying (not here, IIRC) that the main reason it wasn’t possible to implement a workable identification system in the US was that the evangelical Christians believed it would lead to the apocalypse, number of the beast and all that. I’m guessing that “main reason” is flat out wrong, but any thoughts on to what extent this is a factor?
@CatCube
It was. Open borders means just that. Advocating no restricts whatsoever on who can come, live, and work in the United States. A return to the pre Chinese Exclusion Act status quo ante. Nowhere have I advocated for anything like that. On the contrary, I’ve argued on SSC for among other things making e-verify mandatory and eliminating the DV category.
I’m not quite sure why this strawman is so attractive to those of you on the immigration restrictionist side. I’d guess because you want to set up a false dichotomy where not supporting your preferred policies (in most people’s cases the wall, in yours murder patrols) can only be compared to the most extreme possible alternative rather than to the many obviously superior options in the middle.
Do you acknowledge the terrible incentive problem this creates?
You end up with a situation where the de facto law is “closed borders for those willing to obey rules, open borders for anyone willing to resist enforcement to the extent that lethal force may be necessary.”
Quite quickly, word gets out among the unwashed masses of the world that the way to ensure free entry into America is to credibly convince the border patrol that they’ll have to kill you in order to stop you.
Do you not appreciate how untenable of a situation this becomes for enforcement authorities? Do you not understand how this will affect the mix of immigrants we receive?
This logic frightens me, because you’ve just announced your willingness to be blackmailed. Somebody wants in? Do it in a way that looks dangerous enough and we’ll help you. How can I be sure it won’t escalate to the Border Patrol having to leave caches? Or taking the concertina wire off the fence, because somebody died in it? Installing a bridge over a section of river where lots of people drown? Ultimately, yes, I’m willing to kill someone over illegally crossing the border. Because the law has to escalate more than the other guy. Or it shouldn’t be there in the first place.
For that matter, AIUI a lot of these are being placed by “do-gooders” on our side of the border. Your logic suggests that any government interference with them is tantamount to murder. If the border patrol comes across someone setting up a cache, can they morally arrest the people involved? (I’m not sure of the relevant law. Pretend we’re discussing making it illegal if you have to.) If the water is already deployed, do they have to leave it? Are they obligated to put it out themselves if they make the bust before it’s deployed?
I suggested destroying the cache and leaving a radio. That seems to solve both sides of the problem. Everybody at least has the option of going back to Mexico alive instead of dying in the desert. Weirdly, CatCube is the only one who acknowledged it. Are you sure that safety is your only objection to this scheme?
1. I have no objection at all to legal immigration, and think we could probably do with more of it. Please drop the stupid strawmen.
2. Romans 13:2-3: “Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and you will be commended.”
Happy Fourth of July to you too.
Everyone in this thread seems to take it for granted that restrictions on immigration in general, and prevention of illegal immigration in particular, is obviously a good thing. That is not at all obvious to me.
As Brad correctly pointed out, open borders would be “A return to the pre Chinese Exclusion Act status quo ante.” With regard to everyone except Asians, it was pretty much the situation until 1924, with a few exceptions such as restrictions on anarchists, disabled and diseased persons, and the like.
Open borders with regard to New World immigrants would be a return to the legal situation pre-1965 (The Hart-Cellar Act, which for the first time set a quota on immigrants from the Western hemisphere, although there were occasional efforts a little earlier against undocumented immigrants from there).
I don’t think many people would argue that the first century of open borders was a mistake, although there was certainly a good deal of anti-immigration sentiment at the time. I’m not sure that many would argue that unlimited immigration from Europe for the next 40+ years and from the western hemisphere for most of the next century was a mistake, although that seems to be something most people are unaware of.
What has changed since then to create an almost unanimous opposition to open borders? I can only think of two obvious candidates.
The first is the growth of the welfare state. In a laissez-faire system immigrants can be expected to be a net benefit to those already there, although they may be a cost to some subgroups. That seems consistent with past U.S. experience.
In a society with a substantial amount of redistribution, on the other hand, there is at least the possibility that immigrants from poor countries will come to a rich country not to engage in productive work but to live off welfare, which provides a higher income than work in their country of origin. My impression is that that is part of what is happening now with African and Middle Eastern immigration to Europe, although the subject is so controversial that it’s hard to be sure.
One obvious compromise, and the one I suggested forty-some years ago, is open immigration with new immigrants not qualified to receive welfare payments and the like–and, ideally, with their taxes reduced to make up for the tax-funded benefits they are not getting. That, plus a reasonably lengthy period to qualify for citizenship, would seem to eliminate the argument for restrictions based on redistribution.
From this standpoint, poorly enforced immigration restrictions with lots of illegal immigrants looks like a possible second best, a way of achieving much of what I described de facto if not de jure, although it has a sizable downside due to attempts to enforce the restrictions.
A second thing that arguably has changed is the lower cost of transportation, making it easier for people to come. That isn’t relevant to the case of immigration from Mexico or central America, which doesn’t require airplanes, is to some degree true for immigration from Europe and Asia. But 19th century technology included steamships, and water transport, although slower, is cheap, so I am not sure how large the difference really is.
What remain, and what I suspect are the main motives for the current anti-immigration attitude, are the same arguments that fueled 19th century anti-immigration sentiment, hostility to people different from us coming here to change our society and steal our jobs.
Or, a step down from that, they are coming to do work, but can’t do work of high enough value. It seems pretty plausible that unskilled immigrants will despite their best efforts be less productive than the natives, because the natives are more highly trained and educated. That sort of thing becomes more and more important the higher the degree of welfare state the natives want to run. You just can’t afford Norway if your labor force is that of Guatemala.
This scenario seems more likely to me than the notion that immigrants are coming to lie about on the dole. The stereotypical immigrant does not go on the dole; he works like a dog doing nasty work for peanuts.
I don’t know what you mean by that, since bean is of course right about the general principle. The state has a right and duty to use force, including lethal force and including to protect borders, and as a Christian I’m committed to that too. Where I perhaps differ is in how I think that force ought to be used. To respond directly to bean,
I don’t buy that it has to escalate more than the other guy. If someone is attacking you with lethal force, can you use lethal force back? Of course. But if someone is attacking you with nonlethal force, can you use lethal force? No. And sometimes you can’t escalate to the level of the other person; if someone else were shooting our children, it doesn’t mean we can shoot their children to stop them. Given that illegally crossing a border is not of itself such an escalation, I don’t see how lethal force is justified there.
I’m concerned about incentives here too, but your argument is not the way forward. And for the record, I thought your solution to the water thing was not bad.
And what’s wrong with objection to people coming here to “change our society”? Suppose they were all basically totalitarians at heart and came here intending to institute a totalitarian state? Or democratic socialists, coming here to expand the welfare state enormously? Or Spanish-chauvinists, coming here to change the common language to Spanish? What’s wrong with objecting to people coming immigrating in order to change the country to something inimical to the incumbent citizens?
Even if so, they bring and bear or father children. Who for at least a couple of decades, are going to be a net economic drain, thanks to all the programs for poor children.
@DavidFriedman
Such a system would probably break down very quickly. Do parents of citizen children who don’t have citizenship themselves not get stuff? It’s gonna look terrible when one kid who’s a US citizen gets treated better than another because their parents can access xyz services and the other kid’s parents can’t. What about stuff that’s in the public-health interest? It’s gonna look bad when there’s an outbreak of some transmittable disease that started among people not covered by, say, low-income health care cost assistance.
From my perspective, the US needs to unfuck its immigration system, in general. The current system is a confused mess that (if my brief Googling is correct) selects most immigrants on the basis of family reunification. It uses work visas for high-skilled workers who, as far as I know, in Canada would be straight-up immigrants. If there’s a need for low-wage seasonal workers in some fields, then there should be a seasonal worker visa system, not illegal immigration providing a pool of easily-abused labourers. It’s completely unclear what the US immigration system – how the legal system for selection of immigrants works, how illegal immigration is dealt with, etc – is meant to do, as far as I can tell – what’s the objective of the system?
@bean:
This is a claim about what you should do when you are subject to the authority of another. It doesn’t address what the ruler should do.
If you want to start citing individual verses, the pro-stranger side is going to have a lot more ammunition. The Bible is not subtle on this issue. If the constant drumbeat of “for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt” doesn’t do it for you, take Matthew 25:31-46:
PS: Romans 13 was historically a cornerstone of the “Biblical” case for slavery. In your shoes, I would be careful not to be too confident I was interpreting Romans correctly.
Edit to add:
@Nick:
While it is true that rulers have both the right and the duty to enforce laws, and the ruled have the duty to obey legitimate authorities, it is at the very least a little bit ironic that bean was arguing that it’s wrong to rebel against authority on a day set aside for celebrating such a rebellion.
I wasn’t advocating for that kind of unilateral escalation. But there isn’t a sharp line between lethal and non-lethal force, and some people will be killed even by supposedly non-lethal means.
Example: A cop goes to pull someone over for speeding. The person ignores them and speeds up. They continue to ignore attempts to pull them over until the cop is forced to do the Pit maneuver. The resulting crash kills the person. This is an entirely predictable outcome of trying to stop people for speeding. A few will decide that a car chase sounds like fun, and a few of those will be killed in the attempt. There was never a concrete intent to kill any single person, but there was a conscious choice to escalate to potentially lethal methods, to enforce the rule that your best option when the cops try to pull you over is to cooperate instead of running away.
I think that the use of the term “lethal force” here is disingenuous. We are not talking about shooting everyone who we see crossing the border illegally. We’re talking about destroying the logistical support for illegal border crossings. This will result in deaths. So will not banning coal mining. But it’s not an action targeted at causing deaths. I do think there are things (leaving radios) we can and should do to reduce the death toll. But I also think that taking this to its logical conclusion means that we no longer can take action against someone trying to make crime less dangerous.
@Iain
I honestly can’t remember if you’re in favor of open borders or not. Brad, who I was replying to, isn’t, so he’s already ceded the basic premise that the government has some authority on who comes in or out.
As for “sojourners in Egypt”, I’m not sure that follows. Should we treat immigrants/foreigners well? I believe the Bible absolutely teaches that. Abuse of illegal immigrant labor absolutely contradicts those verses. Do those verses equate to a case for Open Borders? I’m very not sure of that. The government acting under its delegated authority is different from me acting in my private capacity. And there’s Old Testament precedent that they didn’t have to let in absolutely everyone (see Throwing Off Invading Armies).
And while I appreciate the irony of the timing of my making this case, I’m not going to not respond to something because this happened to be July 4th.
Thank you, that embarrassingly sailed over my head.
bean,
You weren’t, but others in this thread were, and I wanted to separate myself from that position. I’m sorry if I made it sound like you were with them on that.
I agree that not being an action targeted at causing deaths matters, but that’s not enough to justify it. If we’re going to permit foreseeable deaths, the old double effect rules apply:
I seriously doubt that just going around destroying water drops gets by this, and I took it from above that you agree: it’s leaving far too great a risk of deaths, and border security is not proportionately serious enough. I don’t even see it as sufficiently different from the “puncturing the rafts” example someone gave above: the only relevant difference is that that’s less direct, but the indirectness does nothing to affect the certainty of the outcome, so it’s just as wrong. Your leaving-the-radio solution is much better because it’s actually taking necessary and reasonable precautions to minimize chances of death.
Use of the Pit maneuver is, as far as I can tell, in line with this analysis, though I think your justification is a little loose. Just glancing at wikipedia:
So correct me if I’m wrong, but it sounds like use of the Pit maneuver does require a proportionately grave reason and sufficiently low risk of death.
If we can all agree—as I take it you already do, bean—that “by whatever means necessary” approaches are fracking terrible, the conversation would be much advanced.
@bean:
I am not in favour of pure open borders. I agree that the government has legitimate authority over who enters the country. But I disagree with those people who claim that this authority justifies any and all extreme measures. (To be clear, I don’t think you are one of them.) If you want me to get specific, I’d say “shooting anybody who tries to cross the border” and “destroying caches of water and leaving people to die of thirst” are morally wrong. Building a giant wall is not morally wrong (just really dumb). Replacing water caches with radios is not morally wrong insofar as you trust the border patrol to arrive on time and not, for example, “forget” to charge the batteries on the radio. Nevertheless, I don’t think it would be worth the cost.
I continue to think Matthew Yglesias’s bicycle analogy is relevant here. Bicycle theft is illegal, and the government has a legitimate interest in preventing it. Nevertheless, many people get away with it, and we do not dedicate infinite resources to eradicating it. This doesn’t mean we have an “open bicycles” policy; it’s just basic cost-benefit analysis.
In a country that is already spending twice as much on ICE and CBP than it does on the FBI, where the rate of border apprehensions was down 82% in 2017 vs its peak in 2000, I think the onus is on the people pushing for stricter border control to explain why the marginal decrease in illegal immigrants would justify the marginal cost of keeping them out. Indeed, I think that any reasonable cost-benefit analysis would find that the American status quo spends way more money on immigration control than can be rationally justified.
(I also suspect that the current panic about Hispanic immigrants will look, in retrospect, no better than the historical panic about the Irish.)
I’m no longer a believing Christian (although I remain, in many ways, a deeply Presbyterian atheist), and while I still have strong opinions about the correct way to interpret the Bible, I try not to get too pushy about them. That said, my preferred framework for thinking about this sort of thing is as follows. There are a lot of verses in the Bible making extreme demands on our generosity: “If you have two coats, give one to the man with none”; “if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also”; “what you do for the least of these…”
Many of these, taken literally, are incompatible with a functioning society. (To borrow from your earlier post: nothing announces your willingness to be blackmailed like Matthew 5:39-40.) Nevertheless, they are not just present in the text, but repeatedly emphasized. To me, it makes the most sense to see them as aspirational goals. As much as possible, turn the other cheek. As much as possible, give your extra coat to the man with none. God does not ask that you turn yourself into an easily exploited punching bag, but he wants you to edge your way right up to that line. When you err, err on the side of loving your neighbour. (And on the side of an expansive definition of “neighbour”.)
In the context of immigration, applying this approach to the verses about strangers would push for borders to be “as open as you can reasonably make them”. I don’t know where that line is, and I think there’s lots of room for honest disagreement, but I have a hard time believing that the line is stricter than the American status quo.
My two (apostate) cents.
As I understand it, the 1965 Immigration Act was a compromise between progressives who wanted to end the national origin quotas and nativists who saw nothing wrong with them. The result was a facially neutral law that favored “family reunification” as a way of keeping the ethnic makeup of the citizenship more-or-less the same as it had been.
Latin American countries (and Canada), which had never been subject to the pre-1965 quotas, were brought into the new system without much thought. As far as I can tell the focus of the immigration debate in the 1960s was still Southern and Eastern Europe.
In the years since then, the geography of immigration changed dramatically, while the laws remained almost exactly the same. (The biggest change since 1965 is the “diversity lottery” introduced in 1990, apparently because we weren’t letting in enough Irish. It’s still a tiny fraction of legal immigration.) Somehow the nativists have gotten it into their heads that the 1965 law is what brought all the Mexicans in, when in fact it made legal immigration from Mexico much more difficult.
Why haven’t we changed the laws? Because while the parties have gotten more uniform on other issues, they’re both deeply fragmented on immigration, and there’s no proposal that can get a majority in Congress. So we’ll carry on with the increasingly absurd 1965 system forever.
How many people here are open-borders other than Friedman? The open-border right might be better represented here than the left. It’s kinda disappointing to see people who I generally put in the same basket as myself (boring left-liberals or social democrats) get assumed to be open-borders.
@bean
Romans is best understood in the context of the author trying to show a community in Rome that the message isn’t sketchy. He’s going to say “yeah do what the authorities say” because “I’m respectable, ps overthrow your government” is a weak claim on respectability.
It’s also unclear whether a lot of the injunctions from Jesus, Paul, etc were meant to be permanent injunctions, or short-term heavy-duty emergency injunctions. Someone who thinks (I accept the argument of the character of Jesus’ preaching to be basically apocalyptic) that the world is going to change in some radical way (not necessarily come to an end) soon is not going to be concerned about the behaviour of governments, given that they expect those governments to come to an end soon.
This is like saying “you’ve only got another month in prison so behave yourself and you’ll be out soon” as a general injunction to behave one’s self in prison.
EDIT: And Paul’s letters are all him dealing with some specific situation. Getting universal instructions from them is a bit like trying to conclude rules of effective business or command from a most-likely-incomplete selection of their emails or orders. You can sort of puzzle it out, but Paul’s instructions are all part of him trying to hold communities he’s associated with together, not lose them to competitors preaching different messages, etc.
@BBA
I’m semi-aware of the history. I should have been clearer – that is the problem, that a policy was sort of put together as a compromise rather than to serve some objective. Not that any other system is some beautiful perfect thing outside of history, but the US seems to do particularly badly for some of these things.
@Nick
I have a couple of problems with this analysis. First, life rafts are emergency gear. Someone in them is out of the fight. This isn’t true of water caches, which are being used to aid and abet the activity. Second, it seems to quickly lead back to moral blackmail. If the caches are being placed by an organization of pro-new-undocumented-Americans citizens, can we take action against them? How is arresting someone trying to plant caches different from removing them after they’re planted? What if they leave it in a National Park? Or on someone else’s private property? Does the Border Patrol have to refill them when they get empty? Not doing that can also kill someone, although I suppose you could dodge that one under double effect. But what’s to stop them from trucking people out to drink them dry? In a weird way, I think that caches planted by coyotes as part of a deliberate plan have more moral weight than ones planted by do-gooders with no coordination with anyone actually crossing the border. Someone might actually be counting on the former. On the later, someone who takes off without sufficient water and hopes to hit a random cache is sort of bringing it upon themselves.
@Iain
I don’t really disagree with you about immigration in general, both as a Christian and from a practical perspective. I do think that attacking water sources is a reasonable option, because disallowing it leads to absurd conclusions.
Many of them will. But the question is whether they will be below the level of the lowest paid not-on-welfare workers, which strikes me as unlikely for anyone in reasonable shape and willing to work hard. There are a lot of lawns to be mowed, houses to be cleaned, factories who can use a few low-skilled workers for low-skilled tasks, and the like.
The problem gets harder if there are high minimum wage laws being enforced against them. Fifteen dollars an hour is about $45,000/year for someone willing to work a sixty hour week, which is surely well above the welfare level.
My point was not that the argument was obviously wrong but that it was the same argument used by opponents of immigration in the 19th century and that the historical evidence suggests it turned out to be wrong then.
You can argue either that I am misreading the historical evidence, that we would have been better off with much less immigration over the history of the U.S., or that something important has changed. I offered some responses to the latter argument.
I don’t think that’s quite right. The lowest-paid not-on-welfare workers are almost certainly getting more in benefits than they are contributing. The highly productive pay more than they get; the minimally productive pay less than they get.
The question is whether the immigrants can contribute more than the benefits that accrue to them as members of the society. And that’s a higher bar.
I would support open borders in the context of an AnCap society.
In other words, if we privatize all “public” property and guarantee the freedom of association, I’d be all in favor of open borders.
But until we do that, nope, not interested.
One of the biggest problems with this solution, aside from the bit where it looks like a basically venal “let’s punish the Other Tribe’s heartless money-grubbing capitalists rather than Our Tribe’s poor oppressed People of Color, is that it isn’t actually going to be the perfect solution that makes 100% of the illegal immigrants go away. Even 50% would be a stretch.
Which means, the 50+% who remain will by necessity be working for the most unscrupulous employers, often explicitly criminal and/or black market, or be left unemployed as a pure drain on society. And, insofar as they are economically dependent on criminals, quite vulnerable to exploitation.
Securing the border but turning a blind eye to what goes on within it, gives us a mix of failed immigrants who live in their home countries with approximately the same civil rights as everyone else, and “illegal” immigrants who are basically indistinguishable from other Americans including the bit where they are productive law-abiding citizens who might even wind up voting Republican.
Thing is, that “not interested in open borders with the status quo what it is” position covers a lot of ground. I’d suspect it’s the majority opinion among Democratic voters.
People aren’t upset at what must be done to enforce immigration laws because they don’t like the laws, they dislike them because the things that would need to be done are often unpleasant and depending on your morality may be immoral. People haven’t necessarily thought everything through, because we (people) generally do not do that.
I’m not open-borders. I suspect a country can’t have all three of disproportionate wealth, a high-sharing society, and open borders.
I think the US should implement the Australian/Canadian model of high but selective immigration, plus substantial border controls that aim first and foremost at catching and prosecuting the coyotes, a verification system that makes it very difficult to hold a legitimate job while unauthorized, and make a serious effort to deport perhaps 80% of the illegals who are already present.
@Brad
Probably the same reason that you characterize what I said as advocating “murder patrols”–by carefully dodging any nuance, you get to assume your conclusions. Here, the argument is whether the use of any lethal force to guard the border is “murder”. It isn’t (I mean, morally. IIRC you’re a lawyer, so what current law says is more your wheelhouse than mine.) To clarify things, because at its base, “murder” is defined as “unlawful killing”, but has a secondary connotation as “immoral killing” (the sense I was using, but I’ll leave you to state which one you were using). I’ll use the term “immoral killing” here to remove the ambiguity.
A) If the USG erects a double fenceline, erects guard towers on the near side, and the guards challenge somebody between the fences who doesn’t stop and escalates to shooting them coming over the near fence: not immoral killing. (Though as I said above, the land, construction, and manning requirements would be so immense that I don’t support this as a solution–but the crucial distinction here is it’s not immoral, just a stupid use of money same as the wall.)
B) If they erect the fenceline as above, but when challenged the intruders halt and put their hands up. The guard shoots anyway: immoral killing.
C) The fenceline exists as above, but the guard sees somebody well behind it that he suspects came across. He tells them to halt, and when they run he shoots them: immoral killing (Once you’re outside a very well-defined control zone it’s a police matter at that point. Roll patrols there to arrest them.)
D) The guards don’t erect a fence, because the desert terrain means that crossing that particular section is already perilous. However, they come across a supply point to enable people to breach the border at that point. They destroy it, and at some point in the future people attempting to cross assuming its there die: not immoral killing. If they’re allowed to actively shoot people crossing, passively increasing the chances of failure isn’t immoral either.* (As an aside, I think that the people who leave the water there are acting immorally here.)
Now, as a practical matter I think @bean’s proposal to leave a radio is something that should be done, but its crucial to understand that this will reduce the possibility of people dying but not eliminate it. You can’t guarantee that the radio will work months later after being in the desert, if that ends up being how long until somebody comes trying to use that supply point. There’s certainly no obligation to set a watch on that point, and creating one would enable malefactors to spam a bunch of supply points to stretch the Border Patrol beyond their limits. 5 gallon jugs of water are way cheaper than two-man teams sitting in an observation post 24/7.
E) Just to be complete, the Border Patrol destroys a supply point as in (D), but a patrol happens on the people who were counting on that point while they’re still alive. The patrol waves to them and drives on: immoral killing. They’re no longer trying to breach the border at that point, so killing them is wrong.
@John Schilling
I’m not really sure what you’re saying, since the capitalists in this scenario are My Tribe, as we usually use the term here. However, just like why I didn’t vote for Trump, just because something is better for somebody who’s nominally on my side doesn’t require me to support it. The benefit to them from dodging around immigration laws isn’t sufficient reason for me to give them what they want on this issue.
Anyway, I’d be thrilled with a 50% reduction. It’s way more than you’d get from border patrolling solutions.
* Note that this was what kicked this whole thing off, because when I said that the Border Patrol should be doing this, @beleester said that it would be more honest to just shoot them and at least then you can’t deny what you’re doing. My response was basically that I’m not interested in denying that, just not doing it because (A) takes a lot of money and effort and (D) takes almost none.
I had in mind rafts used to cross from Cuba to America or to cross the Mediterranean, not rafts from shipwrecks. But I’d say they’re more similar than you think, since the water caches are being used as a necessary element for crossing the border area.
I agree about prioritizing caches planted by American charity organizations and stuff. Make it a matter of policy that these caches will be targeted and destroyed by border patrol and ban organizations from setting these up, because, once they are known to be there, there’s a risk folks will start depending on them—and as I said, I think destroying it and leaving a radio is fine. I doubt anything can be done about planting them on private property, and I’m not sure about the case of a national park—is there some special jurisdictional issue with border patrol entering those? Geez, don’t tell me rangers are setting up sanctuary parks—but would this ever be more than a fraction of cases? I’m not sure what you mean by “trucking people out to drink them dry.”
The key difference with those is that you’ll figure out they’re slashed when you’re still on the other shore. I’d have absolutely no problem sabotaging a bunch of rafts that I expected to be used to try to cross the Med, so long as I was certain they wouldn’t find their way aboard a boat to be used in an emergency.
Say I’m a rancher. Someone sneaks onto my land, and plants a cache. Can I remove it? Do I have to leave a radio? I agree we can’t do anything about people doing it on their own land, but I’m trying to expose what I see as the absurdity of making us leave them alone/give them special status, as it interacts weirdly with other laws.
Not what I was thinking at all. This is tied into the previous one. If it’s immoral to remove them as “slashing life rafts”, what about ones we’d remove for reasons not having to do with border enforcement? You aren’t allowed to leave stuff in a National Park, period. So can the rangers take it out under those rules, or do they have to leave it because it’s a water cache?
Tell the border patrol agents. “Hey, if you can, use the caches to provide your water. Oh, and we’re sorry, but we had to drain the emergency supply in your truck, and haven’t gotten around to filling it up again.”
@Matt M,
Well, perhaps I’m missing something. What specifically do you anticipate people doing as a result of such a policy that they aren’t doing already?
@bean,
I don’t see any willingness to be blackmailed either. If someone has tried to swim over a river and is drowning, I’d want them to be rescued (if possible) rather than shot at; but that doesn’t mean they get to stay in the country afterwards. I don’t want the water caches destroyed, though you can go ahead and keep them under surveillance. (I wasn’t aware that any of these were being placed at random by people not directly connected with the smugglers; that does complicate things somewhat.)
I see no reason why you would imagine any obligation to remove the concertina wiring or to build bridges. Not the same thing at all, IMO.
I suspect an increase not only in attempted crossings, but an increase in the amount of force and violence used in attempts to resist apprehension by border control agents.
Shouldn’t that come first? I mean, presumably the main reason so many people are choosing to immigrate illegally, despite the costs and risks involved, is that they correctly judge that they have basically no chance of getting in any other way.
If that changed, such that most of people choosing to immigrate illegally are those you actually have a sound reason to keep out, the “prison guard” analogy suddenly becomes a lot more compelling.
I did say I had no problem with the agents using lethal force to defend themselves. This isn’t at all the sort of situation I was talking about.
@Iain
Exactly. There aren’t any kinds of numbers to justify the moral panic.
@CatCube
If you shoot people because it’s cheaper and more convenient than arresting them, I’d say that’s pretty damn immoral.
I also reject the analogy to prison guards. Escaped prisoners are assumed to be dangerous. Perhaps not every last one is, but it is a decent enough guess. I have no reason to think that most people entering without inspection are especially dangerous.
@David Friedman- What has changed since (a hundred twenty years ago) to create an almost unanimous opposition to open borders?-
A half-century bipartisan agreement to maintain a semi-legal helot class of illegal immigrants to hold down wages. R party donors get to pay less wages, D party activists get to make crimethink accusations to preach down the hearts of sinful workers who don’t like lower wages: the stupid party and the crooked party get a bipartisan agreement for something too stupid and crooked for either to get by themselves.
@John Schilling
I have heard and made arguments about punishing employers so many times, and never heard this argument you make, or anything like it ever. Huh. Sheesh I need more friends who know how to argue.
Edited to add: It seems to me this shouldn’t have felt like a novel, unexpected argument. Maybe I’m persuaded to rethink through my thoughts on immigration policy.
No, it’s confiscating someone’s illegally-possessed bulletproof vest and then being blamed when a criminal shoots them
There’s a few comments in this thread referencing the right of the rulers to rule and the duty of the ruled to obey. With respect to state agents, it’s not clear they have the right to rule or that citizens have a duty to obey, and arguments that support political authority don’t stand up to scrutiny.
I’ll add my voice in as another proponent of open borders, for both moral and economic reasons. Given the existence of the state, I’m supportive of keyhole solutions that would restrict welfare and voting rights for immigrants.
Nope. The difference is, they have set out the water as a necessary part of their survival. They aren’t setting our the water “in case they end up thirsty in a desert”. They set out the water, because they are going to the desert. It’s not a fall-back contingency, it is a necessary part of the plan. And the people destroying the water know it is necessary.
Disabling a sprinkler system isn’t murder. Setting someones house on fire and barricading the exits is. Do you get it?
Back to bulletproof vests. If I said “I am going to need this bullet proof vest. I am going to wear it while I get shot as part of a stunt for a film.” here we have the two factors, just like with the water: the necessity and the certainty. So, if you switch the bullet proof vest out for a fake, that would be murder, to any reasonable outside observer.
I appreciate the straightforwardness of the posters who say “its not murder because I think immigration is immoral, and killing someone to stop an immoral act as a last resort is not bad”. I do wonder, however, what their response would be if I said that I thought that preventing immigration was immoral, and in order to keep border security and ICE from doing these immoral things, as a last resort…well, you get the idea.
No, it’s more like “I am going to need this bulletproof vest, I am going to get shot while robbing a bank”. The is no obligation to tolerate illegal acts on the grounds that they make other illegal activity more survivable.
More importantly, there is some amount of blame that can be assigned to the Border Patrol dumping the water. But the primary responsibility for any deaths ultimately lies with the coyotes. It takes a special sort of stupid to get shot at for realsies with a vest as your only mitigating factor, and on top of that to not bother to inspect the damn thing beforehand.
Are you guys are having the debate about whether the bulletproof vest is for robbing-a-bank versus doing-a-stunt-in-a-movie because you disagree about the legality of crossing the border in the first place?
I didn’t think that was the angle he was going for, initially.
@Gobbobobble
So you would say then, that Stalin deserves no blame for the people he killed in the USSR? I assume most of them were violating some sort of law. And since “law violators = culpable”, and “law enforcers = blameless”, we can conclude that the dead essentially chose their own fate? [edit: I acknowledge that you said that some responsibility lies with the law enforcers, but maintain that the primary responsibility is on the law-breakers]
The legality vs. illegality of immigration plays no role in my judgement. Law can be terrible and immoral. See: slavery, the Holocaust. That argument is such a dead end, I didn’t think it was seriously being deployed.
@Guy in TN – I disagree that legality is a dead end. I won’t argue if you don’t find it personally convincing, but:
1) Our legal immigration quote represents some kind of rough legislative compromise among the citizens of the country through their legislators. You can argue that the compromise was de facto “X legal immigrants plus a variable number of illegal immigrants Y to account for the fact that you can’t practicably prevent all illegal immigration,” but some of the country thought we had an agreement to get Y as low as possible, and or an interest in getting it low.
2) More importantly, IMHO, the wider we allow the door for illegal immigrants, the more unfair it is to legal immigrants sitting on wait lists, and the less control we have over who we allow into the country.
If the very concept of border control becomes primarily identified with, A: a yuge ineffectual wall that everyone understands is just a symbol of Trump’s ego and his supporters’ insecurities and, B: a bunch of people talking about how it’s perfectly cool for them to gun down immigrants, then we’re going de facto open borders and that’s the end of the story.
That wouldn’t be my first choice, but I can live with it.
@J Mann
We’re bouncing around a bit here. Initially, we were on the meta-level causality question, of “does destroying water in a desert make you responsible for that person’s death”. It should be easy to answer that question without getting into the specifics of what a person thinks of immigration law. The question of causality, whether your action results in something happening, is entirely separate from the normative questions of whether any of this is good or bad.
On the object-level, it’s a little late in the thread for me to make a robust case for why I support illegal immigration. But the run down is:
1. Diminishing marginal utility of money; immigration transfers wages from the wealthier to the poorer (average Mexican in Mexico makes ~$10,000 a year)
2. It is good for people to escape gangs and corrupt governments
3. It erodes U.S. nationalism. Lots of reason why this a good thing, makes war more difficult, diminishes the ability of whites to position themselves a the “true Americans” to the exclusion of others
4. Our current enforcement apparatus involves building concentration camps, separating children from parents, and building an environmentally-destructive border wall. Even if I thought the immigration was bad (say, if they were Nazi-immigrants), the cure is worse than the disease.
5. This enforcement is also turned against U.S. citizens. Mandatory checkpoints dotted across U.S. highways, surveillance, getting thrown in jail until you can “prove your citizenship”. An excuse for the police to continue to expand their powers. [I recognize that this and #4 are arguments for supporting legalized immigration, rather than illegal immigration per se]
6. Mexicans have better voting habits than the average U.S. citizen. This is evidence of better moral character. I make no apologies for supporting people who make America a better place.
In regards to your primary objections:
1. Re: democratic compromise. I am sympathetic, at least, to the argument from democracy. “This is what the people wanted” is normally pretty strong. In this case though, since illegal immigrants can’t vote, and this issue is directly about their status, it undermines the extent to which the people collectively chose the system we have. Also, the people of Mexico who want to immigrate to the U.S. can’t vote in U.S elections. It’s like saying “well, at least slavery in Mississippi is democratic”. Even with the dubious assumption that democratic is always good, the argument is incorrect on the merits! [Edit: I know you said the citizens chose it, not the people in general. But I don’t understand that argument. “But it’s what [x subset] of the population chose!” Is even less persuasive than the argument from democracy.]
2. Re:Unfairness to those who played by the rules. Were slaves who ran away unfair to those who legally achieved their emancipation? I’m interested in making the world better for anyone that I can, not spreading human misery out even.
3. Re: ability to choose who we let in. It’s true, that by dismantling our immigration enforcement apparatus, we are undermining our ability to enforce immigration if we ever decided it would be a good thing to do. That’s a loss I’m willing to write off. The current system is so bad, and the leadership of both parties so untrustworthy to make sound moral judgements, that we are better off taking away their ability to enforce immigration at all. It’s like an alcoholic saying he needs wine to reduce his heart disease- tough luck, for you! If you had used the power you had responsibly, we wouldn’t have to do this.
@Guy in TN:
I’m extremely confused by this statement – it seems like a very broad generalization and I’m not familiar with any facts on which you might be basing it.
Do you mean “better voting habits” in terms of “they tend to vote for my tribe’s interests/concerns”, or in terms of higher turnout, or what?
@Guy in TN – Thanks!
1) Super-meta: Yes, it’s tough to keep track of discussions this far down. Sorry for responding to the last thing I saw if it was unclear or a derail, but thanks for your clear response.
2) I agree with you about destroying water. IMHO, the best argument in favor of the Trump mandatory arrest policy is that it will hopefully discourage people from going through the desert.
3) I understand your point, but you can probably understand why some people don’t like your policy of trying to erode their vote against their will. You may be right that it’s an accident of history that they get to vote about US policy and Guatemalans don’t, but that’s not much consolation to them. I like localized democracy because it’s an orderly process.
4) I’m also skeptical that open borders is as positive or harmless as proponents suggest. On a prudential basis, I’d rather someone else try open borders for a few decades so I can see how it turns out.
5) I’m much more likely to be convinced by arguing that the illegal immigrant inflow is better addressed in other ways, or that the costs of specific policies aren’t worth their benefits.
@disposablecat
I mean they vote Dem, which results in better legislative outcomes from a utilitarian perspective. I’m not interested in maintaining a false equivalency both-sides-ism.
I can understand how this is distressing to the 24% of Americans who identifies as a Republican. But its a plus for the 31% who identify as Democrat, so I see no harm in saying it openly.
Thanks for confirming – that’s the only way I thought you could possibly have meant it, but I wanted to try to be charitable and see if you meant turnout or something.
You see, that, right there, is the sort of naked “My Tribe ™ is on the Moral Right Side Of History and the Other Tribe ™ are dinosaurs who don’t realize they’re obsolete yet” rhetoric that I come to the SSC comments section to avoid, and when you state that to be your position so honestly it lowers my prior that your future comments are based on anything other than your dismissal of people across the aisle from you as having opinions worth considering.
(For the record, I identify as neither D nor R, being as I am a gay man in an extremely rural area who nonetheless fits in culturally here – and while I am opposite you on the immigration issue, I am sure there are other areas of policy on which we would substantively agree, which is a relativism that I try to keep in mind when my interlocutor is of the “other tribe” on the issue we’re talking about.)
It’s quite appreciated, in case anyone says “claiming left-wingers want to demographically replace natives in order to gain political power is a strawman.”
@Guy in TN
Not really relevant to the topic at hand, but I want to question this, because both assumptions here seem a bit flimsy.
1. Does illegal immigration, or immigration in general, dilute US nationalism? Back when it was Anglos-vs-everyone-else, did immigration of continental Europeans weaken US nationalism?
2. Is there any predictable relation between US nationalism (I don’t know exactly how you’d measure that, but opinion polls presumably could give clues) and US warmaking habits, or % of American population that is in the country illegally and US warmaking habits? Are the descendants of illegal immigrants, or more recent immigrants, considerably less nationalistic than the US norm? The US is probably less nationalistic from the mid-to-late 20th to the early 21st century than it was from the mid-to-late 19th to the early 20th – at the very least, US aggression against other countries has to be phrased a lot more politely (there’s nothing as blunt as manifest destiny). Has the US been less involved militarily worldwide now than then?
I think that the nature of the US as a global power with interests all over the world is primarily behind warmaking; if the US was more nationalistic but more isolationist, it would be making war less than it is now.
@Randy M
What political side doesn’t want more of people who vote for them, and fewer of people who vote against them? Note also that in countries where the major parties are equally good at appealing to immigrants, this doesn’t happen…
A note on votes: It’s not only a question of which party they vote for, but also what policies the parties adopt to gain their votes.
Ones that claim to represent the interests of their citizen constituents, I suppose.
I guess I am bad at modeling left-wingers! I would have thought that you would disclaim the view that it is ethical to encourage immigration in such numbers and from such groups that policies that current citizens dislike are able to be implemented over their opposition in lieu of actual persuasion. Compared to that, being for open borders is merely naive or altruistic.
I suppose that’s the nature of being progressive versus conservative. If you are progressive, that is, you think the culture and policies need to change in general, you are going to favor outsiders different more different from the nation, whereas if you generally like the way things are, you want people who fit in with the culture as it currently is.
edit: Although I recall that GWB or conservatives at that time argued for immigration or amnesty on the basis of Hispanics being generally more conservative, so I guess I need to admit there is some of that on both sides, even if one side seems to be wishcasting.
An idle musing to followup dndnrsn re: nationalism:
I wonder, are Hispanic Americans (legal or otherwise) more or less likely to support the US mounting up again to go (help) deal with Mexico’s cartels?
What is the moral difference between:
a. Welcoming mass immigration into your country because you think the new immigrants will help your side win its political battles?
b. Welcoming an actual military invasion into your country because you think the invaders will impose policies more to your liking than you can get under the current political system?
If Alice supports intentionally weakening border enforcement and immigration laws to achieve (a), and Bob supports intentionally weakening military budgets and restricting defensive preparations for war to achieve (b), how do we decide which of them is behaving properly?
Gobbobobble:
My unscientific impression is that hispanics in the US very quickly start thinking of themselves as Americans, except maybe when we’re playing Mexico in the World Cup or something. And their grandkids will completely identify as Americans.
Guy in TN:
You have crossed the Poe’s Law horizon.
The people and property that are destroyed in the case of a military conquest.
A better comparison for encouraging violating the law to effect political change would be to encourage faithless electors in the electoral college or something similar.
Well yes but that’s not what I was asking. In WWI, German Americans were rather less enthusiastic about going over there to help the Entente. Irish Americans tended to be more sympathetic to the IRA. IIRC both were at least a couple generations removed. I’m wondering whether (intended-as-)benevolent intervention in the Old Country is more or less appealing to Mexican Americans than the national average. (Particularly those who send remittances, but that’s a tangent of a tangent).
I’m not trying to prove any particular conclusion, just came to mind as a possible test item with the discussion on whether mass immigration would actually reduce the country’s appetite for interventionism.
@Randy M
Consider the second part of what I said, though. The three parties in Canada are (these days; it has not always been this way) not wildly different in their ability to attract the votes of immigrants, their kids, etc. No party has a reason to either try and bring in ringers or devote huge amounts of effort to keeping people out, because on the crude level of national or provincial or municipal politics, the immigrants don’t have wildly different preferences from people who have been here longer (Quebec-only parties excepted).
Further, if someone legally immigrates to Canada and becomes a citizen, and so can vote, they’re a Canadian too, so the Canadian government has a responsibility to them. It’s not as though noncitizens are voting. Besides, what goes around comes around: for a long time, each successive wave of immigrants has been disliked to whatever degree, until after a generation or two they’ve settled in, and there’s a new wave of immigrants for people to dislike.
As a Canadian, basically, I don’t think that most immigrants who meet the immigration criteria, are going to steer this place in a worse direction than the people already here are gonna steer it. I don’t think that I’ve got some special right to this place because my ancestors came over here a bit earlier than someone coming over now or next week.
@albatross11
If I’m a supporter of the, uh, Republican Democrats (it’s a European country OK) and I know that immigrants will 99% vote for my party, I still have to actually get enough power to change the rules such that more immigrants can come in – so, people already here have to approve of what the RDs are saying, no? They’re not enemy soldiers, they were allowed in, by the mass of the people choosing to let them in.
Compare to the people and parties who tend to get power or some semblance of power when an enemy invades: it’s usually those who couldn’t win at the ballot box or whatever. Consider all the minor Western European fascists who were installed as figureheads by the Germans – when they’d stood for elections before the war, they usually did poorly.
Of course, as Randy M points out, there’s also the lack of violence (in Canada, I’d bet that first-generation immigrants are less criminal than the norm).
@disposablecat
That I believe one party produces superior outcomes over the election of the other, doesn’t mean that I think members of the other party don’t have anything useful to offer intellectually. I mean, didn’t Scott have a post in 2016 that was basically “don’t vote Republican”? If I wanted to hear only from people who agreed with me, I sure as heck wouldn’t be posting here.
@dndnrsn
If I remember my history right, German immigrants formed a significant part of the opposition to WW1. A lot of anti-immigrant sentiment during this time period was a result of the feeling that their existence was undermining U.S. solidarity.
Yes. Here’s polling regarding the war in Iraq. [edit: Recognizing that “nationalism” and “support for war” are separate concepts. The overlap seems obvious enough though, am willing to be persuaded by more in-depth polling]
Its true that nationalism doesn’t necessarily result in war making (modern Japan, for example). But when there’s the climate of the possibility of war, nationalism certainly greases the wheels (historical Japan, for example). It’s often forgotten the extent to which fear of a civil revolt (in other words, anti-nationalistic disharmony) kept Nixon from pushing farther into Cambodia.
@John Schilling
I’m not sure Joe Random restaurant or construction company owner is red tribe to begin with. But even if he is it seems pretty reasonable to me to put the burden of a solution to an objective non-problem on the tribe that’s in a moral panic over it.
@Guy in TN
Is “I don’t want us to go with the country I came from/my parents came from” due to a lack of nationalism, or because it hits closer to home? Would German immigrants have been less likely to support the US going to war with Borduria in 1917?
So, this is just about Hispanics – other groups might not follow the same patterns. It establishes that Hispanics were more in favour of bringing the troops home than the norm, and that foreign-born Hispanics were more in favour of that than US-born. This is a bit suggestive – but there could be all sorts of other things going on.
I think we’re maybe using different definitions of nationalism, or models of how it works? Civil disharmony upon leaving the war – as it actually happened – wasn’t anti-nationalistic so much as it was more nationalistic elements blaming less nationalistic elements. Hardhats blaming hippies, that sort of thing. Vietnam is the stab-in-the-back myth of the mainstream American right.
The US right now would probably make war regardless of how USA-USA-USA! people are – how patriotic or nationalistic they are. It’s in the US’ interests, or at least in the interests of much of the US’ ruling class, to have military bases all over the place, and to crack some skulls every now and then. At a minimum, they think it is in their interest.
@dndnrsn
I admit I’ve been playing loose with the term, so it’s time for some clarity. Really, we are talking about two concepts here.
1. National unity: The cultural cohesiveness and uniformity within a given state
2. Nationalism: An ideology that places a higher moral value on people from inside your nation than outside
You are absolutely right to point out that the German immigrants were nationalistic, and would have probably supported the U.S. in an alternative WW1 history where the U.S. sided with Austro-Hungarian empire. The critical part is that while the German immigrants were nationalistic, it was in support of a different nation than the rest of the U.S., so it undermined national unity.
National unity is very important for those wishing to wage war. (The extensive national-unity propaganda efforts demonstrate that). It was a collapse of national unity that was the reason the hippies were burning flags in the 60’s. There is reason to believe that this lack of national unity kept the U.S. from going into Cambodia. At this point, the hippies and the government weren’t even rooting for the same team.
While lack of national unity certainly undermines war efforts, I believe also that a lack of nationalism undermines it as well. It’s hard to imagine supporting bombing another country, if you placed the citizens of that country on the moral level that you place your own. When U.S. celebrities went to visit with the North Vietnamese, or the DPRK, the purpose was to undermine U.S. nationalism. It was an attempt to convey the message of “hey, these people aren’t too different from us. They listen to music, have girlfriends, go out to eat at restaurants. If you bomb them, you may as well be bombing the folks in Ohio”.
So does immigration reduce nationalism? Maybe. It’s true that Germans and Mexicans arriving in the U.S. are probably reasonably nationalistic, in support of their respective nations. The resulting multiculturalism, however would probably erode nationalistic tendencies. To associate with people who have different culture/language/religion than you, and to see that they are normal humans, pretty similar to yourself, can help dispel myths regarding people of foreign nationalities. Lot’s a complicating factors here, but I think its not a coincidence that whites in the most diverse U.S. states have voted the anti-war party in the U.S. over the past 30 years or so (at least in terms of how that party uses rhetoric and postures itself).
@Guy:
Did you really just call the Democrats the anti-war party? Obama was bombing *seven* countries when he left office. Also, didn’t a majority of Dems vote for the Iraq war in 2003?
One of the reasons I didn’t vote for Hillary was that I considered there to be a reasonable chance based on her rhetoric and the Democratic establishment’s history that she would drive us into a full throated war with Iran.
On the other hand, it seems like national unity has some pretty significant advantages. For example, a society where we all see each other more-or-less as “us” instead of “them” is probably one where it’s easier to get support for social welfare programs. For another, there are wars we *should* fight (though admittedly, we get into a lot of unnecessary wars per war we should fight), and more national unity probably makes it easier to fight those wars.
@disposablecat
I did! Because party ideology is positional. It would be fair, also, to call the Republicans the anti-tax party, despite H.W. Bush’s deviations in the early 1990’s.
I’ll grant that the 2004 and 2008 elections were a long time ago, but they were essentially a referendum on the war in Iraq. International affairs played a large role in 2012 too, with Romney positioning himself as the hawk. It wasn’t until 2016 that the lines started to get blurry. So yeah, the Democrats are the anti-war party, positionally speaking, at least through the past 50 years of history.
I strenuously disagree that a party which takes a public position of “We are for X!” in order to get elected, then proceeds to deliberately and repeatedly do not-X because it’s better for the interests of their donors, can credibly be called “the party of X”.
@albatross11
Maybe. I don’t really get the incentives behind this though. Since many government benefits are universal, aren’t these people sabotaging themselves by opposing them? Even the means-tested benefits check for income, not national origin, so poor people wouldn’t gain a positional advantage over the “other” by opposing them.
Is there really that strong of a drive to equally hurt yourself, if that’s what it takes to hurt the other?
Also (and I know this is confounded by a thousand variables), running a correlation between Medicaid expansion and diversity state-by-state would almost certainly produce results contrary to your theory.
@Guy in TN
What do you mean by moral value? A lot of people who aren’t nationalists might say that, if their government has to choose between a citizen and a non-citizen, the citizen wins; they might discount the value of noncitizens to some degree: perhaps they think that if it’s 5 noncitizen lives vs 1 citizen life, pick the citizen.
Immigration might weaken US nationalism, but US nationalism is a civic nationalism of a sort that is fairly malleable.
Not even that they were nationalistic, just that… they didn’t like the idea of their new country fighting their old country. Nationalism seems a bit heavy to describe that.
A lack of national unity does undermine war efforts, sure. However, a country with a highly-trained professional volunteer military like the US probably has a lower standard of national unity to fight a war than a situation with a conscripted soldiery and war bonds and gasoline rationing and all that. Even moreso if fewer troops are committed, most of the fighting on the ground is done by allies, etc.
Or, this could just mean that war gets waged to protect those nice sympathetic people… Interventions in recent years have taken this form.
The thing about calling the Democrats an anti-war party (I agree it’s positional) is that they’re an anti-war party you can vote for but still get war if you want it.
Yes, this is what I’m talking about. Is “nationalism” not the correct term for this? It’s true that many people who would not normally describe themselves as “nationalist” subscribe to this belief. I’m open to suggestions for an alternative term.
Sure, as technology advances, it renders the need for troops less relevant. In the meantime, wars still require humans to be fought, as evidenced by the U.S. military’s large recruiting budget. And politicians still have to win elections, do they can’t alienate too much of their constituency.
This is just kicking the can down the road. Wars must necessarily be fought against a certain group. Humanizing the people on the side we are taking only works because the other side is dehumanized by comparison.
Selfish (or not completely selfless). There are two reasons I may vote for a government with such policy: that I value the people of my nation above foreigners; or that I value my own life above that of everyone else. Of course I have no chance of electing a government that specifically prefers me above everyone else, so the viable compromise among the voters which maximizes my survival is a government which prioritizes its citizens.
Too broad, because “selfish” also encompasses people who are opposed to this policy for self-interested reasons. For example, I may think that in a system of assigning various worth-values, the majority of people would choose rank me near the bottom. So I could be opposed to this system, and instead advocate for a non-ranking system, for reasons entirely related to my self-interest.
It’s like racism. I get it, racists are looking out for their self interest. But you know who else is looking out for their self-interest? Anti-racists, particularly those who end up on the receiving end of the racism. It is useful to have a specific term for the race-value-assigning ideology, rather than lumping them both together under the term “self-interest”.
There’s also the slipper question of what constitutes “self-interest”. Is self-interest about implementing my goals, or only about my mere biological survival?
If you want to take the hard-line survival approach, then you must conclude that a person who willingly sacrifices themselves to save their family (or even save their entire city) is acting against their self-interest. Which is a fine definition, sure, but with this definition self-interest is starting to look like a pathology that needs to be addressed, rather than a normal trait of a healthy society (certainly we can agree that parents sacrificing themselves for their children is a noble act?).
With the “achieving goals” definition of self-interest, we can say assuredly that the person who sacrifices themselves to save their family is acting in accordance with it. We can also say that people who want to assign higher-values to a particular nation/race/whatever, in order to achieve preferential treatment from their government, are acting in their self-interest (since preferential treatment is their goal). However we must now also say that people who want to abolish this preferential treatment are acting in their self-interest. This is because a world where different humans have equal value is their goal, and abolishing this preferential treatment is a means to achieve this goal. So now, everybody who is acting towards achieving their goals is now working towards their self-interest, i.e. “selfish”. Here, calling everyone’s ideology “selfishness” only serves to obscure ideological differences rather than discern them.
@Guy in TN
Nationalism (leaving separatist nationalism aside) seems used to describe something a bit more active in what it suggests. “Our citizens are worth more to us than theirs are to us” is much more passive than “it’s justified to take their land/claim what is rightfully ours/claim what they stole from us” – consider European nationalism prior to WWII. Ethnic settlement in most of Eastern Europe got changed and made more regionally homogenous by WWII and its aftermath – but used to be every nation-state had minorities who were of neighbouring national origin, and its own people as same in neighbouring states. Nationalist parties in these countries tended to like the idea both of kicking out the former and embracing the latter. By definition there would be promised real violence.
If “prioritizing citizens over noncitizens” is nationalist, then most people are nationalists, and the term serves to distinguish them from a small minority of internationalists or people who otherwise believe that national origin, state, etc should not matter. It also doesn’t match the use in, say, history, where one doesn’t conclude that the SPD was a nationalist party.
Not just the technology, though. The nature of the military is different; its fighting capability is somewhat less dependent on public opinion. Further, the opinion of some elements is worth more than others: it wasn’t the hippies wanting out of Vietnam that was the decisive factor. The decisive factor was ordinary boring working and middle class people turning against the war, especially with regard to the draft after a certain point.
Sure, but we’re great at finding ways to dehumanize people.
The US is presumably less nationalistic and nationally unified than it was at various past times – does it prosecute more, or fewer wars, now, versus various points in the past? It certainly has a larger military budget than at many points in the past.
It seems like you would agree that someone who does not assign separate values based on national origin is corrected termed an “internationalist“, no? So what would the opposite that ideology be? “Non-internationalist”? “Anti-internationalist”? “Uni-nationalist”? Why not just “nationalist”?
Its true, that the implications of this usage is that nationalism is more widespread than among just those who self-describe as such.
Do you have a proposed mechanism that would make the act of valuing people in your nation over those outside your nation, lead to less warfare?
(I think Scott makes a strong case that warfare has actually declined in recent times in his Anti-reactionary FAQ. Of course, one could make the argument that is is despite, rather than because, of decreased nationalism)
@Guy in TN
On the other hand, dividing it into two kinds of ideological belief is less useful as a description than conventional usage, where just as “nationalist” involves going beyond prioritizing citizens or whatever, “internationalist” involves going beyond feeling that nobody should have priority. If you’re describing, say, European politics right now, being able to say “nationalist” and know that the party likely thinks that the government should be doing the bear minimum it is supposed to with regard to migrants of various sorts, if that. If the SPD, CDU, and AfD are all “nationalists” the term doesn’t really convey much useful information. (And the AfD are pretty milquetoast as far as nationalists go; why, as far as I can tell, they don’t even want East Prussia back!)
While the internationalist/nationalist distinction might be useful, for the purposes of discussing contemporary or historical politics, I think that looking at the situation and coming up with the categories after that is superior.
I doubt it would lead to less; rather I am saying that I don’t see evidence it conclusively works the other way too – there are reasons besides nationalism a country might go to war, and if you’re not generally mobilizing, you don’t need ironclad national unity. I think you’re extrapolating too much from the experience of modern nation-states fighting wars with a significant amount of mobilization.
War worldwide, or war with the US specifically involved? We’re measuring US warmaking, not general warmaking.
Plus, nationalism has been up and down. Nationalism in a modern sense doesn’t really appear in Europe until, what, some point in the 18th century? King declaring war on king wasn’t about nationalism – they might speak the same language (different from their commoners) and they might both have subjects from different national groups. Similar patterns exist in other parts of the world.
I’m pretty sure my definition is the conventional usage. link From Merriam.-Webster dictionary:
What you are noticing is a disconnect between how political parties self-describe and the standard definition of words. This is normal. For example, the Democratic party is “anti-gun”, yet supports arming the military. A standard reading of the words “anti-gun” would lead one to believe that they should be against anyone having guns, military or not. But this is not the case. Because when the Democrats describe themselves as “anti-gun”, they are doing as positionally, as in, “we are more anti-gun than the other guys”.
@Guy in TN
That definition seems to go a fair bit past “saying that a state government should prioritize its own citizens” though. The Canadian government prioritizes Canadian citizens; the Canadian government doesn’t exalt Canada above all other nations (certainly, a lot less than the American government does) and tends to prioritize its interests in a way that’s lower-key than agitating to invade Alaska or whatever.
Further, it makes sense to describe the Democrats as “anti-gun”; it’s not just their own branding. Saying “the Democrats are anti-gun and the Republicans are pro-gun” provides more information about American politics and is more useful in understanding American politics than pointing out that, really, they’re both pro-gun. It answers the question “why are legal gun owners so commonly Republicans?”
Why would Canada prioritize the interests of the people who comprise the Canadian nation, if it didn’t “exalt those people” above people of other nations?
Surely actions matter more than intentionality. E.g., “You can’t call me a racist, because even though its true that I support policies that hurt every race other than my own, in my heart I don’t feel that they are inferior. Trust me.”
Lawyers who prioritize the interests of their own clients aren’t exalting them, merely recognizing that they’re the people they’re being paid to work for.
I’m not the person the question was directed to, but I think there is an obvious candidate. One reason to go to war is to stop bad things happening to foreigners. Part of the motivation for the Iraq war, although not all of it, was accounts of how badly Saddam Hussein was treating his own people and how badly he had treated the Quwaitis. Especially for a rich and powerful country, there is a natural temptation to use its power to stop people abroad from doing bad things.
@Guy in TN
Because the actions the Canadian government, regardless of party, promotes and takes fall far short of the sort of actions that parties that call themselves nationalist/that get called nationalist promote and take. Consider the Bloc Quebecois (a Quebec-only party devoted to Quebecois sovereignty and preserving/getting Quebec acknowledged as its own nation; they’ve mostly given up on separatism) – they are more nationalistic than the Canadian norm; they are far less friendly to non-Francophone immigration than the Canadian norm. They are devoted to preserving a Quebecois nation in a way that the other parties are far less devoted to preserving a Canadian nation – because immigrants can be turned into Canadians in a way that they cannot be turned into French Canadians. This has faded somewhat in Quebec, but it has faded in part due to the decline of the French Canadian % of the Quebecois population – which is what they were worried about in the first place.
Again, a definition of nationalist that includes everything short of internationalism is kind of useless as a political taxonomy; it would include most parties in most countries over most of the history of democracy in those countries. When, in a Canadian context, the Conservatives, Liberals, NDP, and the Bloc Quebecois are all nationalist, you lose the ability to point out how the Bloc Quebecois are different and how the Quebecois political context is different – you would also lose the ability to talk about how the political contexts have changed over time (a hundred years ago, a national politician could have talked about wanting to keep Canada white, meaning of British extraction, and nobody would have batted an eye; now even saying they want to keep Canada the way it is now demographically would not go over well – but Canada has not gotten less nationalistic because the Canadian government considers itself to have a greater responsibility to a Canadian citizen than a citizen of another state?)
If you want to create a pure, objective definition of nationalism, in which everyone who is not expressly an internationalist is a nationalist, sure. In five hundred years when we’ve colonized the stars or whatever, we can look back and say “man, those Earthlings were so nationalistic!” But for actually discussing politics now, or a hundred years ago, recognizing that the SPD in Germany today is different from Fidesz in Hungary, is useful.
If this was actually the case then the GOP should happily propose a constitutional amendment that makes it harder to gain citizenship but easier to cross borders for work.
This would just be obvious grandstanding (because no such amendment would have a chance of passing), so it would only happen if the GOP saw an advantage in such grandstanding.
It would force the democrats to back down on their stance. The GOP gets to be the “compassionate conservatives” to immigrants, and the Dems lose votes from naturalized immigrants who would have been able to bring family over more easily.
They don’t do this because the know conservatives won’t always have control of government. Once the crowds of immigrants are in, it would be tempting for the left to grant mass citizenship to them, once the left gains power. Bringing them in is just doing the left’s work for them.
There’s also the birthright citizenship issue, requiring a constitutional amendment to change, which makes non-citizenship immigration quickly result in new citizens.
That is why you make it a constitutional amendment, making it far harder to skirt.
I need another couple of Supreme Court appointees, and a Constitutional amendment limiting the total number to nine, before I can feel as confident as you.
I mean, they can propose whatever amendments they want but it won’t go anywhere (because D opposition) and won’t even be treated as a legitimate proposal because the chances of it passing are 0. Democrats wouldn’t even have to acknowledge the existence of the proposal because they control most major media outlets. Even if Trump tweeted about it everyday at most the average Dem would be forced to say something like, “that’s racist” once every few weeks.
Besides the paranoia here, then it would cost them nothing to do it.
The short point is that you can beat consistent bluffers pretty easily. The guy at the table who says “I know you are bluffing, I fold because you are just going to bet bigger on the next street” clearly does not know his opponent is bluffing.
@baconbits9
I don’t think the bluff would be effective in the least, and would distract resources from other, more effective, places of advocacy. In addition to that, I think it would open up another avenue for Democrats to scream racism.
Lastly, I think Democratic arguments against this proposal are probably as, if not more, rhetorically persuasive (if not logically so) as arguments against family separation, a debate they won overwhelmingly. Words common to the Dem lexicon like, “voting rights”, “wage slaves”, and “inequality” do actually apply to this proposal,
Even though I think there is a very strong case to be made for maintaining successful political systems, it is rhetorically weak, at least for me articulating it to myself, even though I kinda like your idea in the abstract.
This could be even more dangerous than the current situation, by creating a permanent lower class of people with fewer rights (the US are well on their way to such a situation, again). But probably the courts would soon overturn such an arrangement, by extending the franchise to these workers. Either way, what is the point?
None, obviously. It’s not like Hillary Clinton of all people gave a private speech to an audience of bankers in which she expressed her desire for “a hemispheric common market, with open borders, sometime in the future“, the exposure of which did nothing to invite any sort of rebuke or disavowal from her party. Did this story somehow escape Ygelsias’ notice, or is he straight-up lying?
So I find it hard to blame Trump and co. for casting his opponents as open borders proponents when they all lent their enthusiastic support for what would have been America’s first open borders president.
Oh, be fair to Clinton; she would have betrayed them too.
Oh, be fair to Clinton; she would have betrayed them too.
I’m in agreement here: campaign promises are pixie dust and if you believe any candidate is going to do exactly what they promised, God love your innocence.
Hillary had a message for every constituency, I think her campaign website has been taken down now but while it was still up it really was a smorgasbord of “Don’t like these principles? I’ve got other ones!”
I guess you never got to hear most of her campaign ads, huh? My favorite one was the one that went “I HAVE SPENT MY ENTIRE CAREER FIGHTING FOR CHILDREN. I REALLY LIKE CHILDREN. HUMANS LIKE CHILDREN. THINK OF THE C H I L D R E N N N N.”
Or the one where it goes “Hillary’s Plan: make your wages go up [a green up arrow appears] and make income inequality go down [a red down arrow appears.]” That was the whole ad. Cheap, I guess.
It wasn’t a campaign promise. She gave that speech privately in 2013 to an audience of foreign bankers, who can’t in any case vote. Those remarks reflect her privately held beliefs. She wasn’t above maintaining unspoken positions, as her own thoughts indicate.
@Yakimi
Just because it was a private speech doesn’t mean it reflected her privately held beliefs. I think those remarks reflect what she thought the bankers would want to hear.
Hopefully we can agree that Hillary believes in free trade. I mean, her husband’s biggest achievements were NAFTA and opening up more trade with China. Presumably she thinks those are good things that should be preserved and perhaps expanded. With regard to advocating for open borders, she expressed her support of Obama’s pro-amnesty initiatives many times.
Do you have any reason to believe she secretly didn’t support open borders and amnesty? It seems hard to believe. I mean, she would have made some pragmatic compromises along the way, no doubt. But the overall goals seem very clear.
Is there any reason at all to believe she did support open borders (which are in no way the same thing as an amnesty)?
She said she did in private speeches she gave to influential people, as discussed earlier in the thread. In public, she said milder versions of the same thing.
Are we using different definitions here? My definition of open borders would be a legal regime that let anyone who wanted to come here become a citizen instantly (or at least very quickly). If you have open borders, you automatically have an amnesty, because there is no longer any such thing as illegal immigration.
I guess technically you could prosecute people after the fact for immigrating before the open borders policy had been implemented. But it seems extremely unlikely that the government would bother to do that if it had given up on enforcing immigration restrictions going forward.
Not my definition, as I hope I already made clear. Mine is that anyone can come but that there are restrictions on citizenship such that, by the time someone is a citizen, he will probably be reasonably well acculturated.
“Milder versions of the same thing” are self-evidently not the same thing; I wouldn’t say you supported a milder version of communism if you told me you thought children should share things sometimes. I don’t believe there is any evidence that she wants a drastic increase in the number of immigrants to the US, which to my mind is the central feature of open borders. Certainly there is no chance that such a thing would’ve happened if she’d been elected.
Probably, but the converse is emphatically not true.
Right now, the only countries that have something close to open borders are those within the EU/EEA. And that doesn’t mean you have a right to citizenship in the country you moved into; you follow the same procedure as other immigrants who naturalize. The only difference is that you don’t have to get a visa or ask for permission to become a legal resident as long as you are studying, working, or able to support yourself.
Take for example Spain; in order to become a citizen, a person has to reside 10 years in the country and apply for citizenship. We make exceptions for ex-colonies and ex-occupied territories (with the exception of the occupied territory of Western Sahara), and Sephardic jews, for which we require just 2 years.
Note that the exceptions do not include EU countries, except for Portugal (an ex-occupied territory/province). Spouses of citizens who remain so only need one year.
So basically you first need to live five years legally in order to obtain legal residency, if you are non-EU, and then live five more years to obtain citizenship.
Being an EU citizen just means you cannot be deported for those 10 years, unless you commit a crime (a light crime during the first 5 years, a heavier one in the next 5). You have to be able to take care of yourself during that time; freedom of movement is given only to those that have a job, are studying, are able to support themselves with their own means, or are looking for work (this is just for three months; if you haven’t found a job by then, you will be reported).
I don’t think that it is a good idea to extend it to everybody right now; but as the world becomes richer, countries that are as democratic and rule following as ours could be included. I wouldn’t mind to have open borders with Japan, for example, although I don’t think that they would be keen on that. Trump himself has expressed the view that he would be OK with Norwegians moving into the US.
But if a country becomes rich enough that their citizens are not orders of magnitude better off in a different country, just slightly better off, you can be sure that most people will stay in their own countries, and only the most mobile, active, and enterpreneurial will come (and that is good). I think that having a similar democratic framework is important for that, too.
I don’t think we are there yet, but I think that aspiring to a world where anybody can have more or less the same standard of living anywhere and you can travel and move freely is a nice goal.
By the way, I don’t think there is anything wrong with giving people who have resided peacefully in the country permanent residency.
In Spain, an illegal resident needs to:
a) Live in the country without commiting any crime other than residing illegally, and have worked for a period of six months, with an employer that will testify for you, and is willing to give you a legal contract.
b)Live for three years, show that you have emotional ties, and have an employer willing to give you a legal contract.
c) Are a victim of domestic violence who has sued and has proof submitted by prosecutors; have been a witness against crime.
The hard part is usually the employer part, because they need to be willing to give you a contract and justify it to immigration authorities.
Crimes other than the residing illegally itself disqualify you.
Note: in Spain a permanent contract means you cannot be fired for unjustified reasons, which means that as long as you come to work or take medical leave, you can only be fired by a downshifting. It also must include the equivalent of payments to Social security, unemployment and disabilty insurance, health insurance (except dental).
Do you really think that there are that many immigrants who have people who are willing to vouch for them by giving them such a contract? It is my understanding that for a low-skilled employee it is very hard to get a permannet contract that includes healthcare.
@ Pontifex –
Hopefully we can agree that Hillary believes in free trade. I mean, her husband’s biggest achievements were NAFTA and opening up more trade with China.
…As a conservative woman who think that both second and third wave feminism are a long-ass leap too far, I object to assuming that the political views of the husband transfer over to those of the wife. I object in the *most* strenuous manner.
keranih wrote:
I agree that there are cases where husbands and wives (or same sex partners) disagree about politics. But I think that the political positions of one partner are credible Bayesian evidence about the political positions of the other.
DavidFriedman:
The simple truth is that once someone is in the country, there is overwhelming political pressure to make that person a full citizen. If someone is paying taxes, but can’t vote or serve on a jury, etc etc., people are going to start making comparisons to Jim Crow and “separate but equal.” And frankly, they’re not completely wrong to do so. The Supreme Court probably would strike down anything that smelled like dual-class citizenship, no matter how technocratically optimal it might be. (They’ve done it before!) And the Democrat party would have an obvious overwhelming incentive to break open the immigrant votes cookie jar as soon as possible.
rlms wrote:
Let’s take a look at Hillary’s own website.
OK. So, millions of new citizens, then.
So about 5 million new citizens.
So they’re eligible for benefits immediately.
So you “don’t believe there is any evidence that she wants a drastic increase in the number of immigrants to the US”. I don’t believe there’s any evidence you actually know what Hillary’s very public positions are on these issues.
@pontifex
Maybe should reread the quotes in your comment. Does it not seem odd to you to cite someone proposing a plan to “protect our borders” in support of the claim that they support open borders?
You have convincingly showed that Hillary supported turning large numbers of illegal immigrants into citizens. That was not in dispute, because it is not at all the same as supporting a large increase in the number of immigrants to the US (that involves the population increasing).
Not completely wrong when the alternative is to not only not let those people vote or serve on a jury but not even let them come into the country and work here? That’s a much more unequal treatment.
Seems to me that “open borders sometime in the future”, i.e., when and if it actually becomes practicable, is a very different policy to “open borders now”.
In case you’re not aware: There is on the left, though I couldn’t tell you exactly where, a long-standing critique of free trade that says if goods and money can cross borders freely, that obviously has lots of advantages, but if at the same time people can’t cross freely, they’ll get ripped off. It’s a basically-pro-free-trade position, that explains the downsides of free trade as partly resulting from the relative immobility of people.
This is not the same as bleeding heart ‘open borders’ sentiment. The latter is indeed a fringe notion that we should let in anyone who comes. The former is saying that it wouldn’t matter as much how strongly China props up it’s steel industry if US workers had a chance to apply for the jobs there.
Can’t believe Scott didn’t make the title “ETHELTHREAD THE THE UNTHREADY.”
Probably too obvious, though.
You say that, but I read your suggestion and the actual title twice each before I noticed the difference. At first i thought Scott must have seen your suggestion and edited the title.
Argh!
I did the same thing (though I had been early enough to know that Scott hadn’t changed it). I actually had a reply box open and filled with, “That’s what he did title it,” before realizing what the difference was.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to make a Star Wars movie with a budget one twentieth the size of Solo’s, meaning $15 million total. You may assume you are making this for Disney, so the rights to the Star Wars intellectual property do not need to be budgeted for. What sort of film would you make?
(I have some ideas myself, but let’s hear what everyone else comes up with first.)
I’d start by having most of the action in space or on Anonymous Desert Terrain, allowing us to build comparatively-cheap spacecraft sets instead of filming light spacecraft hovering above trains speeding across snow-covered mountains. Not sure how far that would get me, but it’d be somewhere.
Um, see my post below. It would get you quite far indeed 🙂
@I’d set most of the action in space=
Yes! Steal from NASA or other astronomy sites, blow up a star or two- Poul Anderson’s Mirkheim for something industrial on a planet passing close to a star. Throw in a space princess’ quivering boobies as the stars explode around her and no one will care about plot inconsistencies.
Uh, this one?
Snark aside, I don’t feel like ANH was big-budget for its time.
ANH, adjusted for inflation, would have cost about $48 million today. Way too expensive (though cheaper than I would have guessed, certainly.)
Special effects are comparatively much cheaper.
I don’t understand how CGI cost works. Black Panther had a budget of $200 million and the CGI in the Wakanda scenes is terrible. What’s going on?
And yet, I still imagine special effects are more expensive than the alternative.
Is a CGI R2-D2 really cheaper than a midget in a little suit?
@Matt M: at this point I doubt the suit and midget actor cost more than CGI.
I’d be really interested in learning how this works.
It’s kinda interesting how well the effects in terminator 2 and Jurassic Park held up to time.
Probably because they were a bit minimalist and used real props for some scenes mixed with the CGI.
The problem is that when you can have entirely CGI characters directors decide it’s a great idea and actually do that. When a CGI character remains on screen you have more and more time to spot the flaws you end up with jar jar binks.
So if you’re gonna use CGI and you want it to look good you either need to go 100% for a fully rendered animation setup or use the CGI as little as you can.
But the bar for special effects is set much higher. There were only forty spacecraft involved in the final battle in ANH, of only six discrete models, and only a handful on-screen at any given time. Against a backdrop of empty space with maybe a few shots of Yavin.
If you try to sell that under the “Star Wars” label today, the critics and the fans will be laughing at you. You need hundreds of ships, or at least dozens in a more kinetically interesting environment.
I am told that The Expanse comes in at about $5E6/episode, so if we assume their effects would hold up on the big screen, you should be able to do a reasonable movie equivalent for $15E6. But their space battles are typically only 1-2 ships visible plus lots of looking at tactical displays. To my eye, that’s a better way of doing SF space battles, and should be encouraged. The bit where you hire talented actors rather than famous ones, also to be encouraged.
But the Star Wars brand is built around big spectacular close-quarters dogfights in “space”, and if you’re not going to be doing that then it isn’t clear why you are calling it “Star Wars”.
@Le Maistre Chat
I’m a Visual Effects Artist, and have worked on a few movies and animations. What can I help you with?
@John Schilling:
I don’t think this is actually true, and it continues to baffle me. The sequel trilogy films, so far, seem to be really stingy with the action, and I don’t understand why. I mean, in TFA, we had:
– Two gunfights (Jakku and Takadona)
– Poe and Finn dicking around in a TIE
– Some running around in the desert with TIE fighters, plus air chase
– Some running around with tentacle monsters
– A halfassed air battle
– The ten-second-long incomprehensible clusterfuck that was the Starkiller attack
– A pretty good lightsaber duel
Then in TLJ:
– A couple fairly unimpressive space battle sequences involving a couple dozen craft at most
– The throne room fight
– That whole mess in the Supremacy hanger
– The Battle of Crait, which was mostly just some broken speeders flying around for five minutes, then Luke showing off
And that was it. (No, that business on Canto Bight doesn’t…doesn’t count.)
So…like…why? This is basically the most famous space action movie franchise in the world, isn’t it? Why aren’t they just going balls-to-the-wall with the battle scenes? Do they not have enough money, when they’re making some of the most popular movies on the planet? What’s going on?
If you’re making a Star Wars movie, why wouldn’t you have the entire third act be a space battle on the scale of Coruscant from RotS? Actually, screw it. Make the whole movie about that. Do for space battles what Fury Road did for car chases. (Disclaimer: I haven’t actually seen Fury Road, so I don’t know exactly what it did for car chases, but I’ve heard it was impressive.)
I just don’t get it. Do the people writing these things not like space battles? What’s wrong with them?
(I may think about this topic far too much.)
The original trilogy wasn’t action packed, space battles and dog fights. ANH is closer to a chase movie than an action move.
Opens with the Empire chasing a single ship, followed by them chasing a couple of droids. By the time the Falcon leaves Tatooine the sum total of action is
Massive ship chasing small ship, storm troopers overrunning rebel defense, Obi Wan cuts one guys arm off, Han shoots Guido, Falcon blasts it way through a handful of storm troopers. The Empire blows up Alderaan with no resistance, the heros mostly run and hide while on the death star, one light saber fight and then there is one sub 10 min sequence attacking the death star.
Empire Strikes back has about the same amount of action with the order shifted around. The big battle opens the movie, then everyone runs, trains or is captured. Some stealth mode on Cloud City, and finally one (bigger and better) light saber battle.
A lot of franchises start out this way, there is very little boxing in Rocky, or Rocky II and the shark in Jaws in only on screen for like 10 mins.
And Errol Flynn never managed ten solid minutes of swordplay in any of his movies.
If you make a Jaws movie without the shark, or a Rocky movie without the boxing, the critics and the audience will be laughing at you, not with you, and you won’t be making blockbuster returns at the box office.
A Star Wars movie needs to have a War, in the Stars, period. It’s not “Star Espionage”, it’s not “Star Horror” or “Star Noir Thriller”, and it’s certainly not “OBTW we just realized that any war actually fought in the stars will be strictly beyond-visual-range tactics”. The stylized space battle sequences are part of the branding, and they don’t come cheap.
The name isn’t the branding… otherwise no one would drink Coke without the cocaine, or people would go to Star Wars expecting two giant suns battling it out.
The first movie was the one called “Star Wars”, and the one following it had no war in space. The closest it got was a battle scene on an ice planet, and yet it wasn’t laughed out of the theaters. It didn’t have the good guys winning and yet it is generally considered the best of the original 3 and even the best of all still (though probably some nostalgia).
Expectations can be subverted in film with good results, even great results while narrow branding can weaken a saga.
There was at least one space battle scene in ESB – the chase through the asteroids.
I don’t recall there being one in Solo, though. But I’ve only seen it the once.
The most obvious answer is a Bottle Episode – a story that’s constrained to a small location, reducing the number of resources and making it so you don’t need to invent a dozen different species of alien to fill your galaxy. You could have a Rebel (or Imperial) commander, who sees the story through reports from the front lines rather than seeing the flashy space battles in person. Princess Leia might be a good canon character to hang such a story off of.
$15 million can buy you some pretty good movies (that list isn’t inflation adjusted, but you get the picture), but it looks like it won’t buy you good CGI. Again, our Space Commander looking at a tactical map and hearing things on the radio might be a way to stretch the budget. IMO cheap special effects are really visible, so I’d rather go deep instead of wide with such a movie. Save your CGI budget for one big scene at the climax.
Another idea: Focus on a Jedi character who’s going undercover, and therefore tends to rely on Jedi mind tricks or subtle maneuvers rather than lightsaber combat. You can make a good spy movie for under $15 million, and this would basically be a spy movie on a space station. Set it in the Old Republic (since there aren’t many surviving Jedi in the new series), or just make like Rogue One and say “No, he’s not a Jedi, he’s just a force-sensitive martial arts hero. Totally different.”
Obi-Wan Kenobi, Tatooine Spy? How much does Ewan McGregor cost?
My idea is a bit similar, a cops vs underworld plot where the protagonists are rebels on an Empire-ruled planet who need to carry out an important mission while the adversaries, an Imperial Detective Inspector and his assistants, close in.
In act one we meet the teams as the rebels break one of their own out of prison and the imperials detain and interrogate various associates of the rebels. In act two, the two teams recover from the events of the break out and consider their next moves, and we get a bit of back story on the leader of the rebels and the Detective Inspector. In act three the rebels infiltrate an imperial engineering facility and send a mouse droid into the walls to get pictures of the prototype for the new TIE fighter. When the rebels exfiltrate from the facility they come within inches of the imperial team, who are entering. The Detective Inspector realizes, too late, who just walked by.
I figure most of the filming would be in urban environments, with set dressing to indicate that it isn’t Earth, and lots of rain and darkness to cover the seams and set the tone. The special effects would consist of some actors in alien and droid costumes, blaster fire during the jail break, some handheld devices and monitors used by both teams, the mouse droid, a few cars modified to look spacy, and a static model of the prototype TIE fighter. None of that sounds particularly expensive.
Interesting bit of trivia: Splinter of the Mind’s Eye was originally written with the intent that it would be used as the basis for a low-budget sequel to the original Star Wars if Star Wars did well enough to merit a sequel (it wasn’t really expected that it would do well enough for a big-budget sequel like actually happened). Per Wikipedia:
That said, this isn’t really an answer to this question because I really doubt this would actually work as a Star Wars sequel these days.
A plot focusing on Wookie resistance as more and more of their people are trafficked into slavery by the Empire (Defiance (2008) in space). Because almost all of the characters will be either in Wookie or stormtrooper costumes faces won’t be visible and unknown actors can be used. Filming can be done outdoors, minimizing set construction.
To what extent do people want famous voices?
“WrraAooOOAAaarrgh”
All sounds the same to me.
150 minutes of Wookie dialog. No subtitles. This one is for the true fans.
Plus, the holiday special was CANON.
ART
I would get David Cronenberg to remake the Star Wars Holiday Special.
A middle-of-nowhere farmer—a down-and-out, less eager variation of the type Luke starts off as in A New Hope—boards a crummy public transport as part of a long trip to as far away as something can reasonably be in the Star Wars universe. (That is, this should be a multi-day trip; I’m thinking of this kind of like being in steerage on an old Atlantic voyage.) I’d want to do a kind of Hitchcocky mistaken-identity thing where some people suddenly want to kill him and some other people, probably including a beautiful Jedi woman (or is she?), want him to not die. Perhaps they also want him to continue pretending to be the person the evil types are trying to assassinate, to buy him some time. To ramp up the tension it has to be clear, for easy-to-understand plot reasons, that this MUST be resolved before the ship arrives at its destination.
Our POV character has no powers and has never been involved in anything with an area of effect larger than this backwater hometown; he’s reasonably handy and can be armed, but when there are fights he’s going to see bits and pieces of them (in the most dramatic but/and also affordable way possible) as he’s running away—at first because he’s scared, eventually because there’s some role for him to play that requires doing something while the two actual sides in this conflict fight each other. For most of the movie both sides are constrained by the sheer dull normality of this voyage, which they need as cover; every passenger COULD be a villain or a secret, incredibly competent hero, but is probably just a guy who has jury duty at some incredibly far-off federal site, is visiting his brother on a jail planet, whatever.
For me the most exciting part of the first Star Wars trilogy is Luke repeatedly discovering that the world is much bigger and stranger than he thinks it is; I think it’s possible to write a story like this that offers some of that same feeling despite taking place in a huge but very dingy space-bus, in which over the course of a few days our POV character goes from not knowing anything to being initiated by mistake into a very twisty, high-stakes conflict that makes sitting across from the most boring guy in the world in the cafeteria extremely tense.
I always loved that bit of trivia about Splinter of the Mind’s Eye being a low-budget emergency sequel.
Hire some competent writers with noir experience and a good cinematographer and this movie sounds fantastic.
I’d do a “bottle” film set on an abandoned, damaged star destroyer that a smuggler crew is investigating for parts and a rumored cargo. Then they find something . . .
You could keep the cast low, keep the effects budget pretty low, re-use the same “interior hall ways of a space ship” stuff over and over again, and use bad lighting to cover cheaper effects.
Also, go cheaper on any space effects CGI, and keep those scenes segregated from any live-action stuff. I’m convinced that you can get away with a lot of cheap-looking CGI, as long as it’s the only thing on screen (i.e. it only starts to look really terrible when it has to be compared to live-action humans and scenery).
I’d cheat and hire a Japanese anime studio to make an animated film. It’s not unprecedented; both DC and Marvel (owned by Disney) have done anime-esque movies in recent years. I wasn’t able to find the budget for Batman Ninja, so I’m stuck playing with estimates, but it looks like it costs roughly on average $2.5 million for a 1-season (12-13 episodes, or roughly 4 hour) show. On the one hand, I want movie, not TV, quality, but on the other hand, I only want 90 minutes, I can offer $10 million (with $5 million left aside for bringing it to the US) and I’m offering a foot in the door on a still-massive franchise, so it should be worth it to one of the big-name studios.
The problem is going to be the plot. I have to have something that will pass muster with both the Disney corporate execs and with the fans, because I want this to succeed. The coward’s way out is to make a series of shorts, a la the Animatrix. By making them short, I can touch the established story or characters without disrupting them. It’s much easier to make a 10-15 minute short about Obi-Wan or Boba Fett or the Mos Eisley Cantina or (I can dream) Thrawn than it is to make a full story. There are a lot of scenes that fans would love to see on screen, and the uncertain canonicity of an animated adaptation is a way to present them without worrying about how they will impact the larger canon (or the IP, for the Disney execs.)
A much harder challenge is to come up with a story that fits in with the larger Star Wars story and adds something to it. I believe the failure of TFA and TLJ to fit in with (or extend) the myth arcs of the original and even prequel trilogies is one of the major failings. Rogue One, at least, tries to bridge the gap between the prequels (the fall of Anakin) and the original (Luke’s journey to Jedi). The best place for a stand alone movie is in the gap between the two. Some options include Leia’s story leading up to her appearance in Rogue One, a continuation of Ahsoka’s story (which I’d immediately discount due to already being animated in a different style), or some other story dealing with the early rebellion.
Others have already covered the basics. No real effects means none of the things people mostly associate with Star Wars, not even the first ‘low budget’ one. I don’t think you can make a movie that fans would recognize as ‘Star Wars’ for such a low budget as a bottle movie, you would basically be making a horror movie in space with a lot of those ideas, which wouldn’t fit fan expectation.
I think they way to do it is to make the movie about The Force which frames it as a Star Wars movie in a straightforward way. Make it an origin story about a person discovering the force for themselves (maybe even the first person) and you have an excuse to ditch the massive ships, blasters, light sabers and explosions. Strand a group of people in a cheap filming location, push them to a limit by an unseen enemy/evil and have one of them react by discovering the power that was within them all along.
The 2012 _Dredd_ had 3 times this budget, so anything on that scale is out.
A reasonable baseline is _Attack the Block_ which was 8 million. You are not going to get Finn and Doctor Who any more, but you could get a couple of experienced TV actors and the best of this years drama graduates.
Stormtrooper uniforms, blasters etc, are affordable on that budget, just stay away from aliens, spaceships and full-scale battles. If you can CGI 2-mile high floating towers into the backdrop, then London can stand in for a Rebel world holding out from New Order bombardment under a planetary shield.
Are the inhabitants of a run-down, poor region going to support the planetary elite’s decision to stand up to the new Empire in the face of blockades, food shortages and the risk of total catastrophe?
I could do it for $15M. Replace all phrases in [brackets] with whatever the franchise-relevant entities are called.
It’s an 80 minute psychological thriller film noir dramatic dialogue set entirely in a prison cell, along the lines of The Interview. Darth Vader is being interrogated by the [intergalactic space police] for crimes against the [imperium], during which he fabricates an elaborate rationalization for his behavior that the investigators find initially compelling. At the same time, he uses his false testimony and subtle wit to leverage valuable facts about the strategic goals of the [imperium], which he later uses against them without their knowledge. By the end of the film, the interrogators walk away feeling as though they’ve extracted valuable information, and begin preparing [appropriate sentencing/punishment]. However, little do they know DV has orchestrated a plot that will send their plans into disarray….
Starring:
John Malkovich as Darth Vader
Jodie Foster as Interrogator #1
Ed Harris as Interrogator #2
Xavier Bardem as Darth Vader’s inside man
I’m afraid your film flops and you have masses of outraged fans at your gates.
One does not interrogate Darth Vader. Any such setup could only be an opening scene, quickly terminated by a double-force-choke and Vader walking out of his cell as if it was made of cardboard.
Ooh, I really like the idea of the Rebels capturing Vader (almost by accident — like, they had a plan to do it but they didn’t really expect it to work), and then the whole movie is about them trying to keep this superpowered nightmare contained, and being terrified about the situation. While Vader’s intimidating everyone who talks to him.
Central banks favor policies that produce low, steady inflation rates partly because thanks to some odd feature of human psychology, people are much more bothered by salary cuts than price inflation, even though both effectively do the same thing to their spending power.
This got me thinking: Once AIs dominate the economy (e.g. – doing most of the labor and making most of the spending decisions), would central banks stop encouraging inflation? Presumably, the AIs would be too smart and too logical to fall for the “price inflation is different from a salary cut” trick.
Note that the downside to structural inflation is that it creates confusion among buyers and sellers about the true market prices of goods and services at any given moment. Without it, markets would function a little more efficiently.
https://www.uni-bonn.de/Press-releases/inflation-felt-to-be-not-so-bad-as-a-wage-cut
Salary cuts are a lot easier to target at individual employees (who then get particularly screwed) than price inflation.
This is not the main reason central banks favor inflation. Let’s consider some reasons why central banks aim for low inflation:
1) Central banks have less than perfect aim. This shouldn’t be hard to accept given the recency of the financial crisis. The economy is incredibly complex and hard to measure, and the numbers you hear about GDP and inflation are merely estimates that are always adjusted (sometimes substantially) months after the fact. This makes it hard to be a central banker! Therefore, targeting an inflation/deflation rate of 0 is risky, since you’ll basically never hit exactly 0. I hope I don’t have to convince you that deflation is harmful. Further, as you indicate, the issue is not with inflation per-se but with the “confusion among buyers and sellers about the true market prices.” The issue then isn’t that the Fed targets 2% inflation, but that inflation isn’t always exactly 2%. Aiming for 0% inflation instead doesn’t fix the variance problem.
2) The high-level goal of most central banks is to maintain predictable prices and mitigate the business cycle. To the first goal, any inflation rate will do, as long as it is predictable and stable (as you indicated, the downside is merely the uncertainty, not the inflation itself). The second goal, however, makes inflation a useful tool. First, some background:
Potential GDP generally grows at some consistent and low rate, while actual GDP is generally slightly above or below, and this difference is called the output gap. This causes problems like in ~2005 where GDP was above potential GDP because of easy lending in mortgages and other nefarious things, resulting in an eventual blow-up via recession. Central banks, therefore, attempt to minimize the output gap by increasing output during recessions and maintaining sustainable growth during booms.
Their main tool for doing this is setting the interest rate. Ignoring how exactly they do this, the idea is to encourage borrowing and therefore GDP growth during recessions via a low-interest rate, and restricting it during booms via a high interest rate. However, the Fed can only set the nominal interest rate – that is, the rate the bank says I can borrow. Meaning, if I borrow $100 from the bank at a nominal rate of 5% I pay back $105 the next year. However, if inflation was 2%, the bank really only got about 3% interest (since the $100 is now worth $98). This 3% rate is called the real interest rate.
Bringing this all together, real interest rate = nominal – inflation. When the real interest rate is high, people borrow less (since borrowing is expensive), and when the real rate is low, people borrow more, spurring the economy. Therefore, during recessions the central bank will lower the nominal interest rate (thereby lowering the real interest rate). Sometimes this isn’t enough, however, and in those cases central banks can decrease the real interest rate by increasing inflation. In fact, left to its own devices, the economy will generally experience deflation during a recession (less demand, etc.) and so the real interest rate will rise (making borrowing harder, further depressing growth) without central bank intervention.
Finally, deflation is also bad in recessions when companies have large debt balances – deflation makes these balances effectively larger and therefore harder to pay back and inflation makes them smaller and easier. It turns out that companies with large debt balances often have a harder time hiring, growing, and all those other things that help the economy.
In conclusion, central banks have lots of reasons to prefer predictable levels of inflation beyond human psychology.
I hope you don’t think the claim is so obvious that no argument is necessary.
In a world of flexible prices and wages and fully rational actors, it’s arguable that the optimal pattern is prices falling at the real interest rate, making the nominal interest rate zero. For the argument, see The Optimum Quantity of Money.
This ignores the second point, which shows the value of inflation in spurring business growth during recessions. You can’t just quote vintage Friedman and ignore all the theory improvements since then. As I pointed out in my second point, when nominal rates hit zero, you have hit a lower bound (which prevents you from going lower unless you use inflation). Friedman never got here since he didn’t live in a world where central banks were hitting the zero-lower-bound, but here we are. Maybe you will take the Minneapolis Fed as a legitimate source.
To quote the source:
The second point is wrong. Money is not invested, it exchanges hands, and increasing real returns INCREASE investment, not decrease them as is claimed.
As I explained in another thread, imagine a deflation rate of 5% (-5% inflation) and an expected average rate of profit of -1%. It will be more profitable to hoard money rather than invest it in production or in loans for a nominal loss. This is sort of the “zero-lower-bound” (ZLB) problem that the Federal Reserve ran into during the last recession.
Compare that to a scenario where the inflation rate is 2% and the average rate of profit is 6%. It is still profitable to invest. No ZLB. No problemo.
It might even profitable to invest or loan money if the inflation rate is 2% and the expected value from investment or loaning money is 1%, depending on how that inflation rate is calculated. If it is a CPI- or PCE-based inflation rate, then the problem one runs into is the fact that you don’t have the option of easily hoarding a basket of CPI or PCE goods to earn a 0% return in terms of those goods (i.e. a 2% return in terms of dollars).
You would need a magical costless, compact, secure shrink-ray stasis chamber to obtain a 2% return in this situation. Without such a stasis chamber, you might suffer a -5% or -10% from hoarding those CPI or PCE goods due to those goods degrading, needing to be stored, guarded, insured, etc.
Compare that with gold. Since gold is compact and does not tarnish or degrade, it is nearly possible to hoard gold for a 0% return in terms of gold (slightly less, because of storage/insurance costs. But among all commodities, these costs are most minimized in the case of gold, so it is bound to be the most practical commodity to hoard, if that is what is called for at any point in time).
Here’s another way to look at it:
Let us define the strongest (i.e. most relatively-appreciating) money in any significant time period the “alpha-money” for that time period. In theory, it could be dollars, yen, euros, gold, etc. (in practice it is almost always gold except for the 1920s when the major powers were making a concerted effort to re-valuate their currencies vs. gold in order to re-establish the pre-war gold standards).
If either interest rates or the average rate of profit in terms of alpha-money ever drops below 0%, the world capitalist economy suddenly has a very big problem. It becomes more profitable to hoard that alpha-money rather than loan money or engage in production.
Gold is alpha-money, so when the golden prices of commodities fall during the autumn phase of the Kondratiev Cycle (i.e. there is deflation of commodity prices in terms of the golden prices of commodities), there is suddenly an incentive to hoard gold rather than engage in production.
This is a zero-lower-bound that no monetary authority can easily escape because issuing more paper will have no effect. The fiat prices of goods might increase, but the golden prices of those commodities will be unaffected. The monetary authority would need to have the ability to issue—i.e. produce—more gold at a moment’s notice in order to deal with the problem.
This was, historically, the point of having a centralized banking system with a centralized gold reserve.
The problem with that is, if the gold that such a monetary authority throws onto the market is not really coming from new production, but rather from reserves that they were formerly holding back (as with the U.S. during the collapse of the London Gold Pool from 1968 to 1971), then the monetary authority is merely depleting their reserves and thus their ammunition to respond again when the problem returns…inciting even more suspicion that the existing gold peg will not be sustained and that there will be a formal devaluation and/or a complete float of the paper currency vs. gold, which will increase the run to redeem the fiat paper for gold at the existing rate while there is still a chance…thus depleting the monetary authority’s gold reserves even more, and intensifying the vicious cycle yet again.
I see no way around this golden-zero-lower-bound problem that periodically plagues the world capitalist economy, and which continues to do so, other than:
A. Prevent the golden prices of commodities from inflating to an unsustainable level during the preceding boom in the first place. And how do you do that? By insisting on payment in gold or a paper note 100% backed by gold. In other words, by outlawing, or refusing to honor in court, the use of credit-based gold-substitutes which artificially inflate the golden prices of commodities above what is sustainable. This sort of measure would create a severe one-time deflation in the golden prices of commodities (on the order of roughly -95%) but it would set the future path of the golden prices of commodities on a more sustainable path in the future, assuming that monetary authorities did not permit the use of credit to re-emerge and thus re-inflate the golden prices of commodities.
This could be accomplished even alongside maintaining a 2% inflation rate in terms of dollars, if the monetary base were expanded vigorously enough (dollars implicitly backed by the Federal Reserve’s gold assets—I’m not talking about checking account dollars. Those would have to be converted 100% into monetary base dollars).
And thus if dollars were allowed to depreciate versus gold to the necessary degree (to about 1/20th the previous gold value. I.e. the dollar-price of gold would increase by 20x), then there’s no reason why the one-time horrific golden deflation (the golden prices of commodities falling to 5% of their former level) would need to correspond to any deflation in the dollar-price of those commodities.
As an investor, there would be no reason to hoard gold once the deflation had already been accomplished because, if anything, there can only be a steady-state path of golden prices or golden-price inflation (if credit is allowed to re-emerge). There can be no further golden-price deflation to warrant hoarding gold.
The trick would be to spring this on the public with no warning because, obviously, if anyone gets wind of this impending golden deflation and dollar devaluation, they will rush to trade their dollars for gold like you’ve never seen before. Which brings me to Option B…
B. Confiscate gold, as with FDR’s Executive Order 6102 and the Gold Reserve Act of 1934. There you go: investors must now content themselves with the next-best alternative to hoarding gold (which might very well be to engage in their customary line of production or loaning money), even if that alternative would obtain a negative return in terms of gold. Although ideally you would want to be able to enforce this worldwide, not just in one country as with these earlier actions. And the American public was surprisingly docile in terms of submitting to this regulation. I suspect that a repeat of this sort of legislation would see much more resistance, black-market evasions, etc., especially in Third-World countries where the rule of law is less well established.
See? I’m such a generous Marxist! I’m actually offering possible ways in which capitalism can save itself from the turbulence of the long-wave Kondratiev Cycle! It’s not my fault if nobody heeds my advice….
Edit: I am often amused when I read economists during the era of the Gold Standard complain about a chronic lack of world gold production. Little did they understand that the use of credit was inflating the golden prices of commodities—including the golden prices of the inputs to gold production, thereby artificially suppressing the profitability of gold mining. Without the use of credit (i.e. with the necessity of backing all banknotes with 100% gold), gold mining would have been much more profitable and forthcoming, and there would have been no chronic lack of gold reserves, and no chronic worry about the viability about maintaining a certain gold peg. Nor would there have needed to be any worry about needing to periodically arrest the creation of new banknotes and other paper currency because the gold available for 100% backing would be constantly increasing at a faster rate than banks were used to.
Imagine getting punched in the nose. It hurts, blood might run between your fingers. From that we can extrapolate that all physical contact between humans is bad.
If it turns out that golden prices of commodities are too high (i.e. gold is too cheap compared to other commodities), people will quickly scramble to buy gold, and (perhaps after a brief period of volatility) gold’s price stabilizes at a new, higher level. There would be no continuous expectation of golden deflation (in your terms), and people would have no reason to hoard gold to the expense of other investments after its price stabilizes.
You could say that people now have less money to invest in other things because they spent so much on gold. But I don’t think that’s true: the percentage of gold in the world’s wealth has increased somewhat, but that’s because the total value of all gold has increased; the total value of all non-gold wealth is the same as before.
The consequences are different depending on whether you are talking about a sudden one-time devaluation (of a paper currency vs. gold) or a continuous threat of gradual devaluation that never goes away. If investors could be absolutely sure that it was a one-off devaluation, then yeah, they all just get used to the suddenly higher dollar-price of gold, and their investment decisions don’t fundamentally change. What can they do? They can agonize over the thought of, “If only I had seen the devaluation coming…” but it’s kind of like the thought of buying bitcoin at $19,000/BTC. You might kick yourself for not buying earlier, but the only reason to buy is if you think BTC is headed even higher.
The difference between BTC and gold is gold has a “natural price” (or a “price of production” in Marxist lingo) to anchor its exchange-value, and BTC has none. There is no reason to expect BTC to be worth anything several years from now. Whereas gold is practically guaranteed to appreciate vs. paper currencies in the future (NOT faster than equity index funds increase in their value, though. Gold bugs are idiots. If there is one thing to invest in across the entire business cycle, it is an equity index fund. Technically-speaking, if gold is considered as the most fundamental money from the Orthodox Marxist standpoint, then hoarding gold does not actually produce surplus-value or even accrue exchange-value. All it does is preserve exchange-value at times when the exchange-value of everything else is falling. In other words, being a miser who hoards gold like Ebenezer Scrooge is not a recipe for long-term profits across the entire Kondratiev Cycle. The only reason to buy gold is if you think you have a good handle of the Kondratiev Cycle and know roughly when the spurts of declining commodity golden prices and devaluations of paper currencies vs. gold are going to occur).
Historically, paper currency devaluations vs. gold have never been a one-off, but have had a tendency to recur time and time again. Mainly because the economic forces driving the devaluation (the expansion of the use of credit, and the consequent inflation in the golden prices of commodities) continued apace.
So, for example, even if gold has quadrupled in its dollar price compared to the mid-2000s, it is of little solace to investors because the same forces driving the earlier devaluation remain in place, making another one in the near future all-but certain…and another one after that, and so on, until the banking system is fundamentally changed.
Note that I don’t anticipate a dollar devaluation vs. gold imminently. These things go in spurts, and more pressure must first accumulate. If I had to throw out a ballpark number, I’d say to start watching for a major dollar devaluation vs. gold in about 2-3 years. Until then, I expect the good times to keep rolling.
We must ask ourselves why monetary authorities were so deathly afraid of devaluations of their currencies vs. gold during the days of the gold standard, and why they even went through the pains of re-valuating their currencies vs. gold after WW1 (or why Britain decided to re-commit to its gold standard and re-open the gold redemption channel after the temporary suspension of redemption of Pounds for gold during the Napoleonic Wars). They were also perfectly aware that this placed severe constraints on what they could do with the supply of their paper currencies.
The Modern Monetary Theory folks are correct in pointing out that any fixed exchange-rate standard (whether you are trying to peg your currency to the dollar, or gold, or whatever) is ultimately a voluntary constraint. There is no legal law written in the universe that says you have to do this.
But the thing that MMT folks miss is that, before there was a legal constraint, there had to have been a practical constraint that the legal constraint was responding to or anticipating, and which the legal constraint was designed to head-off or avoid running into. Before there was a legal law, there had to be an economic law motivating the practical necessity of the legal law.
Now it’s possible that there actually was no practical constraint—no negative practical consequence to allowing paper currencies to devalue vs. gold—and thus the legal constraint was superfluous. But I would caution Modern Monetary Theorists to consider Chesterton’s Fence. Why do you think monetary authorities voluntarily embraced the golden handcuffs of a gold standard in the first place? Are you sure that purpose is totally obsolete?
You do, and you have to do better than this link.
I’m not actually typing this right now because I have never purchased a computer, as I looked and saw that prices for computers have been dropping for 60 years and quality has been increasing. I’m not investing in smart phones either, who would ever buy one this year when next years model is going to be better and cheaper?
Raising the real interest rate INCREASES the value of investing. The last line is either intentionally misleading or ignorant of this fact. This point manages to make 3 different mistakes. First is that increasing real interest rates should spur investment, second you only get increasing real interest rates with deflation if you hold nominal rates constant which is not an assumption in a market economy, and finally it assumes that money is invested, which it isn’t. Money is exchanged, labor and materials are invested.
See my response to DavidFriedman above
You’re talking past the point. The real interest rate is the price of investment capital. Raise the going price without shifting the supply and demand curves, and you tend to get more people “selling” (offering money for investment) but fewer people “buying” (seeking investment funds). It’s perfectly plausible for there to be businesses that are interested in taking out loans at %X to finance expansion, but aren’t interested in taking out loans at %(X+1), regardless of how many would-be investors are offering loans at %(X+1).
Where deflation causes problems with respect to interest rates is that a safe deposit box full of $100 bills becomes an investment vehicle yielding a positive real return, which competes with more conventional investment vehicles. If the deflation rate is less than the market-clearing real interest rate, this isn’t much of an issue, since you can still get a better return at comparable risk by buying high-rated bonds or CDs. But if the deflation rate is significantly more than the real interest rate, then safe deposit boxes start crowding out other investments.
That isn’t what Thoma says though, he says
he goes forward with
The first part only holds if you assume that interest rates don’t adjust to inflation expectations. This would be an extremely unorthodox position within the profession, but he passes it off as if its fact, not a hypothetical that would be very unexpected in the real world*.
The second part is him extrapolating from one sector of the economy to a broad and general statement about total investment. Such an analysis would not hold for companies with cash holdings. All investment is not made with borrowed money, so even if he made a convincing argument on the first objection he would still have to demonstrate that the losses from projects that weren’t borrowed for aren’t offset by the gains from projects that didn’t need borrowing.
Thoma’s entire approach is just incorrect. Looking at “costs” like this misses the obvious. Every one of his costs is again to someone else, if inflation is negative and real interest rates rise that hurts one group but it helps another. People who hold bonds now have more real purchasing power, and thus would be expected to increase consumption.
Thoma is basically using half of an accounting identity to try to prove his point.
* He could make a nuanced argument where interest rates wouldn’t fall fast enough causing real interest rates to rise, but he doesn’t present an argument for this.
The deflation rate cannot be more than the real interest rate unless the nominal interest rate is negative. This would violate the zero lower bound issue, and if memory serves correctly (I haven’t bothered reading Thoma for 8+ years) Thoma has written about the ZLB as if it exists.
And the mechanism by which this is proposed to happen is that “investments” in hoarded cash crowd out investments in debt or equity.
You can’t crowd out investments by hoarding cash, cash isn’t invested. When you sell your stocks and “pull money out of the market” you are transferring money from someone who didn’t have money in the market to you, and your stock to them. You cannot “crowd out” investment in this way.
As far as I understand, deflation is not a problem, expectation of (further) deflation perhaps is. But in an efficient market, an expectation of lower prices would appear in the prices immediately, so a rational agent would never predict deflation. (Well, not for products such that you can’t easily shift your consumption in time, such as everyday consumption. But for those products, expectation of deflation doesn’t significantly affect consumption either.)
Unexpected deflation causes problems with sticky prices and wages, especially those that are sticky because of contracts or regulations. If you’re stuck paying sticky prices and wages to your vendors (perhaps because of a long-term contract) and employees (because of a union contract or a minimum wage statute), but you’re selling on a market with deflated prices, then you’re going to be an unhappy business, and depending on the magnitude of the deflation, you might look seriously at scaling back your operations until you can get out from under your sticky input prices.
Unexpected deflation can also cause big problems with loans. You might have a mortgage that’s readily affordable on a $100k/year income, but if prices suddenly deflate by 20% (and your wages aren’t sticky), then you’re stuck paying the same mortgage on an $80k/year income. If your wages are sticky, you’ll probably be fine with a continued $100k/year income (albeit with much less hope of annual raises), but there’s a significant chance you’ll get laid off and have to take a different job at a lower wage after a period of unemployment.
These effects probably only become really bad for a large, unexpected deflation. A 1% deflation when everyone was expecting 1% inflation probably isn’t significantly worse than a 1% inflation when everyone was expecting 3% inflation.
We should link the numbers in all contracts to inflation. Minimum wage too. (Oh wait, employers don’t want to do that because then they can’t silently reduce real wages by giving less raise than inflation. Of course contracts should be flexible anyway, and wages going up or down according to market conditions should be acceptable, and there should be no minimum wage, but that won’t happen.)
If you can’t cancel your contract with vendors or employees, you can’t scale back operations because you still have to pay them anyway. If you are allowed to cancel the contract, you can just do so, and replace your vendor/employee with a cheaper one. Or tell them that if they don’t agree to a lower price/wage, they get replaced. If firms start to scale back operations, there will be unemployment/vendors with canceled contracts, so there will be people who accept a lower price. (Except if it’s prevented by minimum wage.)
The problem may be that if deflations are common, and the contracts can’t be canceled (perhaps because of regulations), then companies will be reluctant to enter new contracts (though they’ll have to respect the existing ones).
In the US we used to have a primitive form of inflation linked contracts that were very widespread (they tied repayment to the price of gold).
The Supreme Court, in a series of unpersuasive opinions, upheld as constitutional a law that struck every one of these clauses down in every contract private or public.
Is there something about TIPS that avoids this specifically?
The law was repealed at some point, I think during the Nixon administration. But the precedents remain. Congress could refuse to pay the inflation linked part of the TIPS coupons without running afoul of the Constitution per the Supreme Court. Presumably we have to pay a higher rate of interest because of that.
Once AI does everything, I except that money and all these financial things will be irrelevant, or at least very different from today. When AI does a lot of things but not everything, we will only consider humans in these calculations, much like today. Robots already do many things, but we don’t say things like “humans do 70% of the work today and robots do 30%”, robots don’t have salaries, and when we talk about things like GDP per capita, we only count humans.
People are more bothered by a nominal wage cut than an inflation-driven real wage cut because their debts are typically in nominal dollars rather than real dollars. Unless wages become completely disconnected from inflation, inflation is good for debtors who work for a living, including “people with a mortgage” and “people with a student loan”.
Not just debts, but all of their other contracts as well.
Arguably, contracts in nominal dollars, and the coordination problems they represent, might explain the entirety of wage stickiness, and in fact “contracts in nominal dollars” might actually be the thing we are calling wage stickiness.
Only unanticipated inflation. Anticipated inflation raises the nominal interest rate to balance out the benefit to debtors of inflating away their debt.
So, if there’s an anticipated inflation rate, and a loan is based on that anticipated rate, and the anticipated rate becomes the actual rate, then everyone gets a fair deal, right? Debtor gets access to capital at a rate he or she is comfortable with, creditors gets a return on their investments that keeps up with inflation.
Above-anticipated inflation levels would be good for the debtor. Below-anticipated inflation levels would be bad for the debtor. Your objection just changes where the hypothetical “fair deal” occurs from zero inflation to whatever the anticipated rate is, correct? Or is there more to it that I’m missing?
Correct. Unanticipated inflation transfers from holders of net positive nominal assets, such as lenders, to holders of net negative nominal assets, such as borrowers.
This is the correct answer to the identity, but in practice both debtors and creditors often suffer during unexpected bouts of inflation/deflation, this is mainly because price changes tend to be lumpy. Many debtors find themselves in default before they can realize the gains from paying back their debt in devalued currency. Germany experienced inflation after WW1, during 1920 food prices increased by over 50% while the price of imported goods declined by over 50%. From May 1921 to July 1922 food prices jumped by over 500%, and imported goods jumped in price by more than 900%, and in the next year food prices rose by over 13,000% and imported goods over 22,000%. During this time real wages fell, as nominal wages failed to keep pace with inflation, real stock prices fell by more than 50% from 1921 to 1922 before rising by 3x in 1923.
Right, but then the question becomes why there’s an anticipated inflation rate at all.
If the answer is simply, “deflation is harder to fix than inflation, and fiscal policy has error bars, so we all agree to target +2% just to be safe”, then there’s no problem. But most of the other reasons for having inflation, e.g. getting sticky-waged workers to accept a de facto pay cut, depend on at least some parties not anticipating the inflation to come.
And if you’ve got an economic force that says, basically, “we need an inflation rate X% above what is anticipated”, on top of an economy that effectively propagates and normalizes the anticipated inflation rate, that leads to rapid positive feedback and the fast track to hyperinflation.
Do debtors suffer under higher-than-anticipated-but-still-reasonable inflation levels? Or do they only suffer the problems you outline in the extreme sorts of cases you provided as examples? Like, the US had double-digit inflation in the 70s and that combined with stagnant wages was bad. Then we had 4-5% inflation with corresponding wage growth in the 80s and that was basically considered a good economic time.
On the mortgage area specifically, I think there’s a big effect of the fact that most mortgages in the US can be refinanced to a lower rate, while still being 15- or 30-year fixed rates. Changes in the expected rate of inflation would change the interest rates charged. So if anticipated inflation goes up, then rates for new mortgages go up, good for current mortgage holders. But if anticipated inflation goes down, rates for new mortgages go down AND ALSO rates for current mortgages go down as people refinance. Of course this is a big, government-subsidized effect and not a natural feature of economics.
I specifically excluded creditors from my previous analysis because my understanding is that deflation, while “good” for creditors under the identity in the sense that their money is worth more, tends to induce sufficient defaults to be net bad for creditors.
Depending on how you pick endpoints, but I would say that inflation became less predictable, and higher than expected around ’66 or ’67 and it ended between ’81 and ’83. In that span there were 4 official recessions (or 3 if you merge the ’80 and ’81 recessions which is not unreasonable) totaling more than 4 years (49 months going by Wikipedia), so about 1/4th of the time the US was in recession. For comparison since the ’81 recession ended the US has been in recession for a total of 34 months, or about 1/12th of the time. From the end of the 1945 recession to the 1969 recession it was 39 total months of recession or ~1/8th of the time.
Nominal home values did very well, so people who borrowed to pay for their homes did well there, but real home values were flat. Wages are generally viewed as stagnant, medium real household income was basically flat despite rising labor force participation (up from ~60% to ~64%, not sure what total hours worked was). So if you kept your job though the recessions you could probably service your debt and come out ahead. Real market returns during this period were substantially negative and even the nominal returns were the worst for a 15 year stretch between ’45 and ’00 (I think).
Someone who bought a house with as little down as they could in the late 60s, kept their job throughout and wasn’t reliant on market gains would have done quite well. I think your average debtor though would have been better off under the preceding or following 15 years overall.
Under some (very specific) circumstances inflation can work in the creditors favor. If nominal values of collateral rise enough you can essentially see the default rate drop to zero, it is rare that this would be enough to make up for the real losses though.
“Belgian boy Laurent Simons heads off to university aged 8”
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44668452
Stories about kid geniuses make me think that we could save a lot on public education expenses if everyone were this smart, since they’d only need 50% as much time as a typical person to finish primary, secondary, and tertiary education. Am I right, or am I missing something?
Eugene Volokh started working as a programmer at twelve, got his bachelors degree from UCLA at fifteen.
Thanks to the cost of and mandate for Special Ed, we could save a lot on public education if most kids were just slightly dull, rather than a lot of them being (or claiming) special needs. Everyone being a prodigy would be a huge gain over that. But neither one is going to happen.
If we wanted fewer with expensive special needs claims, not to mention testing accommodations, the best bet would be to eliminate free public education for the 10%.
While I’ve certainly heard many anecdotes about rich parents getting their kids in special needs programs in order to provide an edge of some sort, I’m unaware of any evidence that special needs students are in fact more prevalent among higher-income families. The one study I found searching for this says the opposite, though it was for Massachusetts only.
Do you know of any research which shows the outcome of the expensive special-ed programs in comparison to no treatment? That is, is sending the severely mentally disabled to “school” resulting in anything of notable value afterwards? Or is it just a money pit to store the kids with applied dignity in advance of needing full-time assistance in life afterwards?
The social value of educating a child is probably an increasing function of that child’s IQ. If all kids were geniuses, it would cost a lot less to educate everyone to today’s average level, but the socially optimal amount to spend on education would probably increase. Today, we spend far more on educating the geniuses who go to elite colleges and then grad school than we do on average students.
This topic comes up pretty often, and speaking as a former kid genius, I think I’d be less of a social and emotional wreck today if I hadn’t taken super-advanced classes with students twice my age and instead got to be a kid, even if I was bored with most everything I was doing in class.
Others have suggested to me that this isn’t true, and I’d be miserable no matter how I was educated.
Still, I think the main point of at least primary and secondary schooling isn’t the knowledge that’s imparted, it’s the social development. Plus, of course, keeping kids off the streets and out of the coal mines.
Some of us are a bit unclear about how this social development is “imparted”.
It seems like it is supposed to be an osmotic process that happens by virtue of sitting at a desk adjacent to a bunch of other children being lectured to on various academic subjects, reinforced by half an hour of having balls thrown at one’s body every day, and I’m not actually convinced that this is terribly effective for the stated purpose.
That description is akin to describing working in IT as “8 hours of sitting at a desk asking people if they’ve turned if off and on again”
ie: designed to make it sound worthless.
I’m not a huge fan of the system but learning how to interact with people, including people you don’t like and don’t get much choice about their existence and presence is a skill in it’s own right.
You don’t learn how to play baseball by sitting reading books about air friction and the physics of objects moving through a gaseous medium. You learn by being handed a ball and having a go at playing.
Similarly you don’t learn how to cope with large groups of other humans by being told social theory by your parents and the 6 other non-heretic humans they allow you to converse with. You learn by being put in a group of other humans and interacting with them, ideally in an environment where the stakes are mostly relatively low.
Socialization doesn’t work this way, it mostly works through interacting with people who are similar enough to you to allow for a relationship to develop. People who talk hierarchies forget that for humans (at least) it isn’t about “I’m on top, I get the money and the women and you work for me”, its about finding roles that work (ie comparative advantage). Relationships require trust, but trust is difficult when people don’t react the way you expect them to. They appear to be random in their reactions if you don’t understand the basis for their reactions, so you need people around you with enough similarities to them that allow you to build those relationships.
This can get to close for comfort though, if everyone is to similar then the hierarchy does devolve into strict positioning as there is a lot less to be gained from specialization relative to just being at the top.
The compromise situation is you want to be in a continuum of people where some people are similar enough to you to build a trust based relationship and some people are dissimilar enough to emphasize the value of specialization. Some people end up as middlemen friends where X and Z dislike each other, but Y is friends with both.
Right. Meaning that if it is important for people to learn it, you really need to have someone teach it. I don’t see that being done.
Which means the person picked last for the loosely-organized sportsball games at recess, and never actually passed the ball because their dismal performance would hurt the team, doesn’t learn how to play sportsball.
Unless you’ve got a coach who makes sure everyone gets to play, which is sometimes the case for sportsball but I don’t think I’ve really seen it for the social game.
Your analogies don’t make for a very compelling argument, I’m afraid. Or if it is an argument, it’s one that should extend to getting rid of all the teachers and classrooms and just locking the kids in a library for six hours a day, because then they’re sure to learn all the academic stuff they’ll ever need.
A system which succeeds for the majority and only fails for the most inept few is still a pretty good system.
Of course that’s sort of a philosophical thing, whether you judge a system’s results/success by min(), mean() or median()
@baconbits9
You think social skills are purely about interacting with people you like/trust???
Not every interaction is trade or commerce or organizational.
Learning how to cope with assholes and utter bastards is part of the skillset. Learning when not to trust is important. How to cope with people you shouldn’t trust further than you could throw them is part of the skillset.
By comparison how to interact with people you like/trust is far easier.
Not if the question is, “should we put the three-sigma freaks into the system that works for the normals, so they will be properly socialized?”
Which, you will recall, is the question actually at hand.
Not really. Most systems will do reasonably well for the average, you have to actively make it not succeed for the average. Most systems will also do well for talented socialites, but there are many ways for people who aren’t average to appear ‘inept’ in a bad system. One example:
I have two older brothers, both of whom wrestled for the same high school team. The older one made districts as a senior out of a solid sectional and so was an above average, but not wildly above average, wrestler. The younger of the two never made it out of the sectional, and actually never even got the top spot in his weight class on the team. He was bumped one weight class up into an empty spot because he couldn’t beat the guy one year behind him. He looked like a below average wrestler for his career. The circumstances however were quite different. The guy who beat the younger of the two out for the spot was a state champ as a senior and almost undefeated, and was actually a few months older than my brother due to a skipped grade. If brother #2 had spent his career wrestling at the right weight class and against same aged opposition he probably would have been above average, in his particular, but not wildly exceptional circumstances he finished his career looking below average.
Systems that cater to the average create more and more of these situations as they get larger or more complex. The kid picked last for sports ball could have been an average pick if he was born in the middle of the school year instead of at the end, the one on the cusp of the advanced classes who gets bumped ahead ends up compared to kids on average 2 SDs above him, and what is worse if he doesn’t he can become ‘wasted potential’ as his general boredom makes him easily distractable.
Systems built for the average don’t just suffer from these inefficiencies, they create them with arbitrary cutoffs, and plans for how to make things work for 12 out of the 20 students in the room.
Did I say anything like that?
This is kind of what kindergarten is.
“Everyone come to the carpet and sit in a circle. Today is Johnny’s share day, let’s all listen quietly while he tells use his favorite things, then raise a question, then go back to our desks and write him a thank you note for sharing with us.”
I don’t know if you’ll find that in the state standards spelled out in detail that “Students should show an ability to listen without interruption. Students should be able to give and accept compliments gracefully and without causing unwanted offense” but there is an effort to model and instruct it, if only for the fact that if kids default behavior was given free reign there wouldn’t be a chance to teach them to add or sound out words.
There may be a lot of emergent lessens in the structure of school, though, that teach counter social lessens. It’s also questionable whether these lessens are indeed best learned from an instructor with a large group of semi-random peers over twelve years. And how much of “socialization” is in fact just the name given to what occurs maturing in any social group?
Right. And then we get the next twelve years of formal education, and it’s that part that people are saying is so extra important because it teaches the wierds and the outliers to be properly socialized. But that part doesn’t really look much like kindergarten.
Almost all… ah heck, all, of these code for “makes my job as a teacher harder/easier”. You never see criteria like “bold enough to correct an authority figure when they are wrong” on a school evaluation form, despite it being a hell of a social skill to have in some situations.
I think it is much worse than that, all of those rules in kindergarten don’t work without a central authority figure announcing and enforcing them. Today we learn about sharing, Johnny if you give half of your apple to Janey isn’t that nice? Then you both have half an apple. Janey say thank you, and give Johnny a nice smile. Isn’t that nice to share? Don’t we all like each other now? 10 years later 3 sigma Johnny tries to get Janey to like him by letting her copy his homework, and then she smiles at him and he goes “aha, she likes me”, gotta keep doing this until she likes me a lot.
@ baconbits9
Bold enough to correct an authority figure,
idk, not a kindergarten skill, but lots of HS (and higher) teachers are pretty receptive to on-topic, respectful disagreements
ime, significantly more so than first bosses
@John There is definitely some bait and switch there. And in fact when people champion socialization as a benefit of mandatory public schooling, I don’t think they have any explicit instruction in mind, but rather assume the the fact of being confined with large peer group most of ones waking hours under the occasional guidance of an overstretched and minimally responsive disciplinary force will magically transform the young person into an exemplary citizen.
Sure, I’d agree that most of the explicit instruction of social skills in schools is generally done for the purposes of making direct instruction easier. You’ll occasionally get some teaching on values explicitly for their own sake about honesty or kindness.
Actually this is one of the issues I have with current models of schooling, and is related to this post from TLP. Schools don’t teach how to manage conflict, they teach how to avoid it.
@Murphy
I think the claim is that the very smart children often don’t learn much social stuff from being incubated with the average children in the average school; they are too different in behaviour to fit in, and still too imature to cope. They are also not very interesting to the other kids except as a curiosity, so there goes most of the normal socialization.
But depending on which context the learning takes place, the lessons might not be the best. A normal kid who gets assholish behaviour from one or two classmates and support from ten other will learn a very different lesson than the precocious kid with no peer support, for example. And given that the adult world is generally milder than middle school, it may not be the best for everyone to let smart children internalize a bleak, dog world view of humanity.
An age segregated environment, where everyone is a direct competitor with everyone else, may not be the best place to learn social rules for the real world.
It’s not that part that’s supposed to be the social development. The social development is what adults rudely call “bullying”, teaching the kids their place in the social hierarchy.
That sucks.
I wasn’t a kid genius, but I was obviously different from my classmates up through high school and jumped ahead a few years in college once I was in an environment with less constraints. I had the option of skipping some grades when I was young, but it was decided against for various reasons (like social development).
It’s possible to screw people up by isolating them with books and class, but I have many doubts that the current default is sane for a very bright child. There’s a happy medium between ultra-tiger parenting and just letting god sort it out as your kid gets his ass kicked by other kids. My parents did a great job considering the constraints (in our society, it’s not really a viable plan to just drop out of school to self-study after all) and so did some of my teachers.
It’s perfectly possible to develop socially doing sports or boy scouts or 4-H or all of the above. I think it would definitely be a mistake for a child to not spend time away from their parents and rigid environments like a classroom, but I don’t think ordinary school contributes much to getting away from this except in that children meet other children there.
How do you jump ahead in college? Take extremely heavy course loads versus average? Doing that enough to graduate early is difficult due to scheduling and sometimes impossible. Even if one is intellectually capable of doing higher level work, there is, ime, a substantial amount of non-negotiable prerequisites.
I was part of a program at my university that had special privileges like ignoring class prerequisites, higher unit caps, and some of our own honors type classes. Our intro classes in major went at roughly double speed compared to what I’ve seen in classes I TA’d in graduate school. I was also surrounded by people like me in the program although most weren’t quite as full-tilt as I was.
So I was able to take fourth year classes starting at the end of my first year and PhD level classes starting my third year. My course load was usually 1.5-2x the normal and almost all of it was advanced courses in math or physics. I really enjoyed it, but it was a little discouraging to realize in retrospect how badly behind I had been before college compared to what I could have done. I had known I was very smart before, but not really comprehended the magnitude of the difference. Although I’m sure my family would disagree and say my head was plenty big, thank you very much.
I think only ran into a scheduling conflict once or twice. But I just registered for both classes and then would only attend one except for midterms and finals obviously. I had to inform professors of course if there was a conflict in test schedules, but that never seemed to be a problem.
Most colleges have a few different pathways that allow skipping freshman-level classes if you already know the material. The easiest is simply doing well on the placement exams for math, reading, and writing: good scores on these tests let you skip the “remedial” classes that many incoming freshmen need, and perhaps the first class or two in the “real” sequence as well.
Next easiest is to get passing scores on Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate exams prior to matriculating. These tests are designed for precocious High School students to take classes that cover the same material as a college-level intro class in the same subject, and then demonstrate mastery of the material based on a standardized test. The high school class is not strictly necessary, as you can pay a fee (currently $94 per test) and sign up for any AP exam your local testing center offers: I passed seven AP exams, having only taken the classes for two of them. Almost all US colleges will give credit for intro classes based on at least the most common AP exams.
Once you’re in college, you can also “challenge” a class with the permission of the instructor. If they agree (and they usually will if you can give a plausible explanation of how you already know the material), they’ll give you the final exam for the course and you’ll get credit and a grade for the course based on the grade you got on the final.
Some colleges and programs also have “accelerated introduction” classes designed for students who already have a decent level of knowledge of the subject. For example, when I was at Cal Poly, incoming Computer Science freshmen could take either the regular Introduction to Computer Science classes (a one-year sequence consisting of three quarter-long classes(*)) or a single course (Accelerated Introduction to Computer Science) that assumes you already have some programming experience and covers the same material in one quarter and fulfills the same requirements.
(*) US colleges are generally either on Semester or Quarter schedules. Semester schedules have two 16-week semesters (not counting vacations and final exams), plus a 10-week summer session that most students don’t attend. Quarter schedules have three “quarters” of 10 weeks each, plus a 9-week summer quarter.
It probably depends on the details.
I don’t think I qualify as a kid genius, but I entered Harvard at sixteen and the first math course I took was advanced calculus. Socially speaking, I was too young for that environment—but I would still have been too young if I had waited until I was eighteen.
I was intellectually precocious and socially retarded, and since our educational system doesn’t provide a good mechanism for socializing with fourteen year olds while studying with eighteen year olds, getting half of the pattern right was probably the best I could do.
I don’t think this is true, but I also don’t think that regular classes would have solved it. I was bored and isolated during my time in regular classes. Then I went to the full-time regional gifted program in 4th grade, and immediately found a peer group. Besides no longer being bored in class, I was no longer nearly as isolated, and got to participate in the sort of stuff that normal kids do. It was great for my social development, and let me transition rather smoothly into more or less normal society as I got older and the program stopped being full-time.
BBA,
Remember that in my OP, I said “Stories about kid geniuses make me think that we could save a lot on public education expenses if everyone were this smart”
So in my scenario, you would have taken classes with kids your own age.
After reading the responses to my OP, I think the best course of action would be to have mandatory schooling until age 16 – 18, partly to benefit social development, but graduating seniors would be educated to the level of PhDs today (or to the level of “master” tradesmen).
The cost of public education would go down since getting a full education would only take 10-12 years, and no one would need to go to college or technical school after high school
Alternative option: You take super-advanced classes with kids your age. This way you get to be a kid, dealing with other kids where you don’t have to deal with major differences in abilities, and get to learn lots of stuff faster.
I can’t speak from personal experience, since my IQ is pretty average; however, I do have a couple genius-level friends. From what I’ve seen, extremely smart people tend to be miserable (to some extent) regardless of their upbringing. The problem is that, as humans, we are wired to desire (or possibly even need) the company of our own kind. We’ll, assuming you’re a genius, how many people in the world are on your intellectual level ? 10 ? 100 ?
You can’t hang out with mediocre people, because you can literally predict everything they will say or do before they do it, so it’s boring. You can’t hang out with smart people, because there are too few of them, and they’re busy just like you are. This all adds up to isolation and loneliness.
My friends deal with this dilemma by fully submerging themselves in their field of study. Unlike humans, Nature is never boring, and it’s difficult enough to understand to hold even a genius’s attention for a long time.
I highly disagree that this is true if we were to make those predictions concrete rather than vague. At least if we’re talking about a typical example of a genius (an Einstein).
But a lot of things that normal people do aren’t very intellectually stimulating. My metaphor would be that for some geniuses it’s the same way that watching white noise on a TV isn’t very stimulating for most humans. Sure, you can’t predict whether a pixel will be white or black in the next second, but it doesn’t matter because there is no interesting pattern.
Of course, there’s a lot more structure than that to human behavior, I’m just trying to wave at roughly what it might feel like.
I think this is pretty on-the-money. Speaking as a very-high-iq-but-not-genius person, I find that I’m happy approximately if and only if I’ve got regular contact with other very smart people.
Fortunately for me I’m a theoretical physicist, so my friends and acquaintances are pretty smart.
Interestingly the “fully submerging themselves in their field of study” thing hasn’t really worked for me. The reason I enjoy going into work every day is the people, not nature.
I think it bears pointing out that there’s a lot of space between a genius and someone with a double-digit number of intellectual peers worldwide. Even someone who’s a 3-sigma genius has about 10,000,000 people at or above their level.
You must hang out with different mediocre people than I do. I was bored and lonely in school, but not because everyone around me was so predictable. They weren’t. They were unpredictable in the way that made dealing with them a minefield, and they were boring because they cared deeply about things I couldn’t be bothered with.
I accept that “genius” isn’t really a well-defined term, but I would argue being 3 sigma above the mean is not sufficient. Maybe four or five.
However, five sigma puts you at about one-in-a-million, which still gives you thousands of peers, so your point is still valid.
Just wanted to say this perfectly describes what I felt. It’s not that I hated my classmates or they hated me (not at all), we just didn’t have much in common to be mutually interesting and to be able to communicate effectively.
I can’t relate to the friends you describe. I have never been miserable in the way you describe. Working in my field keeps me in touch with people ‘on my level’. It may be that I have chosen a particularly good field for this – consider that a stereotypically smart ‘field’ may be neurosurgery. A brain surgeon could be relatively ‘alone’ in a medium-sized city. But other doctors would still be her peers, even if she is the only brain surgeon in town. They would interact often, even if much of the interaction that the surgeon has is with patients, nurses, and techs who are not necessarily going to be peers. It’s even better for me – rocket scientists are also sterotypically smart people, and our industry clusters. There are thousands of rocket scientists in my town, and that’s pretty much how the industry works. Not one surgeon talking to a patient, but groups of engineers and scientists working on a project together, solving problems together. The engineers and scientists I work with tend to range from ‘quite a bit smarter than average’ to ‘that guy may be the smartest person I’ve ever worked with’. People I work with don’t seem sad in the way you describe, though there are some oddballs.
Maybe the problem you describe is something that goes away with age and maturity. I don’t ‘hang out’ much because my family needs me around. Kids are involved in sports or dance or need rides to their friends’ homes or to/from the swimming pool, etc. My wife needs help around the house or I have a task I need to do around the house. I get off work and I’m pretty busy. These things aren’t intellectually stimulating but they sure keep me busy most nights between work ending and time to turn in.
Even when I hang out with folks who are average or below on the IQ distribution. Nearly everyone has something interesting to talk about and if you don’t think so that’s probably a flaw you need to work on…
Think of it this way. LeBron James could play a pick-up basketball game at his in-law’s house with his nephews. It probably won’t be ‘athletically stimulating’. Despite that, I would bet he could have a great time.
I wonder how much the “smart people are lonely because there aren’t other smart people around” idea comes from considering the situation of a single individual outside a family. A lot of my interaction is with my wife and children, who are about as smart as I am. Growing up it was with my parents and sister, ditto. Add to that a few friends in realspace and places like this blog to interact with smart and interestingly different people online, plus friends who you interact with in contexts less dependent on intelligence, and I don’t see a big problem.
I honestly don’t understand incompatibility with
…mediocre people, because you can literally predict everything they will say or do before they do it, so it’s boring
I don’t find this to be true. I worked construction (framing houses) from mid-high school (gray market, because I was too young to be insurable for many of the tools we used) through the first couple of years of college. The men I worked with were mostly sub-average IQ, rough and crude, but not boring. I mean, predictable in the sense that I knew one guy was going to fail his urine test and get thrown back in jail, and another was eventually going to run afoul of the law himself, (he fled the state on a reckless driving charge of all things), a third guy was steady as a rock because he was on probation and supporting his daughter, and the boss was so bad at geometry that I was pretty sure that he was going to lose his business someday (he did).
I mean, they were sort of predictable big-picture-wise, but up close they were chaotic and interesting.
Thats not what is being asked – The question is, assuming.. I dunno, a society wide project to eliminate the mutational load entirely and super-folic-acid-like drugs so that the average intelligence is basically.. Ruth Lawrence, would education be cheaper.
The answer to which is “No, because everyone would pick up several masters, but the cost does not matter because the economy would be in the hardest takeoff you can imagine”.
More worrisome, school would be in a social situation entirely unlike anything which has ever existed – No solitary prodigies surrounded by people much older than them, but an entire generation learning at a very high pace.
I don’t know if you’re working, in college, or what, but imagine this: it’s your first year of university. You’re eighteen. So is everyone else in the class – except for this eight year old.
He’s as intelligent as you are (maybe more) but in every other way he’s an eight year old with that level of physical, emotional, social etc. development.
How comfortable are you interacting with him? Treating him as an equal? Imagine he’s twelve, got his degree, now is starting work where he’ll be interacting with people in their twenties and thirties as colleagues. How is that going to work?
A class of eight year olds who are all smart enough to go to university and finish their degree at age twelve is great for the eight year olds, but then they either go on to further education until they’re older, or they end out in the Real World at age twelve and do – what? Work at home inventing their world-changing inventions is a great idea, but what if they’re only smart enough to be as smart as the average twenty-two year old who got their primary degree in four years? that is, smart enough to go to work but not smart enough to be Tony Stark inventing super-tech at the age of fifteen.
What is the average adult going to do, faced with a twelve year old work colleague or fifteen year old doctor? (there was a TV show based on this premise). Plus, as I said, they’ll be ahead of their age intellectually, but still having to physically and emotionally mature and grow up, so you can’t put an old head on young shoulders – an eight year old genius is still going to behave like an eight year old when faced with challenges and fears and problems, not like the IQ-equivalent eighteen or twenty year old.
This is a really good point. Wouldn’t child labor laws cover child geniuses, though? So either stay in university until you’re a doctor or go hone to your parents and be an autodidact?
I don’t think child prodigies end up in the real world after undergraduate degrees; typically they will go into research or something. This works well for people who are just a few years ahead of their peers as a 20-year-old PhD student won’t have the social problems of a 14-year-old undergrad. I imagine the 8-year-old in the question will bounce around various undergraduate programmes until he’s in his mid-teens before progressing to a postgraduate degree between 16 and 20.
I didn’t catch last week’s discussion about the separation of children at the
border, but I wanted to share some notes I distilled from a couple of
conversations I had on the topic.
If we take for granted that unauthorized immigration is a crime, and that we
need to enforce it some way, I see a spectrum of possible approaches:
1. Handle violations of immigration law the way we handle violations of other
laws, stick the adults in jail to await trial, and have CPS or equivalent
find some individual or organization to care for the children while the
adults are being detained.
2. Given that in cases of alleged immigration crime, there usually isn’t a
family member present in the country to care for the children (at least
none that are willing to alert the immigration authorities of their
presence), the outcome of the previous option is to put children into
group homes which aren’t _all_ that different from jails. So in effect
we end up separating families, and then jailing the whole family anyway.
How about instead we just establish detention facilities for families,
since jailing the whole family _without_ separating it would seem to be
an improvement.
3. Families detained at the border are put in jail awaiting trial, as opposed
put in prison after sentencing. In most other cases when someone has been
charged with a crime but not convicted, there are a number of alternatives
to spending time in a jail, such as bail or house arrest. These
alternatives aren’t really available for families detained at the border
because they are not yet established in the country: they don’t have a
house to be confined to and they don’t have anyone to pay their bail. But
there’s no reason that the detention facilities need to look like prisons.
They could instead look like small towns, where detainees go about their
lives normally, growing food, constructing houses, while the children go
to school and have the opportunity to be socialized in a more normal
environment. These improved conditions reflect the fact that the detainees
have yet to be convicted of any crime. The town would have to be fenced in,
and guards would need to be present to prevent detainees from trying to sneak
out.
4. Now that families are living in conditions closer resembling a town than a
prison, there’s no reason that they shouldn’t be allowed to be productive
and work towards their advancement in life. We could allow detainees to
start businesses and export goods from the facility. In fact, while we
can’t allow detainees to leave the facility, we could allow US citizens to
come and go as they please. This would expand the range of businesses
detainees could pursue to include restaurants and other service
enterprises.
5. With modern surveillance technology, we don’t really need a fence and
guards to confine detainees. If some municipality is comfortable with
allowing detainees into their community, then instead of establishing
dedicated town-like detention facilities, detainees can simply be issued
ankle bracelets and allowed to live in existing towns while they await
trial.
6. It seems arbitrary to confine detainees to an area the size of a city,
rather than, say, an area the size of a state. Instead of leaving it up to
municipla governments to vote to allow in detainees, that choice could be
given to state governments.
Approach #1 is what we’re doing today. We’re sort of also doing #5 in the
form of sanctuary cities, which are open to would-be detainees who were not
detained at the border. Approach #3 is similar to Japanese internment camps,
except that the detainees will actually be awaiting trial for alleged crimes,
which dissolves the moral equivalence, if not the political equivalence.
I find approach #4 most interesting. It resembles prison colonies like
Australia, and could lead to the gradual development of the legal precedent
needed to establish some kind of archipelagic system if we allowed detainees
to establish their own governments (while US peacekeeping forces remain
present to enforce some basic rules). This is realistic only if we allow
detainees to choose to remain in the “prison colony” following their
conviction, rather than be deported. There could then be some path for these
convicts to later qualify for a legal visa to leave the detention facility,
and start on a path to citizenship.
I don’t think it’s wise to allow an analogous path to citizenship with
approaches #5 or #6, as this would be a threat to federalism, and that’s a
Chesterton’s Fence I want to honor. If we allow states to accept families
detained at the border while they await trial, and then allow those detainees
to choose to remain in that state after they have been convicted to avoid
deportation, then we are left with a system where individual states are
more-or-less offering international visas, which is clearly not meant to be a
function of a state.
I have not been following the “separation of children at the border” issue, but reading your list there, I think you lost me at #3 when you said towns. There probably are reasons, having to do with things like security and budget, why the facilities that house these families shouldn’t resemble towns. Simple rectangular dormitory-like buildings seem like they’d serve better.
Part of the function of how to treat immigrants must surely be a comparison with how immigrants are treated in other countries, just to get a baseline anyway.
Doesn’t #4 just reinvent the idea of a ghetto? I mean, sure, in theory there’s no reason why a ghetto need be as miserable as those the Jews lived in. With much more funding, and much less sadism and arbitrary oppression on the part of the authorities, I guess a ghetto could be a little better than an internment camp. But I wouldn’t hold my breath for it. And no matter how nice you made the ghetto, it would get bad PR: from the left for being a ghetto, and from the right for being too nice and encouraging even more immigration.
That’s kind of the crux of the matter. IF we have decided that we want less illegal immigration, then the most effective means towards that goal will be to do all that is practically possible to make illegal immigration unpleasant for those who attempt it.
I think a problem with #4 is that likely represents an improvement in living conditions for many immigrants and would do little to deter their arrival. In the meantime taxpayers would have to foot the bill.
So in effect, it’s well worth your while to grab a couple of surplus kids from your cousins, say you’re a family (after all technically you’re not lying, you are blood relatives) and let the US border authorities catch you, because you have nearly all the advantages of being legal without having to go through the tedious process to apply for legal immigration, plus unlike the other illegals you’re not living with the threat of being discovered and deported over your head (the authorities have already caught you, they know you’re here, and they’re putting you in Detainee Town). You get housing, schooling, a chance to work and earn money, sell your goods/services, interact with US citizens, and live in a little township of your own national culture and identity with your fellow-nationals! Where is the downside here? You don’t mention anything about “and if your case isn’t decided within five years, we deport you back home”, so a detainee could live twenty years and raise a family in what is practically [insert equivalent of Chinatown, Little Italy, Spanish Harlem or other descriptor for segregated areas immigrants clustered in].
I’m not seeing a downside here: I come over the border to live in a safe(r) more secure area and get a job, I’m being housed, educated, and allowed to work and earn money and even set up my own business legally, what is the bad part of all this? I can’t visit Disneyworld because I’m technically in detention awaiting trial and so am confined to the specific area of the detention facility?
Crossing the border illegally is a misdemeanor violation. As I understand it, we typically don’t actually arrest people at all for misdemeanors, and if we do arrest them, we don’t keep them in jail very long – we release them and trust them to show up at court on time, and then if they don’t show up we charge them with that too.
People aren’t freaking out because we’re enforcing the law for this like any other crime, they’re freaking out because we’ve instituted a harsh zero tolerance policy and begun enforcing the law much more harshly than is typical for crimes of this magnitude. If we instituted a zero tolerance policy for other misdemeanor crimes, like petty theft or speeding, and started putting people in indefinite detention and sending their kids to foster care or group homes, people would start freaking out about that pretty quick, too.
I plan on trying oral ketamine for treatment-resistant depression. I want to do everything as “by the book” as possible (except for, you know, actually getting the stuff, but that’s a different topic). Is there anything I should read up on regarding proper dosing and treatment patterns? Good studies to look through?
I’m planning on a dose of .5 to 1.25 mg/kg of body weight, as those are the dosages I’ve seen in the handful of oral studies available. These doses also seem to be significantly below the threshold for bladder damage, from what I’ve read.
Recently done this. I’d be happy to share my thoughts privately. sscanon@yahoo.com
So I’m going to play Twilight Imperium for the first time in the next week. Does anyone who has played the game have any advice or, failing that, funny stories?
I’ve looked up some guides and have a basic sense of how the game is supposed to work but it’s roughly as complex as a tabletop RPG and the rulebook is almost entirely useless.
So far I’m thinking about playing the
KzintiEmirates of Hacan. Their focus on trade seems fun plus they’re spacecats. Not sure if it’s a good choice for a beginner though.There is no good place for a beginner. That said, fourth edition is significantly more beginner-friendly. If you’re playing third edition, try to make sure you have the first expansion–the one that replaces the Imperial Strategy. I also recommend playing with the rule variant that includes exploration counters, and the one that reveals all the objectives at the start of the game. I would avoid the rest.
Try to have all the players read the rules before you get to the table; I know it’s not always possible, but it’s something to aspire too. Then just be patient with each other. The first game is often…somewhat slow.
We’re playing fourth edition and most of the other players have played third edition before.
You’ll be in a better place then. No mucking about with modules.
In terms of good factions for new players, then, I’d say they’re all perfectly fine. Maybe don’t use the Nekro Virus or the Saar, since they both require you to be aggressive and take other player’s stuff. Whether they’re any good depends entirely on the personality/vindictiveness of other people at the table. If they’re playing the ‘any slight against me will be answered with a precommitment to your total destruction’ they are very bad, so you want to feel out your play group first.
I have third edition, and I play it about once a year. I don’t know if fourth edition includes the variant to have random goodies on planets; I invariably use that and regret it. I like variance, but the variance is too high here; if you lose a turn because some insurgents kill your only ground forces, while an opponent gets a free technology, that basically makes the next 3 hours a foregone conclusion.
In the same vein, and I expect this does hold for fourth edition, you need to ruthlessly politic against anyone with a favorable position; the starting planets’ positions will have a lot impact on production letting someone get away with taking much more than the average because you don’t want to gang up on them or don’t want to start the aggression early, or don’t want to vocally oppose the new player (I’m the game owner and usually playing with at least one other new player–I feel awkward trying to oppose someone’s game with one breath while advising strategy and rules in the next) similarly sets you up for a long, slow but inevitable loss.
Remember, it is a game of strategy, not tactics. You won’t come back with amazing victories in the dice chucking ship-to-ship combat. If you build more ships (and choose the right roles & technology, etc.) you’ll win.
Be mindful of player skill/experience when sitting around the table. Similar to 7 wonders, TI is particularly vulnerable to bad players warping the game. Giving a significant advantage to good players who happen to be sitting near them.
I recently played it (as the spacecats) for the first time, and found it disappointingly simple and quick to play.
That’s surprising.
I was told to expect the game to run 8-12 hours and the number of rules is large for an RPG much less a board game. Can you elaborate on your experience?
I didn’t play a proper game really, there were only three players and we didn’t all realise that the Imperial strategy card (in original 3rd edition) was very overpowered so I took more times than I should’ve been allowed to and won fairly quickly (4 hours ish I think). So the quickness is probably atypical, but I did think that the rules were fairly simple (at least if you’re playing relatively casually and not e.g. spending hours deliberating on the optimum technology choices). For instance I was expecting a hideously complicated battle system, but it wasn’t really that much more difficult than Risk. As well as being reasonably simple individually, they’re divided up into largely independent blocks, so you can (if playing a casual game) just consult them as you go rather than learning them all to start with.
The battle system seems like by far the simplest part. It looks identical to the system in Axis & Allies, right down to the AA Guns and Fighters. No equivalent to submarines, surprisingly, since that is easy to justify as cloaked ships.
Maybe, I don’t play enough games to be able to make a good comparison. But I thought the trade system was pretty simple too.
* * Lurk mode deactivate * *
New player tips
A) Focus on objectives. This isn’t Risk or some wargame; try not to get distracted by all the shiny plastic and space battles. In general, you can only claim a single objective in a turn (more requires you take the 8 strategy tile or occupy Mecatol), so if you fall behind, it’s difficult to catch up. Plan to claim one public objective every turn if you want to stay competitive. It’s not a bad idea to look through the objective deck(s) before starting to get a feeling for the potential objectives.
B) The hardest resource to manage is triangles. You will always have fewer triangles than you want for the strategy, command, and fleet pools. Plan on exhausting your planets for bonus triangles (secondary of the 1 tile) routinely in large numbers, and try not to ignore your fleet supply–it will leave you unprepared for large endgame fleets.
C) Always buy Tech. This is actually less true than it was in TI3, but tech (and especially unit upgrades) is useful, requires prerequisites, and is nearly always acquired one-at-a-time, making it hard to catch up. Tech is expensive and it will make you sad to spend for it, but lack of tech is worse.
D) Ground forces are boring but important. Removing enemy GF from planets is a pain, and requires the enemy to bring GF of her own, taking up space in her carriers that she would’ve liked to use to transport fighters. Just 2-3 GF can make a planet prohibitively expensive to invade.
E) Seize opportunity. TI4 is a more tactical game than it’s given credit for, and it’s often more important to take advantage of openings immediately than keep lockstep on your long-term plans. Never sacrifice your objective-scoring pace, but otherwise feel free to put yourself out there.
Other Notes
Action cards vary from pointless to super useful, but there are a few you should be aware of that can truly ruin your day: Sabotage cancels any just-played action card, ruining your clever action card-based ploy. Flank Speed gives all ships +1 move for a single tactical action, making your “safe” systems much less so. Direct Hit destroys a multi-HP ship after you assign it a hit, killing that Dreadnought you were counting on.
In fleet composition, fighters are great because they’re cheap and can soak hits to keep your capital ships in battle longer, plus you can get more plastic on the board for a given investment in fleet supply. Be aware that fighter screens can be hard-countered by Destroyers, especially the Improved variety.
Early game, you must claim as many planets as possible as quickly as possible. Since you get planet cards exhausted, you’ll have to hold them for a turn before they’re useful to you. Plan to take control of (at least) two systems in Turn 1, preferably pressing towards the center. Getting a forward-positioned star dock ASAP will help you build more ships closer to the center of the board, and is usually superior to stacking them all in your home system to maximize build capacity. Notice that the Construction secondary has the side-effect of locking down the system in question, whereas the primary will let you build the same turn as placing the star dock.
The end of the game can come surprisingly quickly, usually when the first or second 2-point public objective is revealed. Once somebody hits 6 or so points, they could be in win-now position. If that somebody is you, make sure you think about turn order to keep from getting sniped. If you’re going to need a particular strategy tile, you ought to plan ahead by taking Politics and becoming Speaker (to give you first choice). If it’s somebody else, remember that they must control their home system to score public (not secret) objectives.
Races
Like most games with asymmetric player powers, it’s usually best to lean in to your strengths. Most racial technologies are super-useful and should be considered. Starting techs are often “leading” you toward certain high-level techs or (especially) unit upgrades. Consider targeting a unit upgrade, racial, or 2/3-prereq tech for Turn 2 or 3 in order to get maximum value. If you think you want War Suns, you need to plan for it from the start and not deviate in your tech path.
Good “beginner” races are generally those with more thematic focus and fewer fiddly rules. Of those, Yssaril (action cards), Jol-Nar (tech), xxcha (literal turtling), Hacan (trade), and Sol (ground forces) are all pretty focused and beginner-friendly. Take a look at the whole package: powers, racial tech, flagships, starting fleet, starting tech, home system planet(s). If your race’s starting fleet has only one transport-capable ship, be very careful on Turn 1 to ensure you can get 2+ systems (Warfare or well-timed Warfare secondary are the usual options). In general, I would stay away from more combat-oriented races because they typically have earlier “windows” and require somewhat bolder early plays.
In particular, some races play differently with different numbers of players. The game is really designed for 6, so if you’re playing with fewer, there will be more space available. If your race relies on a particular strategy tile (like the Hacan and Trade), you may need to pick the tile yourself or it won’t get taken at all, especially in 5-player games.
Final note
This game can be somewhat Diplomacy-ish, despite the lack of secret plotting. I played a game recently where two neighbors had been cooperative and good friends all game. One built a big fleet and said to the other, “We’ve been good friends, right? [beat] I think now we should be the kind of friends where you pay me. [transfer of extorted trade goods]”
Have fun, and good luck. Try not to ruin all your friendships.
Thanks for the in-depth response!
The Diplomacy-esque backstabbing is probably the part that I’m most comfortable with. My friends who invited me are part of our standing Diplomacy game dating back to middle school.
Do you have any tips on how to use commodities / trade goods effectively? One of the main reasons that I’m thinking about playing spacecats is their Guild Ships ability and racial technology to trade action cards. I’m hoping that investment in the weaker side of conflicts can tilt the balance of power away from the strongest players and tie them down long enough for me to eck out a win. Plus bankrolling a “coalition of losers” may also be useful in votes, because someone who is only hanging on because of my trade goods is going to have a hard time voting against me.
Edit: I misread the Hacan racial technology. I don’t remember how you’re supposed to trade action cards but I distinctly remember it being possible.
I figured most anyone on this board is totally capable to play the meta of player against player and the game theory of managing alliances, etc. That’s the bulk of the game, and it’s usually pretty good here too. The metagame ramps up as the points get closer to endgame.
I actually played Hacan in my last game (a victory); it’s a lot of fun if you’re up for “shenanigans”. Trading action cards is actually a basic power, but it’s pretty situational. Hacan’s more powerful abilities are 6(!!) commodities, “always adjacent to everyone for trade purposes” and “always get the Trade Secondary without having to beg or pay for it”. Early game, they’ll be the only trade option for some players, and later they’ll be good at balance of power politics and keeping a lid on the game (obviously until they surge forward to victory).
Hacan’s racial techs are _amazing_ but require lots of prerequisites. The YYY one lets them steal a strategy tile after the tile selection phase. It’s expensive, and the prereqs mean you’ll only use it 1-3 times, but it can be game-breakingly OP. The GG one spins money and gives you a “delay” action. The downside of beelining the awesome racial techs is that it doesn’t unlock the juicier unit upgrades. They start with blue+yellow, so they’re only one bluetech away from upgraded Dreds and Carriers. Plus, blue II is a useful tech in and of itself. Hacan can benefit greatly from a tech-specialty planet that will let them skip prerequisites. Really opens up the tree.
Trade goods are almost always used for production; much more rarely as influence. There are also some TG-based objectives that are easy-peasy for the kitty-cats. Bankrolling offsetting enemies can be useful, but your own fleet is often just as useful if not moreso. You’ll have enough money to build whatever fleet you like, so build capacity is often a bottleneck moreso than cost. That means you’ll likely be building fewer but larger capital ships in lieu of massive fighter swarms. Double-docking a good 2-planet system (probably not your home system) may be a good idea if there’s one in a good location. Barring that, you could get the star dock upgrade at YY, but I’m not a big fan of it.
Huh, ok so I completely misunderstood how technology works. Thanks for helping me figure that one out.
I’m going to have to look into the numbers to see how useful Dreadnaughts are compared to carriers; people advise against fighter swarms but this looks very similar to to Axis & Allies where aircraft carriers tended to be the better investment.
Since the defender decides what ships get damaged in combat, a fully loaded carrier is an effective damage soak. Not sure if that is cost effective, but fighters are cheap.
The reason you may see people advise against fighter swarms is because they were dominant in TI3 and have been brought back to earth with TI4’s balance. Fighter swarms are still great, but minor tweaks (reduced carrier capacity, some minor tech changes that reduce build limits, etc.) mean it’s harder to build up crazy numbers of them.
Randy is right. Fighters are actually more like Axis & Allies’ Infantry, in that you choose to take them as cheap casualties in lieu of pricier, more dangerous units. Fighters can score kills themselves (especially if upgraded), but that’s not their whole value.
When you do run your numbers, don’t forget that Dreds can transport one fighter themselves if you like.
Fleet construction in TI3 is a balance of many things: production resources (planets + trade goods), docks’ build capacities, and your fleet supply. At different times, you’ll have different bottlenecks.
Is there a way to subscribe to comments on these without posting?
It probably works if you comment with the option checked and then delete your comment.
As one of the guys pouring scorn on the border wall, let me make sure that my objections to it are clear: it’s not that a wall is useless. It’s that its useless if it’s not properly manned and integrated as part of a larger security plan. If I was in charge of border security, I’d be building walls in places I thought they’d be doing some good.
For example, if a local administrator of the CBP thought that a wall would increase his guys’ ability to stop illegal immigration in his sector, or to push crossings to an area that was easier to secure or more dangerous to illegal immigrants crossing (like a desert), I’m in favor of funding that section. However, “Build a Wall along the entire border from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. And make it Yuge!” isn’t targeting the money to be spent on border security carefully.
The wall, as currently being implemented by the Administration, has got it backwards; it’s spending on highly-visible infrastructure at the cost of the less-visible payroll increases needed to actually make it work. It’s being pushed as a political sop rather than an actual solution to its intended problem.
While I appreciate the validity of these sorts of objections – I offer a simple challenge.
Let’s say an expensive, ineffective wall, is in fact built. Do you believe that would be the single least useful deployment of federal expenditures? I, for one, do not. As pointless as a wall would be, there are tons of government programs that are just as pointless, and many that are probably providing negative utility (most of our military adventurism, for example).
That argument works equally well for sending me a check for a few tens of millions of dollars, right? I mean no one would be getting drone murdered. So yay “Millions for Brad” appropriations bill?
Do you honestly think the idea that a wall would reduce illegal immigration to some extent is just as ridiculous as that example?
Of course it would probably reduce illegal border crossing to some extent. Walking across the Sonoran Desert for three days is harder if you have to bring a 50-foot ladder with you, sure. What I doubt is firstly whether it would reduce border crossings enough to justify the cost, and secondly whether how to reduce border crossings is even the right question to be asking.
Did you mean to post this response somewhere else? It reads to me as a non sequitur.
Y’know, what I’m picking up from this entire discussion is that “The US cannot secure its borders against criminals” – and I don’t mean the migrants, I mean the coyotes whom everyone seems to agree are the bad guys and scum.
This should be what is worrying you, whether you’re pro- or anti-wall: not that Jose the day labourer is getting over the border, it’s that the Gang Boss can operate with impunity. If they can traffic people who want to get into the Land of Opportunity, they can also traffic unwilling sex workers, slave labour, guns, drugs, other bad things. If you’re going to pooh-pooh the wall as “the border is too long and too porous and unless we increase the manpower by a factor of a zillion it’ll never be effectively policed”, then please explain to me why you are not concerned about Real Crime traversing it?
Part of the UK/Republic of Ireland Brexit fall-out is trying to agree over our land border, and by comparison it’s way smaller, and yes we’ve had the problems with smuggling and crime to worry about in the past (and possibly the future). An open border only works when the governments on both sides are keeping up their end of the agreement, and I don’t really see anything to convince me the Mexican government is trying particularly hard to keep it safe (rather, that they see pushing along refugees and asylum seekers from other Central and South American countries over the border so that they will be the US’s problem to deal with, and not a whole heap of wanting to tangle with gangs and criminals, and a cynical attitude to ‘let our people go work for pennies in the US and keep their families at home afloat by sending money back*, it means we don’t have to overhaul our system’).
*Ireland too depended on this system of remittances: ‘let the immigrants send their wages from Abroad home to support their families where we cannot/don’t want to support them’, so I’m not saying this is unique to Mexico; we even included it in the lyrics to weepy ballads:
@ Deiseach
Your 2nd paragraph is a lot to unpack.
1) If we’re talking ‘Joe the day labourer’, the coyote that helps him across is the equivalent of a pot dealer.
2) Trafficking (sex) slaves is wholly different from trafficking ‘day labourers’. The ability to hide someone who wants to hide is wholly different from the ability to hide someone who should want to be found. To the extent that the victims cooperate when they wouldn’t have to, that’s the problem, not the incidental border crossing.
3) Guns? You mean there are not enough of those in the US? Also, again, the logistics are wholly different.
4) Drugs: Yes, some people consider the war on drugs pointless and destructive.
5) What is ‘Real Crime traversing it’? It’s kind of hard to stop mobsters themselves from crossing the border legally unless there is an arrest warrant. Even then, the problem is presumably the crimes they commit while in the US. Which is not a border problem.
Put another way: Given the length of the border, it’s very, very difficult to stop say a MS-13 member who is young and healthy and has support networks on both sides of the border to stop from crossing. The money necessary to bring his chances of crossing down to 1% (when still 1 of 100 attempts works) is better spent on cops in the communities where he will commit crimes.
Just because it is impossible to hermetically seal a continent spanning country doesn’t mean we have to throw up our hands and live with mere anarchy. Yes, some bad people can traverse the borders—that still leaves plenty of options for apprehending them on both sides as well as mitigating the damage they can do on this side.
Strongly disagree, coyotes are not the equivalent of a low level pot dealer. It’s been a while but I remember a story in the news about coyotes abandoning people locked in a truck in the middle of the desert. Everyone died.
Or consider the people smuggling humans off of Libya by loading them unsafely into massive rafts that sometimes capsize and drown everyone.
@BBA
A border wall would cost a small fraction of the US budget. Spending $20 billion to get, just throwing out a number here, a 10% reduction in illegal crossings is definitely worth it. What exactly is your standard to “justify the cost”?
If we’re talking ‘Joe the day labourer’, the coyote that helps him across is the equivalent of a pot dealer.
Ah yes, the notion of the friendly neighbourhood pot dealer who’s generally a burned-out old hippie who only grows for personal use and supplying a few friends and is in it because they really believe in personal freedom and harmless recreational consciousness expansion, man.
May possibly exist, but most small-scale dealers are hooked into a network where they get their stuff from suppliers who are responsible to someone higher up all the way up to Really Nasty Gang Lords.
Even if the coyote taking money from Jose is only the local pot dealer, which I doubt, he’s not doing it on his own as a one-man band; he’s linked in to serious gangs who find it one more source of revenue to traffic in people. He either signs on with the big boys or ends up a corpse in the desert.
Most pot (and all legal pot) in the United States comes from domestic grow operations; on the other hand, while small-scale growers do exist, by volume I’d expect most of the pot in circulation to be coming from large ones, who are involved in organized crime almost by definition and are not always great guys. On the gripping hand, though, I get the impression that the worst American organized crime networks deal mainly in hard drugs (probably because getting heroin from Taliban-run poppy farms in Afghanistan to junkies in New York requires a global network that’s willing to deal with Very Bad People, so that’s where their comparative advantage is), and even the worst American organized criminals are leaps and bounds above the Mexican cartels in the beheading-entire-villages department. Or below. Whichever one means fewer heads.
If you can get votes for a “millions for Brad” bill that is tied to an equal or greater reduction in spending elsewhere, more power to you!
I might have been fooled for a few minutes here and there over the years that the Republican party contained some people whose objections to spending were honestly related to the expense, rather than objecting to the actual object of the expense. The LW-ers have no such chance to fool me.
Is the wall funding coming with greater cuts elsewhere? Have the Mexicans offered to pay for it after all? Seems like you are using a double standard.
In the context the argument was being made… yeah, probably. Sorry.
I absolutely agree with you that there are US Government projects that waste phenomenal amounts of money. I’m a structural engineer for the federal government working on a few. And if the President were to tell the Corps of Engineers to take over building the wall, and HQUSACE were to do a mass-email looking for volunteers to do the design, I’d consider throwing my resume in. It’d be interesting to work on a stupid right-wing waste of money instead of the stupid left-wing wastes of money that currently occupy a significant fraction of my time.
However, what I will not do is agree that it’s not a stupid waste of money. I’ve got plenty of projects that aren’t wastes of money that could consume those funds.
Irrelevant. There is no mechanism for transferring money from “the single least useful deployment of federal expenditures”, to the particular allegedly-useful thing you would like to fund. Mostly, Murphy’s law applies: if you manage to cut the budget of something useless, the money goes to something even more useless, even if that has to be invented for the purpose. If you manage to secure a budget for something useful, that money will turn out to have been taken away from something even more useful.
For a more specific understanding, it is far more politically feasible to move money within an appropriations category, than between categories. Which means Trump’s wall is going to trade directly against the number of and support for border guards, and the whole point of this discussion is that we are already at the point of needing more guards and less concrete.
The useless things that offend you so much, will continue to be funded no matter what we do with the wall. What useful thing that is valuable to you but not to liberals/democrats/whatever, are you willing to give up for the Wall?
+1
Is there a name for the terrible, but common, argument you are refuting?
It’s usually referred to as “Whataboutism”: derailing a discussion by bringing up some other issue that’s only tangentially related, but allegedly much more important. A lot of times the other thing is some culture war issue, which makes it that much worse. (Although that isn’t the case here).
I think a more helpful contribution to the conversation would be explaining what else Trump should be spending the money on, if he wants to reduce immigration.
I’ll go first: I think targetting employers who employ illegal immigrants is probably the single cheapest and easier way to cut down on immigration. Hit a few big construction sites and farms with multi-million dollar fines for hiring illegals, and the work will dry up fast. (Unfortunately, this probably isn’t politically feasible for the Republicans to do….)
@pontifex
If you were really intent on attacking people hiring immigrants then you could turn it into a prisoners dilemma of sorts.
Make illegal immigrants legally entitled to minimum wage. set it up in such a way that an illegal immigrant can move over, work for 50 cent an hour, and then make a claim once home against the employer for violating minimum wage law and receive [notable multiple of minimum wage] without any fear of penalties themselves.
Whether you also apply fines to the employer is a matter of taste.
Thus creating an incentive for employees to dob in employers hiring people illegally.
Suddenly if you hire someone from abroad illegally for cheap labor you have a huge ongoing risk that some of them will have a budget crisis a year down the road and they’ll dob you in.
Currently the system seems well set up to unite employers and employees in shared mutual self-interest.
How about rolling out a national ID card with a means tested fee waiver and a provision for the home bound? Then they can get rid of columns A, B, and C on the I-9 and just have one secure document that qualifies.
Newer social security cards are slightly better, but the one I have has all the counterfeit resistance of a 1980s blockbuster card.
Hit a few big construction sites and farms with multi-million dollar fines for hiring illegals, and the work will dry up fast.
(a) The food producers are already complaining about the shortage of illegal labour, and how they can’t pay enough to make it attractive to legal (American citizen) labour because their margins are too tight and they can’t afford it and would go bankrupt and have to close down if they tried
(b) They’re looking into farm automation and robotics to make up the shortfall, so the problem may possibly solve itself
(c) If you do shut down the big farms, then you may also have to deal with the consumers complaining about why their tomatoes/fruit/other foods were not in the shops; you may end up having to import to make up the shortfall and then local producers will be very unhappy with you subsiding foreign (ironically, possibly Mexican) farmers in this manner
(d) I say “ironically” because, in the same spirit of globalism that sees American manufacturing moved to China as a good thing since it increases global wealth, lifts poor countries out of poverty, and encourages equality, a ban on immigrant labour could do the same for Mexico: if your farm workers can’t work on the Nordamericana side of the border, then more fruit and flower farms on the Mexican side to take advantage of the export market (the US now needs to import what it is not growing itself) will employ those workers and aid the Mexican farm sector to thrive! All the pundits who scolded the Trump voters for their short-sightedness and xenophobia in complaining about white working-class job losses should be calling for stricter immigration controls and deportation of farm workers back to where they can get local jobs!
(e) ditto for big construction firms; as we’ve seen with the collapse of Carillion over here, and in general from back in the 2008 bursting of the housing bubble, even industry-leaders operate on very tight margins, there is so much sub-contracting going on that Big Firm being hit (even if it’s only in the pocket and not to the point of ‘welp we’re bankrupt now, happy?’) means they can’t pay their sub-contractors and suppliers, who then can’t pay their sub-contractors, and a chain of collapses, bankruptcies and mass lay-offs ensues.
(e) This means your schools, hospitals and roads don’t get built; there’s already problems with housing squeezes, you think having a major developer go belly-up leaving unfinished project is going to help those?
I agree that the reliance on cheap labour, and that labour is cheap because it’s illegal so the threat of ‘shut up and don’t look for rights or else back over the border with you’ is in the employer’s whip hand is completely undesirable, but I also think the underlying structure of capitalism that makes it necessary for such tight margins and excesses is going to have to be examined as well.
If immigration law is supposed to be a real law that people get punished for breaking, then an institution that relies on the breaking of that law to remain profitable is an illegal racket and should be wound up and its directors prosecuted.
If not, not.
Of course, most immigration law reform proposals do have some kind of sensible provision for agricultural migrant labour. These hit the problem that any kind of written down ‘this is allowed’ statement is going to be less favourable for land and bunsiness owners than the status quo. So it is structurally unable to be passed with Republican party support, and they are going to be at least a blocking minority in Congress for a good while yet.
The food producers are caught in a prisoner’s dilemma. Anyone who doesn’t use illegal labor will be undercut by anyone who does. The solution is the usual: introduce a penalty for defecting, so that it’s no longer the best option.
It would be ironic if the solution to illegal immigration came from Silicon Valley. Someone should put up the bat signal for Peter Thiel. 😉
The big farms won’t shut down. US technology and natural resources are abundant. Also, we shovel lots and lots of federal dollars towards subsidizing them. Trump can put up more tariffs if any particular sector looks weak. The sugar tariff has lasted decades, and is the only reason anyone farms sugar in Florida (so I’m told).
Not everything can be grown everywhere. And even if it could, you are assuming that there is free trade. That doesn’t seem like Trump’s endgame.
In the places where we aren’t building enough housing, the problem is the cost of the land, not the cost of construction. I think it would be good for construction to become a real trade again, where people could make a middle class living. That will take time to happen, but it could.
Most of the construction workers I know are independent contractors. If a big firm went bust, they would just shrug and keep on doing what they’ve always been doing (maybe charging more money to do so). The construction worker shortage is so acute around here that they’re trying to get local high schoolers to help rebuild the north bay.
If Trump bankrupted a few highly leveraged property magnates in big Blue Tribe cities, I doubt any (legal) construction workers would be harmed. Quite the opposite, in fact.
It occurs to me that someone could take my previous comment as support for some particular approach to border enforcement. My actual position is that the globally enforced apartheid based on location of birth is the greatest evil of our age, and impoverishes both its victims and supposed beneficiaries; I’m sympathetic to conversation about how to safely unwind it but utterly uninterested in the “best” ways to enforce it. I think, without hyperbole, that this whole discussion is more or less on par with discussing the best ways to build gas chambers or to recapture escaped slaves. (I’ve used up my energy for arguing about this elsewhere for the moment, so I don’t intend to participate in debating this. I’m just clarifying what was, in retrospect, a poorly thought out comment.)
@John Schilling
That seems incredibly fatalistic and a generic argument against trying to make government better.
You can’t really reason with it because it cuts out all need for defending any policy no matter how stupid and counters all suggestions because it’s all pointless and everything will always end up worse until the government is gotten rid of and thus the world spirit can incarnate itself.
It’s not any more generic than “It’s not literally the worst thing our government spends money on, so we may as well spend it.”
Do we have a particular reason to believe the government will cut taxes instead of spending the money? My prior is here is that the government will find a reason to spend money it is given. So let’s make a narrower but stronger claim – “Is the border wall the least efficient (at immigrant-stopping) way to spend 25b initially, 750m/year upkeep? Is there a limit to how good a wall can be?
I will say that the current wall prototype (18ft, some anti-climb features, notably weak to ladders although remote desert crossings without a vehicle carrying an 18ft ladder sounds problematic) is probably the cheapest method to build a wall that could even deter the least resourceful illegal immigrants. There are places where a wall of this style would be genuinely useful, and places where significantly more protection would be needed. (I think the admin recognized this and is only planning for physical barriers on some of the border, certain areas being considered “rugged enough” that anyone willing to brave the danger of crossing there just gets to in a “try if you like” way).
I don’t think we can consider the 25b in a “versus CBP” calculus. Unless there’s some snazzy equipment CBP doesn’t have that could improve their operations amazingly. (They already have helicopters and drones). So for 750m how many border patrol agents can we hire? From google they cost 81,984, ICE agents make about 61k. I’ll split the difference here and say “every border patroller costs $70k for the person”. I’ll tack on $10k per agent for equipment. $80k. Our current CBP and ICE staffing is at about 21,000 and 20,000. So assuming I could magic these workers into existence, 750m annually buys us 9,375 border patrollers.
I am not ceratin increasing the force size of border patrol/immigration enforcement by 25% will be better than the costs of maintaining the wall. Or to put it as a claim: “The border wall will have to deter or allow border patrol to stop 25% more illegal crossing per agent to be worth the upkeep costs, vice just using the money to hire more agents”
It is in particular an argument against trying to make the government better by spending money. Fortunately, outside of national defense, the things government is best at aren’t really all that expensive.
Once the liberals find out that the yes/no decision on a project is “is this not literally the worst thing to spend money on” there won’t be enough money to spend on a single brick let alone a wall. Turn back.
YOU CAN’T CUT BACK ON FUNDING! YOU WILL REGRET THIS!
🙂
Could the federal government break even by building a ten foot-high continuous wall, charging admission as a tourist attraction and charging the NBA a finder’s fee for each Mexican who can leap from the ground and grab the top?
Seriously?
No, not seriously. I think the Great Wall of America is absurd. Obviously the Chinese central government makes tourist money on the Great Wall, but as an ancient/medieval site it has much better optics.
I think I fully understand why Trump said it on the campaign trail (owning the Democratic reductio of border enforcement), but of all the campaign promises to not break, it’s an absurd hill to die on.
Well damn it, now you’re selling me on The Great Wall Of America despite myself!
When did it being a grotesquely large and pointless work of conspicuous civil engineering ever stop American can-do, moxie, and get-go? Is Mount Rushmore any functional use, and who would have selected Dakota if they weren’t locals trying to gin up tourist trade? In the same way that the Aswan Dam was intended by President Nasser to serve several political purposes, not just “let’s improve crop productivity by being able to control the Nile flooding”, even though it necessitated something as large-scale and imperious as disassembling and reassembling in a new site ancient monuments, so too does the Great Wall Of America serve other ends than the ostensible stated practical one.
Mount Rushmore. The Statue of Liberty. The Grand Canyon. Old Faithful. The Great Wall Of America. A fantastic tourist trip, see them all for the New Greatest Wonders of the World!
“We’re going to have a yuge statue that symbolizes America, and France is going to pay for it!”
Pretty sure the Statue of Liberty symbolizes immigration, not America.
Pretty sure the Statue of Liberty symbolizes… liberty? I mean, Ellis Island is right next to Bedloe’s/Liberty Island so for a lot of immigrants processed at Ellis it’s a powerful symbol, but France didn’t give us the statue because of immigration, right?
But hey… this website says we’re all right!
France gave us the statue to symbolize liberty/republicanism. It was commissioned in the early 1870s, when the Third Republic (1870-1940) was young and unsteady. It was supposed to be delivered in 1876 for the American centennial, but was significantly late.
The verses on the statue are explicitly about immigration.
The bare minimum for a wall or fence being slightly useful is that it forces the adversary to bring and deploy a ladder – or two ladders if they want the option of quickly retreating back into Mexico when the border patrol shows up. This buys the border patrol an extra few minutes to respond, and that’s genuinely useful. Hence the Bush-era fence. There’s a useful deterrent value as well.
But it rapidly reaches a point of diminishing returns, as it doesn’t take that much longer to deploy a taller ladder – at least within the levels we are talking about here. Once you’ve got a fence that can’t be quickly scrambled over or cut through, it’s pretty much over to the border guards to make it work.
Is there any form of passive defense or barrier which would work at least tolerably well at deterring crossers with only a token numbers of border guards patrolling it? Ideally something that would be challenging and expensive for future administrations to dismantle after it has been put into place.
The only thing coming to mind right now are minefields, which seems like overkill.
Minefields definitely would meet the “challenging and expensive for future administrations to dismantle” criteria, but no, there’s not really anything suitable for this.
No. Digging up the mines is relatively trivial (if dangerous), and then the coyotes will have mines to place to fuck with the Border Patrol. Just like a wall, their purpose is to slow people down, though in a war you’d normally use machine guns and artillery instead of trying to catch people crossing.
As long as any trade across the border is allowed, the wall will need to have gaps for the border stations. Which means a future administration could just change the policy for who gets let in at the stations, making the wall and landmines and whatever else you put there irrelevant.
Perhaps the bet here is on the notion that the political opposition isn’t willing to go on record and make it official public policy that lots and lots of people are allowed in with minimal/no screening.
Yes, a future administration could make the wall obsolete by simply declaring open borders to be the new immigration policy. But it seems quite likely that nobody is quite willing to do that (at least for now).
Matt M said what I was planning on saying, but better.
If a fence or a wall really is useless without large numbers of armed men patrolling it, future administrations can quietly neutralize it by reducing the number of armed men on patrol. You can have de facto open borders but if anyone calls you on it you can point to the handful of border patrol agents and call yourself “Deporter-in-Chief.”
If there’s no quiet way to open the border, and you need to send in bulldozers or hang welcome banners on the ports of entry, then it’s much less likely to happen.
If you were to build some really enormous structure, say a wall 50 m high and 10 m deep made of reinforced concrete 1 m thick, then only very determined attempts to cross it would succeed. At 50 m, nobody is going to bring a simple ladder to cross the wall. They’ll need to build scaffolding or bring a serious crane or fire-truck. It will be very obvious if there is any surveillance at all.
Is there a civil engineer in the room? I’d like a price quote on 1000 km of 50-m-tall wall. Also, I want it painted white and to come with a video of me standing atop it saying, “Winter is coming.”
AKA about 30 Hoover Dams worth of concrete.
It’s an immigration policy *and* a stimulus package all in one….
@you need to send in bulldozers-
Ditches are cheaper than walls. A ditch twenty feet deep, with the dirt piled twenty feet high on one side, would not cost the earth, and you’d have a crappy dirt road to drive along and patrol. Sure, ladders, or just determination and a pointed stick in each hand and a rope for later guys. And there you are on foot tired from the climb watching the patrol cars arrive.
Doesn’t work on the flood plain of any river, or in rocky areas with little topsoil.
@Doesn’t work on the flood plain of any river, or on rocky areas with little topsoil-
Wet underwater mud is easy to shovel, and the river is your moat. Dynamite is cheap and works on rocks. Worst case the road wiggles a little. Maybe a bridge where you put a patrol station.
It would still create a bottleneck.
I think the goal of the wall would be to allow in only people lawfully admitted by the government. A future more lenient admission policy would not seem to undermine the purpose of the wall because its policy is neutral as to who gets in so long as the entry is allowed by the United States.
Years ago when I used to read Steve Sailer, he would always talk about the Israelis and their fences and if they could build them then why couldn’t we? (Of course he said it in a much smirkier way than that.)
I don’t remember if Sailer gave specs on those fences but I remember a few of the photos of them and they looked formidable.
John’s point was that any fence or wall is virtually useless if its not patrolled.
Israel is very dedicated to patrolling it’s fence, and even if they weren’t it would be relatively easy to do because it’s relatively short. An equivalent American fence would require more men to patrol properly, and future Democratic administrations would want to make the minimum possible effort patrolling it in order to maximize the number of illegal immigrants coming across the border.
Hence my question: how could you Democrat-proof border security, by making it very hard to open the border without being obvious about it.
It’s not a given that a wall without significant personnel increase would be useless. My bet would be that it reduces illegal crossing to some extent. But we won’t really know unless we run the experiment.
Indeed. Anything that makes crossing the border marginally more difficult should also marginally reduce illegal crossings.
While a carefully monitored wall would be maximally effective, a non-monitored wall would still likely be better than nothing.
>future Democratic administrations would want to make the minimum possible effort patrolling it in order to maximize the number of illegal immigrants coming across the border.
Won’t the future Democratic administrations be too busy confiscating all the guns and arresting all the patriots to bother with opening the border?
Anyway, I’m yet to hear a reasonable explanation from all the “Democrats open borders something something” boo-outgroupers
of why Obama was so spectacularly bad at it for eight years that the number of illegal immigrants went slightly down over his two terms.
Any fence will tend to suffer in the face of someone with 5 minutes and some wire cutters.
Most realistic walls will suffer in the face of someone with 20 minutes and a sledgehammer.
If you aren’t willing to constantly maintain it the barrier goes away.
Is nobody else bothered that people are so utterly opposed to democracy that they want to make it impossible for future democratically elected governments of their own state to choose policies based on the wishes of the future electorate?
Realistically anything like a wall can be undone so the end game seems to be a desire to do away with democracy and replace it with something else because democracy might lead to policies that they don’t like.
@ Murphy
I’m fine with desiring to limit future democratic governments. The constitution does that, too, and it seems to be working out ok so far. It only really becomes a problem when the mistrust in the future becomes downright destructive of the present, such as when people are for excessive tax cuts, so that future governments are constrained by debt.
What I find more worrying is the assumption that a future Democratic government would desire to maximize the number of illegal immigrants, which is up there with ‘Pro-Lifers Don’t Give A Damn About Fetuses’ in violations of the principle of charity.
It’s not a mystery. His presidency started with a massive recession which much of the country hasn’t recovered from a decade later.
Obama made every effort to encourage people to illegally immigrate. DACA and the wave of “unaccompanied child” migrants, the DoJ cracking down on border states like attempting to enforce their own borders, the catch-and-release policy that Trump recently reversed to the media’s horror, etc. But he wasn’t able to do much about the economy so ultimately it didn’t draw in nearly as many people as it would have a few years prior.
Also, the number of illegal immigrants only went down because of our idiotic policy of jus soli. There are now somewhere from hundreds of thousands to millions more undeportable people who never should have been here in the first place. That’s part of the danger here: amnesty or not, the pro-replacement side just needs to run out the clock. It may already be too late.
Surely it is _Republican_ governments who have an artificial incentive to maximise the number of _illegal_ immigrants? Illegals can’t vote, but fill up economic roles that would naturally be filled by Democrats, leaving more natives as managers and owners.
Connecting that to plans for a wall high enough to be profitable for the builders, but low enough to be useless, is perhaps not charitable. But it’s not clearly wrong.
I mean you’re half right.
The Republican establishment is absolutely in love with illegal immigration because of their ties with business owners. But that’s also why the Republican establishment is so deeply unpopular with their voters. Now that Trump has brought immigration restriction back into the Overton window we might even get a choice in the matter.
Not all fences are made of wire. And even fence that is made of wire, can be made highly resistant to wire cutters.
It is relatively cheap and straightforward to build a security fence that sets the bar at, “yes, you really do have to bring an extension ladder”. It’s the next part that’s critical, and simply adding concrete isn’t going to be much help.
@John
I’m somewhat leery that their fence would stand up to decent bolt cutters. If anything except quite expensive bike locks fail to stand up for more than a few seconds I don’t hold much hope for wire fencing.
Re: the more solid metal fences, I’ll give you that, for those it’s upgraded to 10-15 minutes and an angle grinder.
But my point is that if you don’t seriously guard the barrier with humans, it can be significantly dismantled in a very short time period.
@brmic
I’d argue that it isn’t terribly absurd.
many western governments have actively tried to attract immigrants whenever they had a significant labor shortage.
The US historically has actively set out to attract immigrants during labor shortages. Australia had the Ten Pound Poms, the UK had the Windrush generation
It’s not exactly an absurd notion.
In practice the US has a farm labor shortage that natives aren’t terribly willing to fill but has managed to pretend that it doesn’t exist by allowing it filled under the table with illegal immigration.
It’s nominally fine for the US, it gets cheap labor and the laborers accrue no rights. Any serious disturbance of that status quo would either force them to face the shortage and loosen up immigration officially which would be expensive all round.
Of course it’s unpopular with the crowd who like to blame their perpetual lack of employment on foreigners… but most of them wouldn’t actually be willing to take those jobs and the minority which might… wouldn’t for anything less than an extremely large multiple of the wages commanded by immigrants to the point that it’d likely make much of the industry uneconomic.
The border is shorter, but Israel also has a smaller population and budget, so I’m not sure this is a worthwhile comparison.
Israel has a draft, and drafted soldiers are paid something like ~ 5000 dollars/year, whereas US border patrol agents get paid at least 50,000 dollars a year. Israel can afford to have 10x more soldiers than the US, and they still do it for a very small piece of land area.
It is an order of a magnitude cost in enforcement agents. Are you willing to re-introduce the draft and have draftees patrol the border? Because short of a draft, nobody would be willing to patrol vast swaths of nothingness in Texas heat for less than the minimum federal wage. And a draft would be much more unpopular than any wall, however wasteful.
brmic:
Given that there are high-profile Democrats now who advocate open borders and ending ICE, it does not seem terribly uncharitable to imagine that future Democrats might feel similarly.
@Doctor Mist:
It’s disingenuous (and baffling) to conflate opposition to existing border control institutions with a ‘desire to maximize the number of illegal immigrants’. I think most people who hold those positions right now believe honestly that the humanitarian cost of enforcement exceeds that of an uncontrolled border, which can be believed without having any preference about the number of people who actually immigrate.
Is nobody else bothered that people are so utterly opposed to
democracy that they want to make it impossible for future
democratically elected governments of their own state to choose
policies based on the wishes of the future electorate?
You have seriously misunderstood the other side. They don’t want to make it impossible for future administrations to change immigration policy. They
want to make it impossible for future administrations to change immigration policy while lying about it. There is no policy or fence or border
that would withstand an explicit desire of the US Government to change it.
The US historically has actively set out to attract immigrants during labor shortages
We need to stop talking about the UBI if there is a labor shortage, instead of nothing for people to do.
Bolt cutters aside, what about earthquakes ? California gets about one of those per year (though major quakes are more uncommon).
As a So. Cal native, building-toppling earthquakes aren’t an annual event, and the threat of them isn’t enough to deter other construction projects that we think are worthwhile. It may add to the cost by some amount, but not as much as desirable real estate.
There’s a couple things here:
The Bush fences don’t cover the entire border. Even if we don’t make a distinction between fence/wall, covering the entire border should have more deterrence than simply letting immigrants cross the desert.
A fence is probably more vulnerable. Especially since we’re assuming that there won’t be enough border guards to cover every mile, then it’s more important that someone can’t break the barrier easily.
I have no idea how wall upkeep compares to fence upkeep but that’s something to consider.
The wall would be a more permanent structure. That could have more deterrent value to illegal immigrants as well as be harder for a future government to take down..
A lot of the fencing is simply barriers to driving a car across and can easily be hopped over.
Wall or not, there is much more that can be done at the border without even getting in to added border patrol.
Do the people smugglers use mountain bikes? You could easily lift them over the vehicle barrier.
My googling only shows the border patrol using them.
Why not read about the Berlin wall? People come to the US because they are desperate, just as Ost Berliner germans were desperate to escape.
I just visited the wall museum in Berlin two days ago, it was quite interesting to read about how difficult it was for the Ost Deutschland government to properly secure a wall that encloses even a single city.
The people trying to escape from behind the Iron Curtain were in part trying to seek freedom.
To my knowledge, all countries in continental America are some form of democratic government. (Cuba being the main exception). Thus, the people who live there have the ability to change their circumstances. If they aren’t, I have to wonder about the merits of opening the country to a large number of future voters who are trying to flee a country of their own making.
Ah yes, all the problems with stable democracy in Latin America… clearly of their own making.
If only these simple fruit-hatted brown people could get out of their own way! Can’t think of a single reason they’d be skeptical of organizing progressive electoral change and making their own countries better!
Less of this, please. Ideally, none of this.
If you define a government as a monopoly on violence, there are definitely areas in Central America with no government at all. Also, you’re conflating the population as a whole having the ability to change things with any single person or family having that ability.
By that definition I do not think there are any governments, since some private violence occurs in all societies I know of. You can make it a monopoly on legal violence, but that’s a circular definition, since what makes it legal is that it is authorized by the government.
My attempt at a better solution to the problem of defining government.
If “the people have the ability” means “if enough people choose to act together for the purpose,” then it is true of all political systems–a dictator can’t maintain his position if most of the population not only opposes him but are willing to jointly rebel.
If it means “a person has the ability,” then it is not true in a democracy any more than in a dictatorship. Each individual voter has almost no effect on the government he is under. Even if a considerable majority dislike what the government is doing, it doesn’t follow that they will be able to coordinate on an alternative.
A US border wall is easier in some ways than the Berlin Wall; you won’t have the guards themselves trying to escape, for instance. And in many places there are formidable natural barriers on either side, which was not true in Berlin. And the Berlin Wall did work pretty well.
Of course, a US border wall is also harder in many ways too. It’s much longer. There’s no way to have as many patrols. And automated machine gun emplacements are right out.
The only way they managed to make the Berlin wall work is to have a clear line of fire, a second wall, guards everywhere, dogs, civilian informer patrols, informant incentives to rat people out to the secret police, etc. You should read about it, it’s very interesting. It took them many years and a lot of money/manpower to reduce escape attempts to low numbers.
You would have to set up an NK/SK zone, which is not workable.
—
There is also the little matter that US wall fans are using NK and Ost Deutschland as role models for America. Apparently that is the sort of place they want the US to be.
SK and West Germany welcomed refugees.
Ilya,
Various communist hell-holes made it as difficult as possible for people to leave who wanted to leave. Their border guards’ guns were pointed inward. NK and East Germany are extreme cases, but I think a lot of communist countries didn’t want to let their people leave.
Nearly every country has policies to make it difficult for foreigners to come into their country. Some have fences or walls, others just have border guards and deportation hearings. This seems to me like a completely different thing, morally and practically.
Which direction the border guards’ guns are facing is a very big deal, in terms of deciding the moral situation.
The wall may be a bad idea (I think so, FWIW). But it’s not turning the US into East Germany or North Korea, and it’s not even a step in that direction. Confusing the morality of keeping immigrants out and keeping your citizens from leaving seems like it’s kind of blinding yourself, morally. It’s like confusing the morality of slave plantations with the morality of factories with workers paid a wage.
West Berlin did not turn people away who wanted to run away from their hell-hole, neither does SK. Although I am sure both paid an economic cost for hosting refugees, at least in the short term.
In West Berlin they had fire fighters with nets, on call, 24 hours a day, ready to catch people who wanted to jump out of buildings on Bernardstrasse that faced both sides. Such was their commitment to saving people from their misery.
—
Another analogy from relatively recent US history was folks involved in getting slaves out of the south. This was illegal and dangerous, and slaves were not citizens and had no rights. Slaves were people, though, and that was enough to the folks involved in “the railroad.”
West Berlin did not turn people away who wanted to run away from their hell-hole, neither does SK.
Yes, because there was someone else paying for the guards with guns that were controlling the border, so the number of people coming through was going to be minimal in the first place. If Mexico built a wall to keep their population in and shot people trying to escape, that would change a lot of things.
Sure, and that was a good thing. Further, I think West Germany would have welcomed everyone from East Germany who wanted to come. I’m not at all disagreeing with you that accepting refugees is humane and laudable.
What I’m disagreeing with you about is the notion that refusing refugees who want to come from another country is morally equivalent (or really very close) to not letting your people leave your country. The direction that the border guards’ guns are pointing makes a huge moral difference.
Perhaps we should have true open borders and free movement of people. But not having that–having borders that turn people away who want to come to your country, as most countries do right now–is not the same as North Korea or East Germany or the Soviet Union.
Trump’s wall (and walls and fences used elsewhere for slowing down illegal immigration) may be a bad idea, but it’s a very *different* bad idea than the Berlin Wall. I don’t think we learn much about the morality of building a wall/fence to keep immigrants out by comparing it with building a wall/fence to keep your citizens *in*.
@Ilya Shpitser
With regard to the German and Korean borders, in both cases, that’s one nation-state that was divided by external powers. People might say “we should take all comers from across the southern border because they are all human beings”; I can’t think of any smaller-scale groupings of people being appealed to. (Nobody seems to be saying that the US should let all people from the Americas in, or should let Mexicans in but not others because they’re North Americans but the rest aren’t). So it’s not an exact comparison – there’s not the same “these are our siblings, separated by us from misfortune; we must help them” rationale, except insofar as all people are siblings.
With regard to helping fugitive slaves escape: I don’t actually know a great deal about the justification or justifications that those who helped slaves escape, argued for abolition more generally, etc had. So I don’t know whether “these are other Americans, who should have their rights, but are cruelly denied them” was a common reason to be against slavery, to help slaves escape, etc. Anyone know?
I haven’t read a lot of period abolitionist literature, but what I’ve read tends to invoke religious arguments or quasi-religious natural law arguments. The latter does have a lot of “should have their rights, but are cruelly denied them” in it, but the slaves being fellow Americans has nothing to do with it, and at various points many of those abolitionists would have liked to see them stop being Americans. (See the early history of Liberia.)
Taking refugees from a country you are in a cold-war-ish position with is a common tactic. “Look, we got these people to switch to our side, even though they could have been shot trying to flee, clearly we are superior.”
That’s a good point. In this context, however, the people who would say “the US is in a quiet struggle with Mexico, and is way better than Mexico; go USA!” (insert other south-of-the-US countries in place of Mexico as needed) and the people who want to accept more immigrants from those countries (one way or another, legal or illegal) are on the opposite sides of the political divide right now. “The US should take more people from south of the border, fewer questions asked, to prove that USA is #1 and better than where they came from! USA! USA! USA!” would be a synthesis I doubt many people hold, ditto a lot of similar positions.
That is the typical conservative/neocon/neoliberal perspective–let’s have lots of legal immigration, because America is a land of opportunity, and honest hard working people who come here will quickly see our way of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is superior, and let’s keep illegal immigration low to keep out the terrorists and grifters.
Wanting legal immigration low because immigrants bring in their own cultures, religions, values, etc. and might not assimilate and might even be different in relevant genetic ways is much more paleo/alt right.
If you get into economic arguments about not wanting an vastly increased low skilled population to compete with native workers even if it drives down prices, that is more of the populist* right and sometimes left.
All of these may overlap either somewhat contradictory or in convoluted compromises.
*One sign an argument is populist is when it is derided the critics replace “my” with “muh.”
The US and Mexico aren’t involved in anything like a cold war. More importantly, Mexico isn’t shooting people trying to leave.
A wall to keep people out is so vastly different in every way to a wall to keep people in that I doubt the sincerity of anyone who claims to not understand how they aren’t the same. A house I can’t go into is just someone else’s house. A house I can’t get out of is a prison.
What about the fact that most “walls to keep people in” are sold to the public as walls to keep people out. Pretty sure the GDR loudly insisted that the Berlin wall was to keep out evil capitalist spies.
You can actually see for yourself.
There’s a great deal of vagueness about securing frontiers and keeping Berlin from being the flashpoint of World War III, but the only concrete benefit attributed to the wall is,
“We no longer wanted to stand by passively and see how doctors, engineers, and skilled workers were induced by refined methods unworthy of the dignity of man to give up their secure existence in the GDR and work in West Germany or West Berlin. These and other manipulations cost the GDR annual losses amounting to 3.5 thousand million marks.”
That’s so brazen that it’s not even a lie: I don’t think it’s unfair to characterize the East German government’s treatment of its subjects as “refined methods unworthy of the dignity of man”.
@Randy M
Is it? The US currently has a level of legal immigration that’s less than half Canada’s per capita (last available numbers I saw have us taking in 0.7 legal immigrants per 100 Canadians; US 0.3) – how many right-wing proposals argue for doubling per-capita legal immigration?
This would be more easily done with an immigration system more like Canada’s, of course; it’s easier to take more immigrants when you’re selecting for… well, anything better than the US system’s crazy quilt. Last year’s proposed points system for the US would’ve reduced legal numbers, as I recall.
@dndnrsn
Read about Charles Sumner (an extreme example, but he was far from alone.)
Way more people believed slaves should be considered Americans than you would probably suppose, though they were not a majority. Massachusetts was particularly notable in this regard – look at how early they integrated many things. A good portion of the north believed blacks should be Americans, but not necessarily granted full rights or integrated with whites. The ones involved with the Underground Railroad almost definitely believed this, as that was a very risky thing to do if you weren’t a true believer. Many well known figures made extremely blunt statements on this issue that for some reason are just never mentioned. Way too many things in history are justified by the idea that “it just never occurred to them in that time period.” The idea of slaves/black Americans deserving full citizenship rights was extremely well known, particularly in the decades leading up to the civil war – most people were wary of it, but it very much occurred to them, and was debated extensively by brilliant minds.
A larger group of people (particularly in the west), wanted to send them to Liberia etc. and not have them be Americans. This was Abraham Lincoln’s original belief. But even he thought they should all have at least some rights, though he viewed achieving this as kind of a pipe dream due to the widespread racist beliefs.
One thing to look up is the Dred Scott case. The decision in that case said “the black man has no rights that the white man is bound to respect.” This outraged large portions of the country, because even if they were pro-slavery, there were free blacks in existence, and most states gave them at least some rights. This declaration was seen as going way too far and interfering with the laws of other states. It was considered a disturbing statement – few people believed that they were entitled to no protections. That decision contributed a lot to the issues culminating in the Civil War. It was designed to end conflict over slavery, but exacerbated it. Non-slaveholding states realized that slavery was going to spread if that was the mindset.
This is one of the reasons why I advocate making entry across the Southern border at any location other than a marked, official border checkpoint a forcible felony against the US government. It means that should the government choose to not enforce immigration law that “mere” citizens will then be able to use lethal force against the people crossing.
This means that the illegal crossers either need to go through a marked checkpoint, or the border patrol needs to do a well enough job that the general public doesn’t think that playing The Most Dangerous Game is a good idea.
You can call it a forcible felony, you can make it _legally_ so, but you’re rather unlikely to make people believe it is morally the same thing as the traditional forcible felonies. Especially after your border patrol shoots a photogenic young Mexican mother or some American hikers who got lost and crossed the border twice.
What Nybbler says. No matter how reasonable you may think it is to gun down poor Mexican or Central American immigrants trying to sneak across the US border, nor how many people you can find in your bubble to back you up with a “Right On!” or “Preach it, Brother!”, the actual result of that policy isn’t fewer illegal immigrants. It’s fewer Republican politicians, more “deplorables” in jail for murder, and de facto open borders forever.
If you want to Get Tough on Illegal Immigration, you have to do so with solid understanding that this is the the television age, the smartphone age, the youtube age, and all that this implies. If you aren’t very careful in taking that into account, you lose.
What is it with pro-immigration-enforcement people constantly proposing shooting illegal immigrants as a solution to illegal immigration? I guess this is some kind of signaling of how hardcore/serious you are or something, but it tends to convince the rest of us that you’re simply nuts.
Enforcing immigration laws enough to keep nearly all illegal immigrants out isn’t some kind of unreachable goal that can only be accomplished by acting like the villains in some kind of bad action movie. You just make it uneconomical to hire illegal immigrants by fining employers, and deport people here illegally when they become visible to the authorities. Lots of countries do it.
The reason we don’t do it is entirely political–lots of people in our society with significant power don’t want to enforce immigration laws very strictly. Proposing ever-more-crazy enforcement strategies doesn’t do anything to solve that problem. The way you solve that problem is to convince your fellow citizens to support the boring non-movie-villain immigration enforcement stuff that everyone knows how to do. Proposing crazy sh-t like this has the opposite effect–it convinces people who might be persuaded to your side that you’re either unserious or crazy. To the extent moderates become convinced that vigilante death squads are the only way to get border enforcement done, you’re just running a campaign for de-facto open borders, because even people who agree with you that illegal immigration should be stopped are overwhelmingly horrified by that kind of proposal.
“Refuge in audacity” is certainly part of it, but the other part is that I mainly see this point made against people who disagree with you that securing the border is simply and easily done if only we had the political will.
Typically, I see the conversation go something like “The border is so wide and so vast and people in Mexico are so poor and downtrodden, there’s nothing you can do to stop them from coming.” To which a reasonable answer is, in fact, “Well, you could shoot them.” Which might not reduce illegal immigration to literally zero, but likely would significantly reduce the amount of families with children you see attempting illegal crossings at the very least…
@Matt M
I think that “nothing you can do” implies solutions that don’t violate human rights.
Let’s unpack this a bit. The original amnesty/enforcement compromise bill signed by Ronald Reagan had employment verification using a national ID card. That was stuck down by SCOTUS and politicians refused to re-work the enforcement system, so the existing practice continued, only with millions of people now legally citizens and the prospect of yet-another-amnesty bill in-place.
Additionally, there currently are verification systems in place. However, they are notoriously poor in quality, and employers are required to accept that they are valid. Not doing so can be prosecuted as employment discrimination.
Next up, as noted elsewhere, one of the problems is that the government will choose to ignore the issue for various reasons. Business lobbies, whatever. You can’t make the government enforce a law that the government doesn’t want to enforce.
My goal isn’t that the government shoot illegal border crossers. I’m not even looking to have private citizens doing so. My goal is to have the government take their obligations to enforce the border seriously such that private citizens don’t think that driving to middle-of-nowhere with a rifle to shoot people is a good idea. Inherently, the problem is that for whatever reason, the government has long been acting in a way inconsistent with immigration restrictions. Setting up a structure where shooting people crossing the border is legal provides a countervailing force to ensure that the government can’t avoid its obligations.
@Garrett: I’m trying to think of a situation where the government is so strongly anti-immigration that they’ll say “Yes, we’ll allow vigilantes to shoot people crossing the border at will,” but not anti-immigration enough do anything to stop illegal immigrants itself. Call me crazy, but I think “Let’s make E-Verify work better” would be a lot easier to get through Congress than “Let’s shoot illegal immigrants!”
But even if I concede to all the premises needed to make your scheme a reasonable idea, it’s got a bigger problem. It only works if the number of people who think that illegal immigrants are destroying this country is linked to the number of illegal immigrants that are actually entering this country. But that doesn’t appear to be true – illegal immigration rates have been down ever since the Great Recession, but anti-immigrant sentiment is still on the rise.
So the most likely outcome to your plan is that the government does its job, illegal immigration continues its slow decline, but we still get vigilantes going out into the desert looking for someone to shoot and occasionally succeeding.
Well, it would solve the issue of people who claim their sole objection to border control is that it is prohibitively expensive.
Allowing volunteers to shoot illegals would cost the government virtually nothing.
@Matt M
That really is the kind of thing I’d rather you have 1) under the control of elected officials and 2) being done by somebody who’s got a salary we can take. A quick glance around what our police get to show that it’s not a perfect solution, but still preferable to the gangs who are enforcing their own order.
As I alluded to below, I think it’s perfectly appropriate to use lethal force to secure the border, but the point is to secure the border, not use lethal force for lethal force’s sake. If stopping somebody coming across requires shooting them to prevent their escape, fine. However, it’s preferable to arrest them. You won’t get many volunteers for the arrest part, since it’s more difficult and dangerous.
Legalizing vigilantism is worse than legalizing illegal immigration.
@Matt M
Seriously? You want the government to sanction the killing of an already vulnerable populations?
There are multiple TV series where some kind of super-detectives go to the border, and it turns out there is a serial killer who kills illegal immigrants, and border patrol does nothing, and then they catch the guy.
You want to be the guy who says “Well, the serial killer is killing people who have no business being here anyway”?
And what takes from that to say “Let’s get rid of our city’s homeless population; all of them are petty criminals involved in begging/drugs/prostitution anyway”.
And then …
There is a reason why killing civilians intentionally is a war crime.
I do think that using guns against big groups of people that can overpower you makes sense; after all, border patrol agents go in small groups and can encounter big groups. But to have people we have no control over, is a different thing.
@Matt M: Are you equivocating between border control and The Wall? I’m against The Wall because it’s both prohibitively expensive and incredibly stupid. You want to spend that money on hiring more Border Patrol agents instead, I’d still think it’s mostly a waste but it’s not an incredibly stupid waste.
@BBA
It doesn’t seem like the money is the limiting factor here; they have problems filling up the slots that are already available.
Being a border patrol agent requires a background check and to be a mentally healthy, empathetic person (you don’t want psycopaths to have power over such a vulnerable population).
And then you put that person, who has gone through extensive training and has passed all the background checks, in the middle of nowhere, patrolling vast amounts of nothingness alone.
The cities they live in probably don’t have that much in the way of entertainment. It is a job for a loner who likes the desert.
I don’t think we should base public policy based on what hollywood scriptwriters think might happen.
OK, but do you want to be the cliche evil guy from a TV series?
Art shows us how people think; movies reveal quite a bit about its creators values, by showing who are the heroes and who are the evil guys. I have never seen a movie, TV series, or any book where the hero is the guy who goes killing defenceless human beings. This suggests that most people would not approve of such a thing.
I am pretty sure that nobody wants to be the evil guy.
Come on, guys. This is a really, really bad idea.
Vigilantes shooting at illegal immigrants will just turn them into martyrs for the Blue Tribe press to parade around.
Plus, you know… it’s just a monstrous thing to do in the first place.
And how would vigilantes even know who is a citizen? Do you travel everywhere with your ID card? Never, ever forget your driver’s license, even once?
America really needs to be stopped.
To be fair, the easiest way to stop America from this particular evil is to stop trying to immigrate to it. Trying to force America to take in millions of immigrants that millions of Americans seem to really want to live next door to, and live next door to them without ever treating them badly, seems like it would require implausibly intrusive and forceful measures.
More generally, the list of nations that need to be stopped should probably start with nations that are doing evil things to other people in other nations, followed by nations that are doing evil things to their own people but not letting them leave, then nations that are doing evil things to their own people but letting them leave if they want, then maybe nations that are publicly encouraging immigrants but secretly doing evil to them when they arrive, with the nations that brag about the evil they are going to do to any immigrants being the lowest priority because just don’t go there. Also, maybe not starting with the nation that has half of the world’s nuclear missiles.
TL,DR: Kind of looks like you want to solve the lowest priority problem in the hardest possible way.
I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news…
I expressed myself badly. I meant to signal something like “Stop America” (as in “Stop White People”), or “Cancel America 2k18”, with respect to the callous disregard for human life that is evident in this thread and seems to be a fixed part of American culture. From my perspective (and I expect that of most non-Americans here as well), all lives matter and almost all violent deaths are tragedies. I don’t feel too bad about people being killed in self-defence, and while I disagree with the American view that killing burglars is A-OK, I don’t think it’s completely absurd. But when you expand the set of people whom it is is fine to murder to include simple trespassers, that shows something is really wrong.
I don’t think believing that some humans aren’t really people and so can be killed freely is particularly uncommon (at least on a global scale). But that’s not what Americans seem to do. They recognise that burglars/illegal immigrants/police officers are people just like themselves, while simultaneously believing that their lives don’t have moral value. Contrast this with civilised groups like Nazis, who take care to dehumanise their victims first. One might claim that this is what e.g. someone who sincerely says “kill the pigs” is using the language of dehumanisation, but they don’t actually believe that a police officer is fundamentally inferior to a normal person in the way e.g. ISIS believe they are fundamentally superior to infidels. At least according to my armchair sociology, the American attitude requires/embodies a culture of violence that is absent from genuinely civilised countries.
My thought has always been: why not an electronic wall? Buy about a million 360 degree cameras and put them in hardened positions every ten feet along the border. You now have a constant view of virtually the entire border. Pair this with rapid response units behind them. The moment someone passes the border, the border patrol gets in their trucks and tries to stop them. Maybe they can be assisted by a satellite feed or perhaps overhead planes who will keeps eyes on the migrants. If anyone tampers with the cameras, the border patrol shows up and arrests them.
If each camera (including installation) costs a total of $1,000, this plan will cost a total of slightly more than a billion dollars, less than Bush’s fence.
This would give us a solid idea of total border crossings. It would be hard to ever wind down since it’s not inhumane in any way. It would not be overly expensive to maintain. We would have specific statistics on the percentage of illegal immigrants the border patrol catches vs doesn’t. It won’t stop all illegal immigration, but it will make it significantly more likely to get caught. Especially if you do it repeatedly, as most criminals have to. Add in a system of overstaying visa checks and perhaps real penalties for hiring illegal workers and you’d have an effective system.
The only work around I can think of is either a banzai run (put as many people as possible across and hope the border patrol can’t catch them all) which suffers from coordination issues. It is also especially hard for criminal syndicates. A hundred migrant workers might do it, but a hundred drug mules? The cartel would lose all the drugs from everyone caught.
The other would be a tunnel. We could put seismic detectors down to deal with that. Even without them, tunnels that go for several hundred feet require relatively sophisticated engineering techniques. (And they’d have to start and exit far enough from the cameras to not be seen, so they’d be longer than those going under a wall.) They’re also entirely stationary assets whose location becomes more apparent with use.
Yes, and the moment a stray dog passes the border, the border patrol gets in their trucks and tries to stop them. And almost certainly fails whether it’s a literal or figurative coyote they are chasing, with the miscreant gone out of sight long before the border guards arrive, because we don’t have enough border guards. And nobody has a credible plan to hire them.
That was the problem we were trying to point out in the last thread.
Cameras have no great difficulty differentiating a stray dog from a person at a distance of five feet with multiple angles. We could occasionally trim the underbrush to make it even easier. That would be a problem with, say, a laser tripwire, which is why I didn’t propose that.
Also, “sit in an air-conditioned response station, get in an air-conditioned truck, then drive out to arrest someone” is a lot cushier job than what border guards currently do. If we can’t raise the pay, we can make the job cushier to the same effect. But I’m not aware of the specifics of why we have that trouble, other than underfunding.
Wait, are we talking about literal cameras? Because then you don’t need to have the cameras automatically identifying if it’s a human or a dog – the guards can check the feed before they jump in their cars.
Literal cameras will be covered in enough dust and/or mud to be worthless when you need them, and they probably won’t be waiting on nature to provide the dust or mud.
More generally, electronic “walls” have been tried, repeatedly, and they never work – unless you have enough border guards to e.g. chase off everyone who tries to smear mud onto the camera lens, which is roughly the number of border guards you need to chase off everyone who tries to set up a ladder to scale your fence. And you can’t cause a thousand dollars worth of damage to a fence with a pellet gun.
I’m looking for references for cameras on walls not being effective, but google is drowning me with people having problems with their dropcams. I did find http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3042805/Shocking-images-cameras-Texas-Mexico-border-capture-steady-stream-illegal-immigrants-sneaking-United-States-packages-drugs-guns.html which says that the motion detectors are working well, but it’s the Daily Fail so I don’t quite trust them.
If you have two fences, the second 10-20 yards behind the first (which is a good way of increasing wall strength anyway), you can line the second fence with camera spheres, only some of which are live. Like retail stores do, so that thieves never know exactly which spheres are watching.
The call was for “a million cameras.” The border is up to 2000 miles long, depending on who you ask, so that’s a camera every 10 feet, which is way more than is needed. You might want a camera sphere every 10 feet but only 1/3 to 1/4 of them need to be real.
They could be maintained, you know, and hardened in a way to make that more difficult. There’d also be significant redundancy. As for people damaging them, that’s a good way to get border patrol inbound. Plus we could enhance penalties for that, the same way you get treated more harshly if you run from the Border Patrol than if you surrender to them.
Evidence? And a wall might make them take longer but it doesn’t tell you where they are.
Also, you’re ignoring the ‘hardened’ part. We are perfectly capable of making cameras that can’t be taken out with a pellet gun. Maybe put a bulletproof glass bubble, as the US already does outside certain sensitive sites.
A good challenge to installing cameras would be do ask: what are the current techniques for detecting people hopping the fence? We know that electronic surveillance is already in place from the article I supplied. Maybe cameras are already used where they would be best.
By who? The problem, as some of us have been trying to explain for two open threads now, is that walls and fences are next to useless for the US because we don’t have and aren’t going to get a border patrol that can reliably chase down the people who will climb over them. So we certainly don’t have a border patrol that can both chase down the border-crossers and fix every randomly failed or opportunistically sabotaged camera faster than the desert and the coyotes can destroy them.
Things like radar, acoustics, and capacitance wires don’t need exposed optics to work and so can be reasonably hardened, but A: that costs extra and B: the false alarm rate is intolerable. Unless you’ve got enough border guards to send most of them chasing wild geese, which we don’t.
Why not? You have insisted this is a problem and one that cannot be solved. You have yet to give a single reason as to why that is. As I’ve said, this would make the job easier and give them more time, making it easier to hire for and meaning we’d need less than we would otherwise. But I don’t even know if that addresses your point because you’ve only said we can’t get enough BP agents, not why or even how many.
I repeat, cameras have a negligible false positive rate a distance of five feet. I already conceded that something like a tripwire would have a high false positive rate.
I feel like I’m repeating myself over and over again. You’re just saying ‘Wrong, wrong, it’s wrong! In a non-specific way I will not elaborate on! But trust me it won’t work!’ You’ve ignored me explicitly asking for evidence of your claims. You’ve ignored me asking to elaborate. So while I appreciate people challenging my ideas, I’m going to bow out from replying to you.
Here’s seven
1. Donald Trump doesn’t have anything remotely resembling a plan to do this, so it’s not going to happen
2. There aren’t enough qualified people who want to be border patrol agents to fill the slots already authorized, much less expand the force
3. The Border Patrol’s bureaucracy and its existing agents will resist, the way only civil servants can, any plan to dilute their institutional standards and take in unqualified applicants
4. The Border Patrol’s existing agents will particularly resist, the way only civil servants with a union can, any plan to offer lots of money to attract new applicants that doesn’t also involve lots more money to the existing agents
5. Donald Trump has yet to secure more than token funding for the yuge physically imposing wall he really cares about, so no way does he get the funding to massively expand the Border Patrol (and see #4)
6. Even if he did, the next president would zero it out and let all your fancy cameras go to ruin
7. Donald Trump doesn’t have anything remotely resembling a plan to do this, so it’s not going to happen
@John Schilling
Surely one immigration issue everyone can agree on is, keep the geese out?
Or cooked, one of the two.
I like this idea, because it’s politically flexible. Pro-immigration politicians can selectively defund sections of the wall. Anti-immugration ones can increase the number of mobile guard units. Alt-righters can upgrade the cameras to sentry guns. There’s something there for everyone ! 🙂
The new app, Bordr, will definitely have lootboxes.
I feel as though you could do it with less than one every 10ft. Maybe one every 30ft would be fine.
I think some redundancy should be built in. But yes. My point was that even that stupidly large amount of cameras would be relatively cheaper and cover more territory.
I’ve recently become interested in Dempster-Schafer Theory..
Dempster-Schafer describes quantified expressions of uncertainty called beleif functions. What’s wild is that they seem to be proposed as an ALTERNATIVE to probability distributions (at least as we normally understand them).
There are some claims, I think, that they allow a better representation of high-level uncertainty. If you observe part of a population of things, what can you say about the rest of the population? Dempster-Schafer allows you to place ‘lower’ and ‘upper’ bounds, of a sort, on the likelihood of observing something in the population as a whole, based on your partial observation. For example: If I draw five red marbles and two blue marbles out of a big sack, Dempster-Schafer lets me write a belief function that says ‘the distribution of blue balls in this bag is at least 5/(number of balls) and no greater than (number of balls – 2)/(number of balls)’ whereas ‘those Bayesians’ would require you to use something like second-order probabilities to describe your uncertainty about the distribution of marbles.
But it gets weird. There’s also a method for combining independent sources of belief called Dempster’s Rule, which so far as I can find is not rigorously justified by a connection to anything in particular outside of Dempster-Schafer theory. Yet somehow there’s a whole community of papers about this topic.
Anyway. I’m not sure I fully understand it. The time I spent studying it has been snuck in at work on grounds of this-is-arguably-relevant-to-artificial-intelligence. I’m trying to figure out if there’s actually anything to this, or if it’s a bunch of nonsense.
Does anyone else around here know about this theory? If so, what do they think of it? Is it nonsense? Definitely interested in the opinions of XRationalists, self-described Bayesians that they are (is that still a big thing in Yudkowsky’s community?), but also all of the fine intelligent folks at SSC.
Interesting. I think alternative representations for belief are interesting, because it’s not obvious to me that probability is the ideal such. This one is new to me, though.
It’s good, from my perspective, that it provides a way to represent a total lack of knowledge, since this seems like one weakness of probability. (What probability do you assign to the proposition that a smeerp is flurblax?)
The Wikipedia page doesn’t give much in the way of motivation for the inference operator (Dempster’s Rule). But this paper, in an attempt to discredit the rule, actually made it seem more plausible to me. In particular, it gives this example: you have three suspects for a crime (X, Y, and Z), and two witnesses (A, and B). Witness A’s testimony is that there is a 99% chance X is the murderer and a 1% chance Y is the murderer. Witness B’s testimony is that there is a 99% chance Z is the murderer and a 1% chance Y is the murderer. Dempster’s Rule gives a 100% chance Y is the murderer, which the authors find implausible, and they suggest alternative “cumulative” and “averaging” operators that yield ~50% chances for X and Z. Then they show that if the testimony of the witnesses is “discounted” by assigning a small amount of probability to the complete set in the column for each witness, the result of DR comes out more like the average.
I could be missing something, but this seems like a reasonably good showing for DR in this situation. Applying a belief fusion operator directly to the witness testimony presumably represents perfect confidence in the reliability of the witness. If two perfectly reliable witnesses give testimony whose only possible intersection is that Y is the murderer, then Y is the murderer. (“when you have eliminated the impossible…”) This conflicts with intuition only because we know that witnesses are unreliable, and apparently fixing this fixes the “problem”.
(This made me somewhat lose trust in the authors of that paper, and I didn’t finish skimming it, so maybe there is a better argument later.)
Apparently there is a proposed variant of DR where “conflicting” belief mass gets assigned to the empty set rather than normalized away. The idea being that if most of your belief mass winds up there, it’s a sign that you are “probably” confused – maybe the true answer is outside the universe of your set, or maybe you interpreted some of your evidence incorrectly. This is appealing to me.
On the downside, manipulating these belief functions sounds computationally intensive when the sets aren’t tiny. Maybe they aren’t actually more practical than huge matrices of conditional probabilities representing every possible combination of beliefs?
On the whole: somewhat promising, but I’m definitely not ready to drink the Kool-Aid.
It’s probably dumb of me to comment on this since I haven’t read the paper and know nothing about the theory under discussion. But out of curiosity, your initial description of the problem doesn’t say anything about having already established that both witnesses are infallible. Your explanation why the author’s criticism is wrong seems to assume knowledge that they are both infallible. (You say “perfectly reliable” but to be clear it sounds like you have to assume perfect reliability not only as to the honesty of their statements but also as to the accuracy of their knowledge for your explanation to hold.) Is there something in the problem that builds in the extraordinary assumption that the witnesses both have to be inerrant in their claims? And if not I don’t quite understand why the authors are not correct that the inference of 100% Y is extremely counterintuitive. It’s one thing to say that the application of the rule presupposes some degree of trust in the sources of evidence. It seems another entirely to say that it presupposes that both are absolutely infallible and that neither could possibly have made a mistake.
In short, yes, the way they represented the beliefs to be fused implies an assumption that they are each infallible.
The DS representation of belief is a mapping from subsets of possibilities (not individual possibilities, as with probabilities) to weights summing to 1. It provides, among other things, a way to distinguish “the coin is heads with exactly 50% probability” (H=.5,T=.5) from “I have no idea of the state of the coin” (HT=1).
The paper is applying the belief fusion operator to the beliefs (X=.99,Y=.01) and (Y=.01,Z=.99). These beliefs are “dogmatic”: they assign no weight to the universal set. And each belief assigns a weight of zero to one of the suspects. If you take these seriously as your own beliefs, the only possible conclusion is Y.
You don’t go about solving a crime by directly adopting the beliefs of witnesses as your own and then fusing them! As I understand it, in DS theory the approach to this sort of inference would be to first decide what belief we would have based on A’s testimony (not the same as the belief expressed by that testimony) and likewise for B, and then fuse those (allegedly independent) beliefs with the DS rule. So even if we trust A and B a lot, we might adopt beliefs more like (X=.98,Y=.01,XYZ=.01) and (Y=.01,Z=.98,XYZ=.01) admitting a small possibility that the testimony of each witness is wrong. And then (as shown in the paper) we get something reasonable looking!
There probably is something deeply wrong with DS theory; I’m just saying this isn’t it. Any inference method can give you silly answers if you feed it silly assumptions.
Interesting. Thank you for the explanation. Apologies for my Dempster fire of a comment.
I also ran into that paper, and like your analysis.
I’m uncomfortable about things like second-order probabilities.
Sometimes it works. If you observe a sample of some population, you CAN come up with an estimate of the ‘likelihood’ that the next ball will be blue, or green, or whatever. You can assume it follows the distribution you’ve already seen. Moreover, you know that you’re more likely to have seen a representative distribution as you draw more and data. If you know how big the population is, and you have the assumption that you drew completely randomly from this population, then I believe there’s a formula for this. The likelihood of the population have THIS distribution, times the likelihood that I would draw this sample given that distribution…it’s a Bayes’ Rule thing.
But that still requires you to have a prior over what kind of bag of marbles you’re holding. And there are so many problems where it’s difficult to say if you have that kind of knowledge.
But I don’t know that DS addresses all of this either. This combination rule needs to connect to something outside itself, or it just feels like it was pulled out of the Dempster at random.
Update: I found a survey paper which, though pretty terse, seems like a more trustworthy introduction than the Wikipedia article. The authors also have written a book if you are interested. The survey paper mentions several different approaches to grounding DS theory in probability theory. I won’t try to summarize, because it is already almost too dense to follow. But I think it convinces me that the Dempster Rule can be justified in some model, while leaving me very uncertain that it is a useful model.
It also proves (in the context of a particular model of DS) that the fusion of a Bayesian belief and an arbitrary belief is a Bayesian belief, and that only a small amount of the information in the arbitrary belief (the plausibility of the singletons) is relevant to the result. The former seems promising to me – it implies that you can get to probabilities any time you want to add priors, and if it’s the case that it gives the same results as Bayesian inference when all the beliefs are Bayesian that would be good – but the latter seems potentially damning: what exactly is all this extra information we are carrying around if it never can impact a probability?
After some reading into this, it seems like the authors are saying the ‘support’ and ‘plausibility’, concepts which were frequently misunderstood, are actually like lower and upper ‘bounds’ on the ‘true’ probability of an event.
I keep going back to marbles. If I take two red and two blue marbles out of a bag, then put them back, I know that if I pull a marble out–well, there’s at least a certain chance of pulling out a red marble. I’d have to make up a ‘prior’ pretty much out of thin air to get an exact probability, but I know that at least two of the marbles are red, so there’s a lower bound. And I know at least two of the marbles aren’t red, so that’s an upper bound.
In some sense, it seems that DS might not be pointing to anything in reality. From a Bayesian perspective, after all, there’s no such thing as ‘true’ probability. Something is either true or it isn’t, and probability is just how likely we should estimate it given what we know.
On the other hand, there’s a sense in which DS might be doing something intuitively useful. In the bag problem, I model the drawing out of a marble as ‘truly random’. I’m not considering that I might learn where the marbles are in the bag, or take advantage of determinism to figure out which one I’ll draw. There’s an ‘upper limit’ to the probability of me estimating that I’ll draw a red marble, because I restrict the information I might learn to the collection of marbles in the bag.
I feel I am still confused, though, so maybe don’t take this too seriously.
I haven’t read the links carefully yet, but this seems relevant for the issue of dealing with “subjective uncertainty”, which has become an issue in environmental economics. Basically, when making projections of the economic impacts of different climate policies there are some variables which are completely unconstrained, and come down to expert judgments. An example is the discount rate: how much we want to push the costs of climate change onto future generations. Taking a steep discount rate means that we expect future generations to come up with technological innovations to deal with the effects of climate change, and we shouldn’t worry about emitting carbon today. A low discount rate implies that we should be doing everything we can to reduce carbon emissions. There’s no “correct” answer to this, so people just go with their preference. On the science side, we know the climate has “tipping point”, but we don’t know how close we are to any of these.
Since people have different subjective opinions on these issues, they can reach very different conclusions, even given the same data and models. This is also described as the issue of having multiple priors. So the question is, what’s the best way of aggregating over very different opinions? Right now everyone ignores each other, which makes their conclusions seem more certain than they actually are, and is a dangerous place to be. There’s starting to be some theoretical work on how to combine multiple priors, mainly focused on balancing risk and subjective estimates of uncertainty, but this seems to be quite early-stage. I wrote more about this here.
This also seems relevant for worries about GAI and goal-alignment, or any situation where we’re relying on expert opinion, rather than using conventional statistical techniques to quantify uncertainty.
Dempster shafer theory is a way to aggregate data without being overconfident, and is an established subdiscipline of uncertainty theory. I like its ability to model absolute uncertainty, although it can also be parsed in more objectivist ways for people who like that sort of thing, with upper and lower objective frequencies of events. And if you really like expected utility but don’t want to commit to probabilistic beliefs, Smets’ work on pignistic probabilities allows you to have dempster shafer beliefs but still adhere to expected utility.
On a practical level, I have some serious reservations about it though. Probability theory on its own can be computationally intractable in many real world examples, and dempster shafer theory is far worse. Even simple problems quickly become entirely intractable. Maybe there are computational shortcuts that are pretty close to working okay, but if so I don’t know them. Also, somewhat alarmingly, if your beliefs are not dogmatic, then compounding perspectives leads (as I recall—it hasn’t been a few years since I seriously delved into this theory) to increased rather than decreased uncertainty. The dempster shafer rule of composition assumes some independence between perspectives—alternatives exist, but the more of them you use the more ad how your conclusions will be.
What made him Unthready?
He’s not wearing pants under that cloak.
In Old Scottalexandrian, ‘Ready’ actually meant ‘advised’. So Ethelthread actually meant ‘Advised by an old woman named Ethel’. Naturally, the moniker ‘unthready’ comes after the publication of Unsong, which provides an entirely different kind of advice than Ethel’s.
You can’t pass him through the eye of a needle, even with a good eye and a steady hand. But that’s true of most men, alas.
He appears to be rolling some ball bearings in his right hand like Capt. Queeg. That can’t have helped.
In an earlier OT we discussed what might be done to replace college, under the assumption that Tyler Cowen is exactly right that college is not about learning things, but rather about proving oneself intelligent, conscientious, and conformant. One commenter pointed out that it would be useful for whatever institution or program being proposed to be familiar, meaning at least superficially like existing offerings, to gain acceptance by students and employers. That’s a reasonable suggestion, so let’s go with that.
What I am proposing is a proper four-year degree that should be at least as good a proof of the three qualities as most such degrees, but is designed to be cheaper. I call it Hard Cheap College.
A degree from Hard Cheap College is good proof of the three qualities because the academic demands are deliberately high, grading is severe, support (such as tutoring and counselling) is at best limited, and instructors are encouraged to structure courses and assignments so as to trip up the undisciplined. To verify social skills (indicative of conformity) group assignments are common, and often have instructor-created groups.
In order to be cheap the college provides nothing outside its educational mission. There are no sports teams, no student activities, and no lounges. Classes are large. The faculty is qualified, but not exceptional. The college is located on the outskirts of a large urban center and mostly serves commuter students. The curriculum is chosen to include only subjects that can be taught inexpensively. English, math, and history, yes; petroleum engineering or chemistry, no. It probably wouldn’t offer a major in computer science, for example, since such profs are in high demand and hence expensive.
All in all, Hard Cheap College is designed to offer something that is recognizably a four-year college degree, optimized to be particularly good proof of the three essential qualities, and distinctly cheap.
Thoughts?
I think some of the goals are contrary to each other. The practical people looking at such a school are going to want the degrees that lead to a high-paying career.
Aside from that, cheaper and more bare-bones schools used to exist. Some state universities; I believe Temple had that sort of reputation for a while. But all the free money in the university system has made them go away.
How would this be cheaper than (or superior to), say, community college?
I don’t think community college courses are known for being difficult.
True. But if it gets 2/3rds of the qualities at 1/10th of the price, doesn’t that soak up most of the market? Wouldn’t it be easier just to have some CC’s that are hard?
Community College classes are no more difficult than a regular old land-grant university. Some hyper-selective program within that regular old land-grant university might have more difficult coursework, but that’s usually because the community college doesn’t have those sorts of degrees on offer at all, not the difficulty of the course. That said – the fact that there’s no selectivity in community colleges lowers its signaling value significantly.
Have you had experience at both?
I got my undergraduate and master’s at a 3rd tier university, just a step up from community college, really. During my master’s program, I also taught undergraduates. (Engineering Statics, Engineering Dynamics, and a computer programming course aimed at engineering students)
Then I went for a PhD a top-tier engineering school. The classes were incredibly difficult and rigorous, and I had trouble even in the classes I re-took at my second school. I taught again (an Engineering Dynamics & Controls class, and filled in a bit lecturing in a Flight Mechanics class). Much more rigor was expected from the undergraduates at this school as well.
I got straight A’s at the first school. I was on academic probation most of my time at the second.
My suspicion is that community colleges would generally be easier than my first university.
I don’t think we’re talking about the same things. I was making the comparison to just “A Random University” (think general admission to a state school) , not “A top tier engineering school (engineering schools are already known for their rigor). I would suspect that there’s a larger gap between say – Marlboro College and MIT than there is between PoDunk Local CC and Marlboro College.
Maybe so…
I went to a very large community college in California, then to Arizona State to finish my 4-year degree. The CC classes were higher-variance, but many of them were as hard or harder than all but the hardest classes I took at ASU.
Just one datapoint, and I’m sure ASU is an “easier” four-year college (although I did get a degree in Math, which I imagine is one of the more difficult majors).
A lot of people go to community colleges for two years and then transfer to standard colleges. They often have to work to convince the standard colleges that they are capable of handling the workload, and that the courses they took in CC are adequate for transfer. If HCC was located near several standard colleges and did a good job building its reputation among them, it might be able to promote itself as the community college whose transfers always succeeded.
Except for the restrictions of majors offered, you’ve basically described how universities work in Germany and in many other European countries.
And except group assignments – at least in some subjects we don’t have any. I don’t see that European universities require conformity; then again, I don’t know how American universities require conformity, so I don’t know what johan_larson exactly means.
A relevant feature of European universities is that you almost exclusively study your “major”, unlike, as far as I understand, in America.
As for the subjects, you don’t have to restrict them, just charge more for the more expensive ones.
Europe and alike, as far as I know:
1) Shorter programs. University in non-engineering is 3 years. No College required. No Major/minor splits.
2) Large classes, a lot of reading/online practice, and HW submitting. Not a lot of Hands-on, except in Lab sciences like Chemistry. Almost no tutoring.
3) Exams rule, meaning you could not get to a lecture at all, and still pass if you passed the exam.
4) Government subsidies with strings attached. For example, limitations of salaries. This can really make University much cheaper, if there is no competition for salaries. It has been proven that for OK salary a lot of people would take a huge pay cut in order to be in Academia.
5) A lot less focus on amenities, like sports, etc.
@nzk
1) Europe changed to a bachelor/master model to make it easier to switch to a different university/college in the same or another country. The length of the bachelor and master phases can differ.
Both in Germany and The Netherlands, there is a distinction between higher education that is academic and higher education that is more practically oriented.
In The Netherlands, the practical kind are called HBO (Higher Professional Education) and the more academic kind are called universities. The former typically have 4 year programs that grant a bachelor, while the latter have 3 year bachelors and 1-2 year masters. A HBO bachelor does not automatically grant access to a university master. Students often have to first get extra education, called a premaster. This is typically a 6 month program.
2) This can vary greatly. My experience is very different from what you describe, but I’ve heard that it can differ greatly by subject and/or university.
3) My experience as well, with a lot of students skipping the lectures to study on their own/play computer games
4) There is no salary limitation if you get Dutch government subsidies. Over time, subsidies for individual students have turned into loans more and more anyway, so current students will be paying the money back. However, students still pay only part of the costs (subsidies are now going directly to the university/HBO).
5) True. It’s more private initiative than the university providing services. Some fraternities/sororities organize sports and cultural events.
In Hungary we have large classes for lectures, but we also have practice or exercise classes in smaller groups (at least in sciences, including non-lab sciences like math). I think this is a good setup. The exercise classes are often held by PhD students or master students for symbolic pay.
As Aapje said, universities typically have 3 years Bachelors and 2 year Masters. A Bachelor is enough for some jobs, but a lot of jobs require a Master. Engineering is like this, too (or perhaps it’s 3.5+2 years), but perhaps most jobs require a master. A few subjects are “unsplit”, i.e. 5 year master with no bachelor.
3) They’ve started to record them nowadays. Lots of my friends watch a large proportion of their lectures at home, at 1.25x speed.
4) Well apparently the salary limitation is not universal in Europe, but does exist in some countries.
@nzk
Can you give me more information on that? I’ve never heard about that.
You don’t have to pay back the subsidy if your salary is below a certain limit. Is that what you meant instead?
Well, I know it by experience, so I hunted for links. I didn’t really check their validity.
Italy
According to this link, the academic salaries are set by legislation. That is it.
Israel
Salaries are negotiated at national level, between ministry of Education and Professor’s Union.
France
Fixed salaries at national level.
I know there are all kind of bonuses, mostly for getting big grants. But this doesn’t come directly from the institution.
@nzk
Oh, that’s what you meant.
It’s not surprising that the government decides the salaries for people who work for the government (and to have unions fight to have higher salaries).
How would you attract students?
I assume you think the “cheap” aspect is doing that, but I would propose that for students who are willing/able to deal with the “hard” part, college is already “cheap,” in the form of scholarships (or the fact that non-prestigious schools are already fairly cheap on their own).
Your target customer would seem to be a student that is smart and motivated enough to deal with a much-harder-than-typical college experience, but also desires/requires a very cheap experience. I’m not sure those exist. Doesn’t Harvard famously grant scholarships to anyone they accept that doesn’t come from a rich family?
I myself, when applying for grad school, got to pick between Top 10 programs that weren’t offering me scholarships, and #10-20 programs that were offering me a totally free ride.
I picture someone ambitious but poor, yes, and capable enough that they have some hope of making it through HCC. I don’t have a good picture of how talented you have to be to start pulling in serious scholarship money, but I am under the impression it is dead easy to end up six figures in debt after going to a four-year college, particularly since some financial aid comes in the form of loans, not grants. That sort of debt-load seems like something people would be eager to avoid.
I’m expecting HCC to cost something like $10,000 per year. That compares with $14,000 (in-state) or $39,000 (out-of-state) for Michigan State University, a third-tier institution. I thing HCC would offer instruction roughly comparable to MSU and have rather higher expectations, but have much less choice in areas of study and much worse student life.
Is there a range of poor but talented and ambitious where that’s an attractive offer? I’m not sure.
Okay, so you’re offering a roughly 30% discount on the sticker-rate price of a third-tier university, with presumably harder instruction and significantly fewer perks (and potentially no guaranteed loans, but I don’t think you clarified whether you’d be federally endorsed and able to support that or not).
I’m sorry but I don’t think this will appeal to much of anybody.
As I was saying in my own personal example, students are often faced choices such that you can trade-off cost and prestige. A hypothetical student that’s good enough to get into a second-tier school with no scholarship is quite likely to be able to get a full ride or significant scholarship to the third-tier institution of their choice.
So right from the start, you’re limiting your customer base to people who are already not good enough applicants to get any scholarships at a third tier school. In which case they probably could get a significant scholarship at a fourth-tier school.
The “poor but talented and ambitious” class certainly exists. But the entire system is set up such that cost isn’t really considered by most students, due to a combination of self-selection with scholarships as well as guaranteed loans. If you’re talented and ambitious, the cost doesn’t matter – you’ll make the money back (and then some) in your future career. Or if you’re particularly conservative with money, you can move down a tier and go to school for free.
Also note that a high failure/drop-out rate adds to the cost for the students.
Not to mention it’s likely to end up with the regulators on your back. As far as I can tell, schools with low graduation rates are typically viewed as “this school isn’t doing a good enough job helping it’s students graduate” rather than “wow this school must be really elite since so many students don’t make the cut”
(and to have unions fight to have higher salaries).
And no one to fight against them.
The government official has no reason not to hand out salaries and benefits. Especially retirement ones, where he’ll be retired to another state before the bill comes due.
@Mary
Yet, teachers don’t get paid especially high salaries.
Teachers are also quite reluctant to strike, because doing so mainly harms students, not their employer.
That’s at least the conventional wisdom. Here’s a piece arguing that they do.
This idea just really, really cannot compete with “Go to Germany, Study there for free”.
German universities have far more solid reputations – And an american who successfully completes a degree in a German university is signalling conscientiousness and competence pretty darn hard. So the price tag is lower, the signalling worth is far higher, and.. well, also, German universities insist on instilling an actual skill of some kind.
There has to be a catch.
If I had to guess, that the classes are taught in German.
Friends in Germany would probably be lower value than American ones if you wanted to go back to the US.
@Thomas Jørgensen
Germany seems to be reintroducing tuition fees for foreign students.
They have relatively low rankings, because the rankings are more suited to how Anglo-Saxon countries are organized. For example, lots of research in Germany is done by national research organizations, like Fraunhofer, Max-Planck & Leibniz, while in the US much more research is done at the universities. A decent number of employees of the German national research organizations are professors and teachers at the universities, but their research isn’t counted in the university rankings, while American professors and teachers more often publish in the name of the university, so their research increases the ranking much more.
German universities also grade very harshly, so compared that American students that benefit from grade inflation, equally performing students from German universities look much worse.
So I think that it is hard to impress upon American employers how good you are, if you get a German degree.
You’re trying to treat humans as PeopleBotUnits when in reality people do actually give a damn about how they live for notable fractions of their entire life.
Your institution will quickly devolve into a beast primarily dedicated to feeding the paychecks of the board with few other priorities. It’ll be a horrible place to study and as such the people who can go elsewhere will do so. Those will tend to be the cream of the crop leaving you will the least promising students.
So you lose the Intelligent and conscientious signal because mostly those people avoid your institution because the majority of them have better options.
anyway.
You’re describing an IT or technical college.
They tend to be the pits.
They’re basically the same idea and they hit the same problems yours will.
Namely distribution of power.
Lots of institutions try to set up to compete with the big educational institutions but they tend to fail because they try to run it like a Cargo Cult. They think that only the part the students see matters… which is basically like a company only hiring web developers and visual designers while never hiring any backend devs or database people…. because their website is the part that customers see. Why would they wastefully spend money on anything else?
Once you set up your institution you need mechanisms to keep money flowing to the parts of the institution that benefit the students and mechanisms to spot problems and failing parts of your institution.
If you’re familiar with the inside workings of big old prestigious institutions that manage to remain stable you’ll find that they have a lot of very old mechanisms to spread power to students, real power in the form of control of parts of budgets and seats and votes on real committees and boards with real power and student bodies having access to real budgets with real power over those things.
But that’s exactly the kind of power that people will cling too until it’s pried from their cold dead hands. They assume it’s pointless. So they fail.
I don’t think one can “arm chair” effective institutions, it is too hard.
I advocate trying to promote the culture of empiricism so people have the time, funding, and public support to keep trying various things and learning what works that way.
If you leave out expensive (technical) courses, then (a) the students who would like to do such subjects and can only afford Cheap College are not going to be able to do them, and if they can’t afford Expensive College they’re not going to attend any college at all, so you’re under-serving part of your potential market (b) if it’s only liberal arts (because they’re cheap) then the reputation you will get is not Hard Cheap College, it’s Easy Cheap College for the second-raters who couldn’t get into Real (Expensive) College, and all your academic rigour won’t change that perception, even if you do make it tough and not a doss course to get a degree in English or History (please please please don’t have Ethnic Wimmyn Persons Of Non-Ablitude courses).
And of course (c) – don’t these colleges already exist? the lower-tier ones, not the Ivy Leagues and not even the second level after them; state universities that do basic courses on practical subjects without too much fancy-schmancy and turn out hard-working graduates that will fit right in to your company or business (or secondary school)? I’m thinking of what Tolkien wrote in a letter about his Head of Department at Leeds University in the early 1920s:
For historical reference: Leeds University was established in the 19th century, initially as two technical institutions- the medical school was established in 1831, and the Yorkshire College of Science in 1874, both funded by local industries in Leeds. Students at the College of Science (which soon renamed itself to simply the “Yorkshire College” after it added classics, literature and history to an initial course offering of only science, mathematics and engineering) initially received external degrees from the University of London.*
Yorkshire College then became (for a couple of decades) a constituent college of the federal Victoria University, which awarded its own degrees. In 1904, this university broke up and its three colleges, in Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool, became universities in their own right.
*A lot of universities, both in Britain and in former colonies, got their start offering University of London external degrees. The programme still exists.
I very much think you’re right there.
I remember being a bit stunned at the workload of some of the arts dept students. They worked them damned hard. The usefulness of some of the things they had they working damn hard working was debatable but they seemed to have a constant stream of massive assignments and reading lists.
Meanwhile from my point of view I dossed around making the lab computers do silly things without having to dedicate much of my free time to study while doing very well.
My hypothesis is that the workload and support level is sometimes linked to how often the lecturer/prof hears the course associated with being low status or easy.
If you take a course titled “complex quantum chromodynamics and their application in N dimensional field theory”… the room will be mostly empty. They probably have enough trouble attracting students that the class will be undersized and nobody has ever even hinted to the prof that their class might be “easy”… hence they provide lots of support to students and try to make the material as approachable as possible and try to keep the workload manageable with class tutors to help struggling students. The Prof will quietly view every passing student as a testament to their ability to impart knowledge of a tricky subject.
If you take a course titled “Underwater basket weaving in the middle ages” … the room will be packed on the first day and the prof or lecturer will have made it their mission in life to prove to the world that their course is a “Real Course(™)” to make the mocking voices shut up. As such they’ll fail students at the drop of a soggy basket, the exam will be hard to pass even if you’ve developed an encyclopaedia knowledge of every fluid and weave ever used in relation to weaving and the Prof will quietly view every dropout or fail as a testament to their course being a “Real Course(™)”.
As such I always made it a policy, when facing a choice between 2 courses, one fluffy, the other scary-sounding… to always pick the most daunting sounding one. It served me well over the years.
If you throw financial constraints out the window, I heartily agree with this policy. Some of the better instructors and peers I had were in the “daunting courses”. I admit my exposure to this is not nearly as much as some of the other commenters, but I dont regret assuming this as a personal policy.
I wonder how often that applies? Throw a fancy sounding technobabble title on a sciences course and everyone assumes it’s Really Difficult and hence high status, even if you can blag your way through it, while an arts course is assumed to be for the types who swan around participating more in protests than in attending classes?
I think most every humanities subject has some deep theories/scholarship that looks pretty intimidatingly opaque and leads to unintuitive conclusions, just like physics. I’m not sure that a feminist theory class would be inherently less rigorous-sounding or easy to pass than a physics class. The only difference is in which one has some mechanism making it possible to test its theories for consistency with reality.
@albatross11
My personal experience as a history (absolutely soft, but not relatively soft among the humanities; probably harder than a lot of the humanities and a decent chunk of social sciences) guy is that there’s a big easiness gap at the lower ends. A random science person will do better in a 100-level humanities course from the general catalogue than vice versa. However, the gap narrows at least a bit at the higher levels, for a whole bunch of reasons. This is on average.
I think this leads to a problem where some STEM guys think they’ve figured something out, historically speaking, through autodidacticism, when they’ve missed some basic thing someone who’d studied history could tell you. A common one is handling primary sources badly.
Some arts and humanities can be really hard.
Making or performing fine arts involves obvious hard work and mastery.
I found history courses were fairly rigorous. Upper and lower division history classes were my favorite general education classes. And I actually enjoyed doing the research and writing my final paper for my upper division history course. It was difficult and intellectually engaging.
I was not impressed by the courses I took in some of the “softer” humanities, but I think it’s partly a sorting effect due to how serious the students are. If a department isn’t willing to fail out the weaker and lazier students, then they can rush into that major and overwhelm it.
For kind of similar reasons to what albatross11 states above, it’s easier for the hard science professors to justify tossing the weaker students out.
Typically it would be quite difficult to completely blag your way through such courses.
They tended to have a U shaped grade distribution where you either passed with good marks or failed entirely with very few people in the middle. But typically I found the workload to get to the passing side was very reasonable, sometimes as little as a handful of evenings study, but requiring a few “ah-ha!” moments that if you lacked you’d just flounder.
Fluffy courses tended to have an n shape grade distribution, fewer failing but the work required to go from just barely passing to a reasonable grade was huge in comparison to the U courses.
Getting 90%+ in a “hard” course could be easy provided you passed at all, getting 90%+ in a “soft” course was often close to impossible
Courses, and particularly schools, that teach people how to be successful artists have to be really hard. Being a successful commercial artist is really hard, and if your students are never successful, people will notice and talk and then you won’t have students any more.
Courses that teach people how to comment insightfully about art, don’t have to be hard at all. Particularly if they are taught at the Right Schools. The output of a Markov generator will be accepted as insightful commentary about art, if the generator has a degree from one of the Right Schools and uses as input all the other certified-insightful art commentary from same.
This sounds really plausible, but doesn’t match my experience. At my undergraduate college everyone knew that intro to jazz and world religions were easy courses. It’s true that there were other courses that sounded easy that weren’t, but the ones that were easy sounded easy. Meanwhile QM had 15+ hours of homework a week and some junior physics majors barely passing (which is kind of a dick move, put your weed out courses up front.)
Quantum mechanics is pretty up-front for physics majors?
It isn’t like they were getting into chromodynamics before they got hammered. (I go practically cross-eyed trying to read those formulae, and I am really really good at mathematics.)
That said, plain old Physics 1 and 2 had about twenty hours of homework at the University I attended, because it was the explicit weed-out course for the engineering students. After that shit, thermodynamics was a breeze. So I guess it would be a problem if your physics 1 and 2 coursework isn’t challenging?
Yeah, I’d like to know where all these “easy” and “U-shaped” upper level science and engineering classes were, because they certainly weren’t at my college. Most of mine in undergrad were explicitly curved- mostly Bs, few As, C was the lowest passing grade so there was a lump there for a few hard workers the prof felt bad for. If you got more than a couple failing grades total, or even more than one C in a semester, you were strongly advised to transfer out and most did by junior year. I guess at that point things might have looked a little more U shaped but only because you’d already weeded out the people who couldn’t master the material.
Meanwhile even the upper level history courses I took were a breeze if you didn’t mind doing a lot of reading and writing (they’d suck if those things were a struggle for you, but they were basically “A for effort” classes).
Thegnskald
At my school six courses in: mech I, E&M I, optics/modern physics, mech II, E&M II were sequential prerequisites. You’d also have to have completed Calc I-III, linear algebra, and diff eq.
A few students from high end magnet or boarding schools had Calc I-III, mech I, and E&M I coming in but it was much more common to just have Calc I&II and mech I.
My experience was like Brad’s in that it was mostly the opposite of yours.
Support for my “hard” courses may or may not have been better on average than the “easy” courses I took. There was too much within group variation for me to just tell you off the top of my head. But the easy courses were often so easy that it’s hard for me to see how anyone in them would need support.
And the divide wasn’t just science vs. humanities. History department courses were very hard (read 400 pages and write an essay every week) compared to all the other humanities courses I took.
Why are we replacing the institution with another institution?
You know what’s good (or at least underrated) for actually proving oneself intelligent, conscientious, and conformant.
People’s internet comment history.
Who do they follow? Do their comment show that they’ve taken the time to cultivate useful inputs? Have they been able to turn their inputs into useful outputs? Do they add value to discussions? Do they play well with others? Do they waste other people’s time trolling them?
Maybe what we should be doing is investing in analytics to make use of the data points already in existence.
Instead of creating along hazing signal.
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Separately, on an individual scale, its already easy (maybe possible is a better word there than easy) to create these signals for yourself outside of formal education. It largely looks like undertaking showable impressive projects, and showing up at places where people who are useful to network with are at, and having conversations with them.
Link that gets at this idea https://tim.blog/2011/09/29/8-steps-to-getting-what-you-want-without-formal-credentials/
An intentionally process like that already has the benefit of significant efficiency gains on formal education (you can target exactly what you want to show you can do, and get to know exactly who you want to try and get to know, without the forced filler and artificial timelines of college).
In an earlier OT I discussed the problem of proving oneself intelligent, conscientious and conformant more widely, and it was pointed out to me that it would be easier to attract people to a program that seems sort of conventional. It should also be easier to persuade others — notably employers — to take it seriously. That’s why the proposal in this OT fits conveniently within the four-year-college-degree box that people are familiar with.
But if you’d rather discuss the broader problem, that’s cool too.
I did see the earlier OT discussion, and considered making roughly the same comment.
Anyway, how are we defining the broader problem?
Roughly something like matching people’s time and talent with a useful avenue for it, right?
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Extremely broadly, I think the trend will be that progress looks like removing rent seeking institutions from the process.
Both the rent seek institutions of (1) University that certifies that this person isn’t an untouchable whom everyone needs to avoid, and (2) Giant corporation without which no economic activity can be coordinated.
I think we should expect technology to destroy the middle men and rent seekers
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Extremely narrowly, I don’t know if better mining of internet comments is really the answer, but it is one that seems promising to me.
Along that stream, one source of potentially very rich training data to learn more about what can truly be derived from internet comments…
The application form for Y Combinator use to ask for applicants Hacker News user names, it would be interesting to link different founder teams back with whatever data and meta data their Hacker News profiles generated prior to their application.
I’m curious as to how much that data can be leveraged.
(Maybe good teams need different commenting types to optimally coordinate, who knows?)
(maybe Y Combinator already does this in a fairly sophisticated manner, [ie, more than just having a human look through a few pages of comments] idk)
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Just a quick note on what employs will take seriously.
Who the employers are 20 years from now, will be whoever outcompeted the employers now.
Solutions the optimize for fitting whatever dumb thing employers do now, will be behind the curve whenever those dumb things get weeded out of the population.
1. Assume Tyler Cowen is exactly right about what college is good for. It’s not about learning skills, it’s about proving yourself intelligent, conscientious, and conformant.
2. Devise a program or practice that is better at testing and proving these qualities than colleges are now. (Better here probably means cheaper, faster, or more accurate.)
Ok,
Headhunting, via automated internet comment analytics.
Assume Tyler Cowen is exactly right about what college is good for. It’s not about learning skills, it’s about proving yourself intelligent, conscientious, and conformant.
So does he really mean “When I teach classes, I’m not actually teaching my students anything and they learn nothing from me but by showing up and taking the test they signal that they are capable of being work-ready”?
In fact the Mercatus Center and its impressive list of programmes are nothing more than adult babysitting? When the brochure says:
it really means “Nah, what this is about is proving you can get out of bed in the morning and show up on time”? Granted, the PhDs probably are teaching themselves, but it seems an awfully expensive in time and money way of signalling “I can wear a suit and tie!” 🙂
@Deiseach It’s more ‘are they learning anything usefully transferable’ than ‘learning anything at all, and yeah that’s roughly the thesis of Bryan Caplan’s new book The Case Against Education (he’s pretty closely professionally associated with Cowen (my rough understanding is that Cowan was responsible for Caplan being hired at GMU))
If we’re assumming that College isn’t for learning, and it’s purely a signal, I don’t understand why you’re trying to make your new signaling institution a place of learning.
In other words, people are getting Business degrees to be managers at Walmart, but these degrees didnmt improve they’re productivity. So, we may conclude that people don’t actually need extra business knowledge to be managers. So why include that business knowledge in your institution when all it will do is raise the cost?
You said that you wanted something like other institutions; I suggest an internship supervising company. You pay some amount of money to get an internship through Internship Corporation (we’ll call it IC). IC gets you an internship at a business, and provides the business with assisstance managing the interns, such as extra supervisors to disipline interns or tutors to help cover areas that the interns don’t know. Then make it not easy to get in, but hard to stay in so that if the interns do poorly they get fired. While this is considered bad for colleges, I think that high firing rates might make a job seem more selective, as a job is more your responsibility than your supervisor’s.
In all, IC gets you an internship, provides support so the company it contracts with doesn’t bear the costs of training an intern, and fires bad interns.
Everything I’ve heard about most applied majors is that you’re internships are more important than your GPA, suggesing that they might send a stronger signal. It would show your ability to conform to a new environment, get your work done, and deal with other people still, but since you’d be doing productive work AS your education, I would imagine it would be cheaper than college no matter how you structured it.
I agree to this and have a further modest proposal on top of it: select people as a function of their Facebook browsing habits.
Conscientiousness: do they just give their Facebook feed a compulsory look or go the extra mile and browse their friends’, friends’ friends’, etc., profiles and pages? Do they give feedback or leave a comment on each post they have spent time looking at? How often do they update their stati?
Sociability: how many thousands of friends do they have? how many groups have they joined?
Intelligence: Do they take the IQ and “which GoT character are you” tests posted by their friends? How well do they do on those? More generally, Facebook is a great setting for displaying one’s wit and smarts.
The other great thing is that Facebook has all this information on record. We could abolish college tomorrow!
Lol, fair enough.
I don’t envision it being something you’ll opt in or out of.
The actors who make decisions will realize that college is a crappy signal, and that people’s online reputations are good signals. (This is already the case, sometimes you hear about hiring based on GitHub profiles)
The people who are trying to signal will realize that college degrees don’t signal as well as they are hoping to.
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Your economic future already swings based on how you conduct yourself irl (some people can get away with acting like jerks irl, but it’s usually not marginally helpful)
We imagine that how we interact with each other online is a consequence free zone,
That’s never actually been the case, in the future, I would expect it to be even less so.
1. Liberal arts degrees are worthless for job purposes. That’s essentially what the word “liberal” means there. The biggest single mistake of my life was going for English. I get the “college bonus” insofar as I have a degree and can be, er, a substitute teacher, but that’s about it. I could go on to become a professor if I went back for a master’s, but that’s not a good career to get into right now from what I hear. Even if I wanted to, which I don’t.
2. If something is about signaling, established and well-known signals are vastly better than new ones. What you’re going for is something that says, on a resume, “you know nothing about me but what’s on this paper, but I went through the bother of going here for four years, so I probably don’t stab people, act sexually aggressive, come to work drunk or high, steal, or spread crazy and malicious rumors.” If you actually have a useful and relevant degree, that’s even better, but perhaps best of all is having it be a school the recruiter has heard of so he won’t have to dig around to tell if it’s a diploma mill or something equally sketchy.
3. If a credential is something everyone is expected to have, it becomes less a positive good than a dead-weight, a hoop you have to jump through before you can be hired. If everyone has to spend four years simply to certify that they aren’t utterly worthless human beings, that doesn’t really serve anyone but the ones running the institutions; it won’t really prove usefulness, since if everyone’s expected to have it it will be watered down so that even useless and crummy people can get it, purely for market reasons. Which is what I think has happened. I would move away from our current bachelor’s-for-all thinking, and send as many people as possible to brutally efficient technical training, as in community college.
I think point 2 is really it. It’s all about the Brand. And creating a new University brand may be possible but will likely take over a hundred years (Cornell is still looked down upon in some circles).
HR Staff will look at whatever Institution is the most prestigious. Not some no name school no matter how difficult it is. The Ivie’s have 400 years of history behind them and will always be the most prestigious. Almost no matter what they do. I’ve even heard it said Ivies suffer from more massive grade inflation than State Schools.
Now could a new very difficult school become more prestigious than the average state flagship? Maybe, but that hardly matters as there’s basically 2 (or at least 2) tiers of college. The Ivies and the rest. So just getting higher in “the rest” won’t help much at all.
I think you’re giving the Ivy brand a little too much weight here. If I was thinking about hiring someone for my team I’d be a lot more impressed by a degree from Stanford or Caltech (which are not Ivies) than by one from, say, Brown (which is). I’m not HR, I’m an engineer, but my word carries a lot more weight than HR’s for questions like that — I don’t think HR even had any input the last time we hired somebody, aside from the due-diligence stuff like making sure they had the degree they said they had and weren’t wanted for twelve axe murders in Montana.
Eh, I think the exception proves the rule here. Caltech and Stanford are basically Ivies even though they’re technically not. There are a few other high prestige schools that are similar like say Berkeley but go much below there in the rankings and it all starts to look samey.
When I was a grad student at Brown, there was a deal among the Ivy schools (at least among the philosophy departments) that allowed a grad student to devote one semester to taking some classes from another Ivy (I exploited this to take a class on causation from David Lewis, just a few months before his tragic death). Stanford, MIT, and IIRC Chicago were also part of the same deal, so apparently they were regarded as part of the club. As Syx78 says, Caltech and Berkeley are also generally regarded as similarly elite. Though I’ll also add that my experience of Brown undergraduates makes me think you underrate them.
I guess the question becomes, how cheap can you make it? Most state-school engineering majors probably check your “hard” boxes well enough for employers while also being affordable relative to most other options, and then at the end you have an engineering degree (which you wouldn’t from your HCC, because you eschew expensive, specialized courses). The University of Illinois-Chicago (to pick a local-to-me institution) is about $5900/semester for in-state tuition for engineers. UIC is also probably on the expensive end for an in-state school due to Illinois’ recent budget fights – Georgia Tech, a more highly-regarded school, is $10,000/year for in-state tuition. Can you provide a better value than in-state engineering degrees? I have sincere doubts.
I think almost everyone in this debate recognizes that there are “trade” majors (engineering, nursing, computer science) where the value of the major is largely what you learned in school, not just the signaling that you’re a smart guy.
The point is that a liberal arts degree seems like it’s more of a “let me show you I’m smart and functional enough to get through college” thing than a “hire me so I can apply these directly useful skills I learned in my sociology major to your company’s problems.”
Isn’t the answer to stop producing those worthless degrees, or stop producing so many of them, and shovel people into quick training that produces more practical skills? I’m a creative type, I enjoyed a lot of my English classes, but once you get past the 200 level in liberal arts it stops being about the actual arts and starts being people using the arts as an excuse for talking about their pet crank theories. I’m sure we’ve all heard the funny stories. My fave was the scholarly paper arguing that every character in Hamlet is secretly terrified of Ophelia’s vagina.
So, if you’re just not into medicine or engineering or something involving complex empirically verifiable skills or bodies of knowledge … maybe pursue alternative career options? I don’t know what that would look like, but if I’m going to spend years and money I should come out with hard job skills.
Okay, maybe that’s obvious. But … (frustrated shrug). Like I said, if everybody’s getting it, it’s not saying anything special about the people getting it, it’s just a kind of rent-seeking, where you have to pay a third party to avoid being presumed an utter imbecile.
Sure. I’d be quite happy with a system where general education ends with high school, and from there people go either directly to work or into distinctly vocation-oriented education, for those who need more than on-the-job training. That would surely waste less money than we are wasting right now.
The question is how to get there. How do you change our entire deeply-rooted culture around post-secondary education and job training? HCC, for all its faults, was at least something that could be implemented fairly cheaply, and didn’t require a comprehensive cultural shift to be useful.
But you mentioned teaching English. English isn’t useful, once you’ve gotten past basic compositional competence, except in the sense of providing entry into the mostly useless and parasitic community of English-teaching academics. History is likewise interesting, but has no practical value, and I understand a lot of it’s likewise getting jacked by the cranks. What I’m getting is “continue doing extravagantly worthless thing, but at a lower price.” I don’t think that’s a step in the right direction, but rather an increased commodification of education, which will further reduce the value of getting the credential.
I’m not one for faith in The Market, but if more and more people are recognizing that lib arts degrees are useless, isn’t that a sign that the market is starting to correct this error?
Oh, sure, employers sometimes use college degrees inappropriately as an initial sanity-check, particularly in entry-level jobs. The US military, for instance, insists that its officers must have a college degree but don’t care what it’s in. And that’s a bad thing.
But this is also not what HCC is supposed to fix. HCC accepts this situation. It just tries a) to deliver the college education more cheaply where possible and b) to provide a stronger signal of worth by being particularly demanding.
If employers stop accepting liberal arts degrees as signs of worthiness in a general sense, then I agree HCC should stop offering them, since such degrees really aren’t good for much in that scenario.
I’d be happy to see broader reforms in this area. I’m just not sure how to get there.
My sister has an engineering degree, but her job is basically just a “you are a smart person” job. She could probably make more money doing what she majored in but she decided she didn’t want to. I don’t think there’s anything stopping most engineers from doing that sort of thing, other than salary concerns and the fact that most engineering majors want to be engineers.
UIC can. They just put their Masters in Computer Science degree on Coursersa for half the cost. Some Ivies like Columbia and MIT are doing similar. My guess is that since it’s all brand name the fact that you can get these degrees on line for cheap will not affect the prestiege of the institution.
I think that would have a pretty small market. Most of the intelligent students who could deal well with the high academic standards would actually want good teaching (and be willing to pay for it). Students who are not that intellectually curious would mostly want nice things. So HCC would only cater to students who are smart/hard-working but not really interested in knowledge for its own sake. These exist (Cambridge has a degree for them) but I don’t think there are many of them.
I has come to my attention that I have been writing about Tyler Cowen as the supposed source of the notion that universities are about proving oneself rather than learning useful things. The actual source I had in mind is Bryan Caplan, author of “The Case Against Education.” My apologies.
That explains why Cowen’s Wiki page didn’t mention it. I was terribly confused. Thanks for clearing that up!
Noble Thread the Un-thread!
Noble Thread the Poorly Threaded!
Well, yeah, if you just want to talk about what it means.
Taking advantage of being the second comment to remind people that we have another South Bay meetup this Saturday at 2:00. 3806 Williams Rd, San Jose, as usual. If you expect to come, email me so we’ll have a rough count of how many people we are feeding.
It’s in the post!
If you don’t read the posts about South Bay meetups, what hope is there for the rest of us?
To be fair to David, I’m so used to just scrolling down on the fractional open threads that I forget to actually read content on the main ones.
I think CatCube has part of it. The other part is that if you’re planning a post that you want to get near the top, you definitely don’t check the top post to make sure it isn’t covered. (Although this isn’t a problem I usually have.)
When there is a new open thread with only one comment, waiting to read through the post before commenting may mean being third or fourth instead of second. I discovered that you had mentioned it, and might be coming, only after putting up my comment.
Sounds like you commented before you were ready. Nominative determinism strikes again.
Wait, what? Friedman?
Hint: The OT name.
Nominative determinism explains why I’m such a peaceful sort, never arguing with anyone.
Still confused. What does the thread name have to do with this? (I know there’s some pun in the thread name, but it went over my head.)
The thread title refers to Aethelred the Unready. David Friedman commented before he was ready. *rimshot*
Although ‘unready’ here translates to ‘ill-advised’ in modern English (or so I’ve been advised).
@DavidFriedman
You had an hour to delete it, though.
Even with the reminder on the main post, having a second reminder as the second comment down reminds people who don’t read the original reminder.
Reminder reminder reminder.
I’m a (mostly) lurker planning to attend for the first time. If anyone from Berkeley or Oakland would like a ride, I’d be glad to provide one. Email natekurz@gmail.com to arrange.
Naval Gazing looks at the first part of the Great White Fleet’s round-the-world journey.
And I’m doing another Naval Gazing Open Thread today.