Governments should compete for residents, not businesses
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One called itself "A developer-friendly community" and the other "A healthy community"
The cities were organized around their taglines. One was 300 years old and focused on parks, trails, conservancy, and community centers. The other a younger city focused on growth and sprawl, tax abatements, and new businesses.
You should live where the government aligns with your phase of life and personal goals and be free to choose a new government later. Also, democracies can shift over time but generally it is easier to move somewhere new than to feel entitled to change a municpal culture simply because you got older.
[1] Your State may vary.
Each and every City in California is its own legal monopoly on land use, all of them, how it’s working out for them isn’t pertinent to whether or not that’s how it works. Don’t mistake my position for advocacy, it’s a relaying of facts. By and large, this is more or less how it works across the States, but that can vary since the States can basically do anything as far as how they organize local government so long as it falls within some kind of democratic principles and norms.
So effecting regional transit policy basically has three paths in the Bay Area: setup a special cross-county district government like BART, or get buy-in between the relevant jurisdictions you want to run a train through. If that’s a dozen cities and three counties, you’re going to need to talk to all of them. The third path is for the State to implement something directly, but in practice that’s subject to local politics as well, and the State Government per its own laws does not actually have carte blanche to do as it likes with the land over the wishes of local government.
Your healthy community is experiencing homelessness and a housing affordability problem along with every "themed" community around you. Does it make sense to stick with the original theme? No. It doesn't.
The problem here is that by owning property you buy into that theme. Any divergence from that theme is harmful to what you bought.
The only way forward is eminent domain.
But at the scale of current property ownership there's going to be huge backlash from property owners. If people who don't own property organize in numbers that dwarf the total amount of property owners then that could generate enough conflict towards social change.
But that level of organization won't happen until the desperateness hits a sort of criticality. We're still far from that so I'm safe. But make no mistake I know the moral action that we must take, and me sitting on my property is not it.
In California, it's about 56%. You gave to get San Francisco proper to get a minority and then it's still 38% (https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/sanfranciscocou...)
Among older people and in small towns and villages the housing problems, are of course, much milder.
I get what you probably meant, but this is a really strong statement. Our town is struggling with spiraling property taxes and it is forcing long-term residents out. I really feel for older people who've had decades of a social circle, have people to help them with things they can no longer do, etc. You can't move somewhere else and replicate that.
It also happens to be an issue that I am facing, move for more closer alignment to my ideals and abandon my established community, or stay and try to change where I am.
https://edsource.org/2022/californias-prop-13s-unjust-legacy...
I'd be happy to move right now, but interest rates effectively prohibit that as if I had the same amount burrowed my mortgage payment would be over twice what it is now.
This completely eliminates the social upside of property taxes compared to other forms of taxes
It seems like the use of property tax as a major local finding mechanism has a lot of negative effects, from poor school performance to inflated housing costs.
Regardless, it’s besides the point. The point is there are different potential mechanisms for raising money that don’t have the same second and third order effects of property taxes.
The current system is a mix, however.
Property taxes are the way local municipalities raise funds. Tax liens are just the same property tax. I’m suggesting there can be other funding mechanisms, from VAT to income or even automation taxes that raise that money without the same tradeoffs.
Want school? Pay for school tuition. Want roads? Pay the toll. Want fire service? Pay for fire subscription.
etc.
I'd be happy to live in such community but others want men with guns to come toss them out of their house if they don't have the money for the extra services. To me that sounds worse but to each their own.
Fire subscription seems like it would only be workable in a barely suburban or actually rural environment, where your house burning down won't also catch your neighbor's house on fire. Anything more dense and the whole block would go up in flames, including your house, if one of your neighbors didn't pay and the fire department didn't immediately extinguish the fire in their house.
So, not a good solution. Got another idea?
The situation prior to Proposition 13 was also a fiasco with rapid increases in wasteful government spending. I would be happy to vote for reasonable reforms but only if they keep effective spending caps in place.
As it stands, for one-off spend and in general there are other means of taxation that can be utilized. It doesn't need to be property taxes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Massachusetts_Propositi...
It’s as very expensive state but the taxes are limited. And every time a community needs a school or some infrastructure it becomes an old (fixed income) vs young battle.
We recently went through a couple of very contentious town meetings about doing a rezone in one of the two parts of town that has some commercial development basically so distribution centers can be built there. But make no mistake. The town as a whole would be perfectly happy to have near zero non-farm commercial activity if that were financially feasible.
I feel like people need to understand this.
I'm currently living in Nashville, TN, which you may as well have been referring to in the second half of your comment (not mentioned: the focus exclusively on tourism while ignoring needs of actual residents). I did not appreciate how different values could lead to such wildly different outcomes in quality of life.
The situation with the government at both the state and city levels is absolutely dire here (for different reasons) and there's really no hope in changing anything.
"Vote with your feet" is the smart approach.
Many are here because of the lack of income tax, the country music industry, and the extremely culturally conservative government. They either do not care about the poor public transit/services/infrastructure/schools/etc or they do not care enough to outweigh the benefits.
A common refrain I hear when talking to people is that they wanted to move somewhere that wasn't so "woke."
Nashville also, until recently, had a low COL compared to similarly sized non-Southern metros.
Personally I am here for work, and realistically many others would do the same. Nashville has more employment opportunities than the deep south and is a logical place for such people to end up.
> A common refrain I hear when talking to people is that they wanted to move somewhere that wasn't so "woke."
What’s wrong with people sorting into places that are culturally compatible? After all plenty of people move to Paris for the culture.
> They either do not care about the poor public transit/services/infrastructure/schools/etc or they do not care enough to outweigh the benefits.
Aside from schools, most people either don’t use those things or it doesn’t make a difference. Oftentimes it’s an upgrade from the utterly dysfunctional alternative where they came from. (The efficiency of my traditionally red county’s limited public services was a nice change of pace from DC.)
This was literally the gp's thesis, that it's easier to just leave than to try and improve things (for whatever your value of improve is).
I agree it's the logical thing to do, but when definitions of what services a government should provide vary greatly and people sort where they live based on them, it's going to lead to strange results.
The article is about government, which is a shit show here by almost any definition. The city has a massive council that is at war with the state, to the extent that the state just passed a law to cap the council size out of sheer spite. They're handing over billions to buy a stadium for a rich sports franchise. They handed out tax credits to Amazon for jobs in an office building that they're never going to fill.
There are reasons people would want to live here despite this, my list isn't exhaustive. But I can't see any world in which "good governance" appears anywhere on the list, unless you measure it only by how low your taxes are and how lax regulation is (I'm aware some do).
Maybe the extremely pro business, pro developer, pro tourism Nashville considers itself to be a success, but I can't get on board. There has to be a metric other than growth when making decisions, and I'll personally never willingly live in another city that is so blindly focused on it.
It should be noted that while this is good advice, this is a big luxury to have, and not something that is broadly applicable to most people. If you don't have the money, if your career is tied to a specific industry, if you have children from any past-and-now-divorced marriage, or a handful of other reasons, you may be locked to specific areas for a really long time.
Yes, move somewhere new if you can and you feel the grass is greener. But municipal government absolutely owe it to their residents and community to support the people they have, not just the people they wish they had.
Within reason, supporting the people you wish you had, instead of the people you have, is called leadership. It is how we progress as a species.
"thanks for your vote, for your taxes, for your contributions to the community, now fuck off"
I'm living in a district subject to heavy gentrification at the moment. (And as I'm transitioning from student to Yuppie, I'm part of it) The conflicts between newly moved in rich people and the entrenched working class are intense, and looking at other places it is incredibly obvious who is going to win.
The process of moving to a place, then expecting that place to cater to you needs over the people who originally lived there seems deeply problematic to me: Considering the power dynamics at place, the process as a whole is a really mean way of punching down.
Just to give one concrete example, there was a bar close by that basically served as a living room for many of the neighbors. The people living above me are 5 in 2 rooms, obviously they need the space. But there were noise complains, the police came (never used to even come out 10y ago, and lawyers were used). The bar closed, a fashion store moved in, there are of course other bars but they are much more expensive, the staff doesn't speak german and the community largely consists of academics and expats.
This notion sounds right, but observationally it is incorrect in practice. In Chicago the neighborhoods cycle between bustling, vibrant - when filled with new, young singles who move in and bring business with them; and eventually evolving over a decade or so into a bougie DINK family-oriented community, before completing the lifecycle as a sleepy, economically depressed place with miserably stable/flat real estate values that you just pass over.
Seen this exact cycle happen with a dozen different neighborhoods in Chicago.
If people were instead moving to a different area, this wouldn't happen. Well, some are moving to different areas (the suburbs, etc) but not entirely.
It's quite neo-liberal to tell people to just vote with their feet. When rents in your neighborhoo skyrocket because the local leadership has decided to gentrify the area to improve tax revenue, many would agree that's not entirely just to the long term residents.
There are endless rhetorical questions to ask yourself: Where are you in your life and how do you define yourself? Do you prefer cafes or clubs; care about schools and parks? Safety or autonomy? How do you want to commute? Do you want small shops or shopping centers? Small town monoculture or big city diversity? Do you want to your city to attract tourists or be hostile to them?
A city government has a lot of levers to pull to build a city around each of these things, and some do it poorly and some it well.
Don't move to Moline, Illinois or Cupertino, CA and not expect to find a city that bends to the will of John Deere/ Apple respectively. Some cities exist to serve a large corporation above all else (since the entire population works for them). Others exist to serve the local University or the tourist board, and others the soccer moms. None are wrong, they are all trying to find a local maximum to serve the people that live there.
A virtuous cycle of good people attracting businesses willing to pay a premium for good people attracting good people.
You choose it same as everyone else that's there now. Sounds like they compete well enough for you?
Great weather. 4 hours away from skiing. 1 hour away from the beach.
These things aren't attributable to the quality of the govt (except I will say that govt does do a decent job of preserving natural ecosystems)
Why not move to Los Angeles, better weather, closer to skiing, and closer to the beach? Seems to me that there is still something the government is doing to keep you in the Bay Area.
But, really, they're different. Take money out of the picture and tell me I needed to live in either SoCal or NoCal and I'd definitely pick the latter.
(And there's better skiing than both.)
You can say it about any govt in the world. Oh I guess some people still live in Iran/Russia so their govt is doing just fine.
It’s not true, but it’s not insightful nor actionable. That’s why it’s dumb
I was not complaining about the life. I was just wondering how the government's behavior fits the narrative of competing for residents vs business. Of course, I'm angry about the quality of education in California or the corruption in government in general, but that's not the point of my questions.
Is this a bad thing? It is true that California has high marginal rates, but for most people that isn't what matters. The progressive rates are more favorable, and from a policy perspective this creates more economic opportunity. For instance a married couple making $125k a year(bay area median) would have $4300 less in take home pay in Oregon.
>public schools have super low standards and low teaching qualities
Six of the top ten school districts in the state are in the bay area. https://backgroundchecks.org/top-school-districts-in-califor...
This is because the majority of the parents in the tech industry in Bay Area are tiger parents or 24x7 helicopter parents. I kid you not, in a lunch with random tech workers there you will find 9 out of 10 are PhDs from elite universities. The parents themselves are overachievers, and they push their kids really hard. They know every EC, every competition, every course track. They send their kids to tough tutoring schools like AOPS and Think Academy, if they don't get multiple private tutors for their kids. They certainly compete for those elite summer camps. In addition, people with less means, such as manicurists and housekeepers, would pool their resources to find private tutors for their kids in their big families. On the other hand, teachers in Cupertino school district ask parents to grade homework (WTF!). The physics teacher of the kids of NASA's director ask questions like "which one is heavier, a pound or a kilogram" in grade 8 physics exams (WTF!). In the meantime, some school districts try to forbid students from taking algebra 2 or geometry in grade 9 in the name of equity. This makes me especially sad, as brilliant kids who can't afford tutoring will be deprived the rights to be properly challenged, all in the name of so-called equity. But I digressed.
My advice to most young people starting their careers is to avoid the Bay Area unless you honestly have the potential to quickly get up near the top of the income distribution. It will continue as a key tech industry hub but for most people there are better options now.
But many talents do stay in the Bay Area and many startups grew to become giants too. So, I'm not sure it's a one-sided decision by the wealthy. And I'm not sure about now but before 2010, very few people outside of the Bay Area knew how to build distributed systems. Case in point, IBM tried to build an auction system to compete with eBay's, and they couldn't figure out why eBay could support such a large throughput with subsecond latency. And in the first few years since http://highscalability.com launched, most of the shares came from the companies in the Bay Area.
The most common example for the Americans reading this is NAFTA, which makes workers in Detroit compete with workers in Mexico (suppressing wages in both location) while allowing the auto manufacturing companies to treat all of North America as one market. Toyota can move their plants around the region somewhat freely; can someone in Mexico freely move to the midwest?
You probably don't want criminals to freely move into your country. You probably want a country that gets funded by taxes (both short term and long term).
No country in the world maintains open borders. Everytime there has been mass unorganized migration it has been a humanitarian disaster.
Platitudes only work on paper.
What makes the US a better place? What keeps other countries from being a better place?
The lack of those blessings from the past is what prevents others. It’s no fault of the people who live here or there today for the situation we are in. If George Washington had accepted a crown when offered we would be just as screwed up.
I think this strongly discounts the agency of individuals. In our time these are certainly blessings, but they had to be fought for by their contemporaries.
Criminals move between states, but it's not a huge problem. The states can share information and allow joint action. It may require more effort to set up between nations, but it's a common thing today.
Taxes work fine. If you're a resident of a state, you pay income tax to that state. So we obviously know how to find out residency.
>Everytime there has been mass unorganized migration it has been a humanitarian disaster.
If borders were to become easily crossable (not necessarily non-existent, but just a checkpoint to count incoming/outgoing and stop smugglers) in a day, then the next day would see mass migration in so many directions. But after that first wave calmed, I wouldn't expect mass migrations except those following humanitarian disasters. Three had migrations we see today are caused by disasters. Even when the emigrants experience terrible conditions in the receiving country, I imagine it's because their previous life was shattered and they had to quickly flee. It's not a fair comparison to people who would migrate if immigration controls were removed.
> Consider something like 1/3 of Americans have a criminal history.
Here is a discussion: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2017/aug/18/andrew-cuo...
https://news.uga.edu/total-us-population-with-felony-convict...
See form I-485 for PR:
24. Have you EVER been arrested, cited, charged, or detained for any reason by any law enforcement officer (including but not limited to any U.S. immigration official or any official of the U.S. armed forces or U.S. Coast Guard)?
What programs like Operation Streamline do is take advantage of the fact that immigrants dont understand the legal system and, under the guise of a speedier procedure, effectively coerce immigrants to acquiesce to a criminal conviction. This actually does prevent them from coming legally at a later date once deported.
Up until recently ( relatively ) a person could pretty much move to other country without much fuzz.
Even moving to a new tribe in Native peoples in North America required proving a blood relation, having someone vouch for you, or being skilled enough they would accept you in.
Watching the children in Ethiopia starving to death, I couldn’t help but wonder how we felt forcing people to live in an emergent desert to death by starvation was better if we just wrote a song about it - “We are the world.” If that were true, why couldn’t they just leave?
Had we grown at their pace, we'd also be experiencing famines.
As for why they couldn't leave - you can ask their neighbors. The West is not the only destination.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983–1985_famine_in_Ethiopia
I didn’t assert the west should unilaterally open their borders. I stated that borders are inhuman - as humans are naturally migratory. Taking that to the real world, that would mean their neighbors should open borders as well - not just to Ethiopians, but to everyone.
Paraguay up until recently required a ~5k deposit but they dropped even that. In Argentina "technically" you're supposed to follow a bunch of rather restrictive resident visa pathways but few do that and you can file for citizenship immediately upon landing and until your case is finished cannot be deported. The requirements are basically live there for 2 years and show you had some income, but by judge shopping some allow black market income lol.
Others of note: Bolivia and Somaliland only require a token payment for a 1 year resident visa (think in Bolivia you only need do that 2 or 3 times to become PR or citizen). If you have a bit more cash several places like honduras / nicoragua / ecuador only require ~30k "investment" which is basically accessible (eventually) to anyone middle class+ with enough determination. When I went to Rojava they also accept basically anyone as they are a "people without a nation" who happen to have sort of a nation.
And then there's weev, who posts here on occasion. I think he got a Transnistria passport, which is obtainable after only a year of residence. It's my understanding residency is as easy as going to a hotel and asking to talk to the right people about getting a resident permit, and paying some moderate fees.
If you're not too discriminating pretty much anyone can emigrate from the US forever with very little capital.
Now we have people everywhere (that doesn't suck; and even some places that do). We have social programs and expensive infrastructure. The world is very different now than even 100 years ago.
Maybe if the entire world reaches a broadly similar level of human development, including comparable levels of infrastructure and social support, migration can be opened up quite a bit.
But right now it would simply mean that developed nations would see a flood of people immigrating just to get those great services, and it would crush their system. So we need controls to keep the change manageable and ensure that the tax base scales appropriately to maintain the expected levels of service.
Never mind migration. Even travel gets worse. We've had relatively frictionless travel between first world countries. Now it it only 3 month instead of 6 and online visas like ESTA. So it does not seem to get any better and does not correlate so "comparable levels".
Are all of these unorganized, mass migrations disasters? Or are they in response to disasters?
Most organized mass migrations have been disasters. Forced relocations aren’t fun.
But unorganized mass migrations, where people say “let’s get out of this place and go somewhere better” tend to mitigate pre-existing disasters.
Also, you're incorrectly conflating mass migration with open borders. You can have open borders without causing a mass migration and vice versa.
But what about states in the United States? They were explicitly formed as a set of states - nations - that cooperate under a federation. Free migration wasn’t always the case in the original states but was required in the constitution.
What about the EU? People can move about freely today when in the past they weren’t able to.
Or are you saying there’s something superior about Americans and Europeans and we need to keep everyone else in their prisons?
You quote 12,000 years ago as some sort of transition. Realistically migration was relatively unimpeded until the 1900’s. Citizenship isn’t the same as migration, and in many cultures citizens and denizens were two classes with the denizens migrating relatively unimpeded. Some cultures like ancient China had travel papers but that was reserved for nobles or elites - normal people were too beneath notice to require documentation to travel.
How would you prevent the erosion of rights or culture by a group with a bigger population?
For instance, have a few hundred thousand Americans move to Cuba and vote to have Cuba secede to the US? Or a few hundred thousand mainland Chinese citizens move to Taiwan and do the same?
While it's definitely nice to keep migration smooth and easy, it seems like there are lots of issues wherein free and unlimited migration could cause relatively predictable problems.
That would be a great thing for Cuba. Cubans have been fleeing their failed state by the thousands, risking their lives and dying to get a shot at reaching America.
Starvation, medicine shortage, brutal LGBT purges are sadly common place under the Castro regime. Pretty sure these Americans would be welcomed with open arms!
Not really. Cuba is free to trade with any country that's not the USA (and is even free to trade with the USA except for certain entities or commodities).
Decades of corruption, incompetence, brain drain and failed government made the local economy unable to compete.
A country of 11m people loses an estimated $3+ billion per year from various UN condemned restrictions.
Are you saying that causes no shortages? That's not a trivial sum of money (~$300 per capita).
I’d use the US as an example. In a real sense the US is a collection of small countries with a federal system and free right of migration. For this discussion the federal system is irrelevant. How does California or New York or other high populace states ensure erosion of rights? I’d posit part of the very reason they’re so attractive is they tend to hold rights very high on their list of priorities. More oppressive states, likewise lose populace to migration because unless you’re in the in group you don’t belong there.
Cultural erosion is IMO nativism and bias. Time is change, no culture is static, and even our oldest cultures are young compared to humanity and look nothing like they did 100 years ago. Changing populace doesn’t change a culture any more than time does, it’s just easier to blame someone that doesn’t look or talk like you for it.
Your examples of mainland Chinese citizens or Americans moving around are only relevant because the issue of borders to begin with. If there were permeable borders we would be in a steady state and you wouldn’t see behaviors like that. Maybe in the beginning you would see artifacts of history manifest weird transient behaviors, as you do in any suddenly changed dynamical system. But in steady state your scenarios would be as likely as all democrats moving to Georgia to change the election. It sounds good but in practice didn’t happen.
Are you implying that non natives are inherently better than natives?
One of the hallmarks of declining empires is importing people - not to say those people are better or worse, but mixing diverse peoples together is extremely hard. It has to be done slowly and carefully.
> Changing populace doesn’t change a culture any more than time does
I don’t see how you can look at the history of anyone anywhere and believe this.
While I don’t disagree mixing of diverse people can be hard, I would simply point to American history as an example of how the empire you seem to laud was built by mixing peoples relentlessly. In fact immigrants tend to be the drivers of American growth, while the native born… not so much.
I find it fascinating you think culture doesn’t change with time, but with the mixing of different people into a culture only. What culture has been unchanged with time? Language itself mutates constantly, how can a culture be static with time? How does it stay static? The people in the culture change with every birth and every death, the memory of the culture is wiped out every 100 years. Written histories are a poor tool of continuity for something as complex as a culture. Human beings themselves change radically over the course of their lives. All things are impermanent, but human culture isn’t just impermanent, it’s an illusion.
> What makes a person better than another is how they live their life, not the circumstances of their birth.
Their genetics dictate how they live their life. Environment can have an affect, but genes dictate how you react to your environment (unless you believe in God etc).
> I would simply point to American history as an example of how the empire you seem to laud was built by mixing peoples relentlessly.
Compared to the last 50 years or so these immigrants were all very similar both in history and genetics. And even then it’s been a rough ride! I agree immigrants can be great as long as they are carefully selected for.
> I find it fascinating you think culture doesn’t change with time, but with the mixing of different people into a culture only.
Cultures absolutely change over time but the rate of change is much slower than if you introduce a new people from vastly different cultures. It’s the shearing force applied by the differences that’s the issue. If it’s too powerful something has to give.
> However the magic of the plasticity of the human brain is that it can, with effort, overcome virtually any impediment
That’s quite the claim depending on how you define impediment, but as is this statement is too vague to argue with.
> I’d also point out that the more homogeneous the genetic population the worse overall outcomes tend to be.
Again this is a very vague statement where the degree of variation matters. Hybrid vigor is poorly understood and when the differences are too great result in genetically worse offspring on some axis (mules are a perfect example of this).
> So, yes, I think science is total against the idea of racial superiority not just out of its repugnant but just false and furthermore given the homogeneity issue impossible.
I’ve made no claims of superiority and you’re taking a holier than though stance against the straw man you made up. Please leave the emotional appeals out.
> I guess it’s safe to assume you think genetics has no impact on life outcomes and/or there aren’t significant genetic differences between geographically (by ancestor) populations?
This idea that genetics impacts life out comes at a population level is racial superiority, assuming you give some outcome as being qualitatively better. I don’t know how you can cut it any differently.
I definitely don’t think that genetics has any influence though on cultural adaptation. That’s entirely environmental. See adopted children from international cultures raised in a foreign culture from birth. They culturally identical while racially different.
On plasticity, I mean even granting some genetic difference that impacts some degree of adaption to some cultural normal, the brains ability to adapt even given such major structural issues like brain damage make small things like cultural adaption simple. In fact I expect given how much migration happened throughout history it’s an evolutionary necessity to be able to adapt culturally.
Before that comparison works, you have to eliminate the Constitution and all of the protections that come with it.
I don’t understand how Supply side wage competition would be alleviated by allowing workers to move freely between countries. It seems like it could potentially make it worse for higher wage regions of the world?
This dual system protects the upper class from wage competition while allowing it for the lower classes, ensuring that the upper class benefits both from this protection and also the lowered living expenses provided by cheap labor from the lower classes. All arguments that somehow economic laws don't apply and immigration doesn't lower wages come from members of the upper class who want to preserve this system that benefits them.
This is backwards, and I'm having trouble understanding how a more diverse, more transient population would find it easier to find common interests and unite. Suppose a factory unionizes - without borders, the owner will find it easier to import non-union workers. While moving a factory is challenging regardless of borders - it's a big, heavy thing, tied into local infrastructure and supply chains. It's even reflected in the rhetoric - "immigrants will do the jobs Americans won't".
It's also reflected empirically: Whole Foods' heat map says lower rates of racial diversity increase unionization risks - https://www.businessinsider.com/whole-foods-tracks-unionizat... (unpaywalled: http://archive.is/1khJw)
And in the strong Danish unions as far back as 1981 (https://mattbruenig.com/2021/09/20/when-mcdonalds-came-to-de...) when Denmark had only 3.02% of immigrants and their descendants (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Denmark#Modern...)
I think the idea is that there are common interests to be found, but borders artificially keep people apart, by segmenting up legal jurisdictions. For example, why Starbucks employees in Jersey City aren't all that different from Starbucks employees in New York City right across the river.
> Whole Foods' heat map says lower rates of racial diversity increase unionization risks
To what extent is this correlated with the economic security of their employees? Employees in wealthier areas (statistically correlated with whiter) might be more educated on average (which could be correlated with desire to unionize) and/or more likely to have a higher-income partner or family member (which means lower financial risk due to failure or being fired).
GPS data shows how wolf packs carve out territory - https://bigthink.com/hard-science/wolf-gps/
Such paranoia between coworkers is a serious impediment to labor organization. The more diverse the workplace, the better this works.
The same experience has led me to believe that most managers and employers are not so crafty, and are going along with it because it seems to be trendy and in-demand and because they don't want to be publicly canceled. It's more about petty virtue signaling among managers than coordinated suppression of organized labor.
Furthermore, most DEI initiatives do not look like what you describe, outside of a limited subset of academic institutions that have always been somewhat radical (including few to none of the name-brand universities in the Americas) and smaller companies/startups headed by highly-opinionated idealists.
In general I think we are right to be skeptical of attempts to divide, rather than unite. It's absolutely possible that DEI initiatives are weaponized at some organizations, and we should be wary of that possibility. But it's also not fair or correct to assume that it's always being wielded as such.
It's worth noting that there are legitimate good intentions behind all this no-subconscious-bias microaggression stuff. It's derived from a very earnest radical academic tradition. The kernel of wisdom at the core of it all is that diversity is good and should be not just acknowledged but actively embraced and celebrated. That is, people can be united together, without all being the same.
Yes, of course they are. As explained by Chomsky's model of propaganda, corporations hire true believers for these roles because they are the most effective and reliable.
> most managers and employers are not so crafty
Amazon being so crafty is a documented fact; it's naive to think they're the only ones.
Amazon is a great example of a company where I absolutely would not put it past them to use DEI initiatives to try to defeat labor organizing. But in many other cases these initiatives are actually demanded and sought after by employees.
I think in this case the actions of well-meaning people were only appropriated as an oppression tactic after they've caught on in popularity.
History and my own anecdotal experience are not consistent with your implied theory that CRT-driven DEI became popular specifically as an anti-labor capitalist conspiracy.
I think it would make it far easier. The problem is every jurisdiction attacking unions and workers in their own unique legal frameworks, and the forcing of unions/workforces to compete with each other across the borders between these jurisdictions. Capital gets to play Mexican against Indonesian workers, even down to workers in Cook County against workers in DuPage county.
If an Indonesian can easily work in Mexico and a Mexican can easily work in Indonesia, their interests aren't just theoretically similar, they're almost the same.
Yes people can and do move from Mexico to the Midwest all the time.
Why do you think Mexican laborers should get paid less for building your car then someone in Detroit? Part of the goal of NAFTA is to help stabilize the economy of Mexico and help longterm reduce the severe violence in parts of the country.
I am not Mexican but it toke my family 14 years to be able to move to the US from Palestine, although my grandparents and uncles have been here since the 80s. It really isn't hard.
A company doesn't need to move everything, they can just literally build a new factory or rent one else where, not only that they would even get tax breaks as incentives for moving.
Borders enforce the huge discrimination in pay between TJ and San Diego. Even though the same companies work on both sides of the border.
> The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) created special economic and trade relationships for the United States, Canada and Mexico. The TN nonimmigrant classification permits qualified Canadian and Mexican citizens to seek temporary entry into the United States to engage in business activities at a professional level.
> Among the types of professionals who are eligible to seek admission as TN nonimmigrants are accountants, engineers, lawyers, pharmacists, scientists, and teachers.
https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
Border control prior to it was more focused on customs taxes, and in some countries, keeping undesirable races/religions out.
We have decided the latter is wrong, so instead of directly banning, say, Chinese or Jewish immigration, we replaced it with quotas on country of birth/origin.
Before WW2 the state only helped those who couldn’t help themselves. Now the state just fucks everyone.
Not...really? Unless by "state" you are broadly including the church and other philanthropy.
Through much of human history, the state largely 'helped' the aristocracy maintain a monopoly on wealth and power, through frequent applications of violence against their political enemies. In fact, in ~all non-democratic, and in many democratic societies, the state and the aristocracy - and thus, their interests, are often indistinguishable.
But either way, what does any of that have to do with passport controls?
I wonder if the same will happen to online travel pre-entry-authorizations.
During Covid many countries implemented pre-entry-authorizations, similar to US ESTA or Canadian ETA.
Even if the Covid emergency state has been over, some countries that didn't have this forms before, still require them for travel.
And Canada, who's planning to give amnesty and permanent residency to half a million illegal migrants in the coming year. [0]
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/immigration-ministry...
I have never heard this explanation. Where is it coming from? It sounds not only wrong but inverted to me. Governments enforce borders to effectively secure their territory and people, and thus its own power. Is the idea that, without the “legal fiction” of borders, we’d have some kind of global autoworkers Union or something?
Unions have a very specific set of rules to play by, and these rules are different for each country.
I was listening to an interviewer with a labor organizer on the US Mexican border who worked with new arrivals. He said the workers were used to unions from back in Mexico, but he had to spend lots of time educating folks about how things work in America.
Mexican unions have a level of corruption unheard of in even the most corrupt US unions.
The rules unions have to play by were put in place to reduce their power to effectively organize.
We live in a democracy.
The idea that we vote to screw ourselves over completely is strange.
Some people forget that everything isn't a zero sum game. Something can be good for companies and not bad for you. And something can be good for you and not bad for companies.
Some people DO NOT care about the economy and only care about social issues - or at least the economy's importance is far inferior to social issues (usually because they don't make much money in the first place).
Only if by "secure" you mean prevent your population from leaving [1]. The whole origin of border control was to prevent people from leaving. The easy way to think about it is you can't leave a country without a passport but you can enter a country without a visa (exceptions apply).
Did you think about this statement for even 1 second?
It should be clearly and immediately obvious that it is easier to leave places like the US than it is to enter it.
This is obviously the case.
You cannot with a straight face claim that actually it is easier to enter the US than leave.
Clearly, leaving is easier.
It is in fact, 4x easier to enter the US than to leave. Passports are actually rare for a US citizen to have, you just live in a bubble.
[1]: https://www.trade.gov/sites/default/files/2021-03/Fact%20She... [2]: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/about-us/reports-...
Its not difficult to get a passport, regardless.
Pointing to how many people choose to leave the US, or get a passport, does not counteract the true fact that getting a passport is easy.
The amount of visitors would be limited by the size of the tourism industry and regulations around entry visas. This is an unrelated metric.
[1]
> Dispersed as it was, the village abroad was a curiously intimate place, where people knew each other, or of each other, or at least where one another came from. It has its own networks of information that paralleled the new colonial posts and telegraph. Rumour flew vast distances. It was into these byways that the story of Nguyen Tat Thanh [Ho Chi Minh] became interwoven, as he made his way through, and as the French attempted to trace his movements. The new regime in Indochina emerged out of a blizzard of papers for personal identification and restrictions on exit and entry.
[2]
> Migrants everywhere lived under the constant fear of sudden displacement or banishment. This practice of medieval rulers was condemned in England by the Magna Carta of 1215, if never wholly discontinued. It was routine in the repertoire of colonial states. It was visited on Asian kings - the last Mughal emperor in 1858 and the deposed rulers of Burma in 1885, Vietnam in 1888 and 1907 and Korea in 1910 - as well as coolies. People of long residence could be suddenly expelled to some distant 'home', a point of imagined origin to which they might have few ties. This was a visceral exercise in power to cow and to shame: the life histories of the banished were recorded, their faces photographed, and the scars and other marks on their bodies mapped to guard against their return. In the Straights Settlements alone in 1914, 416 people were banished for life, and another 801 'vagrants' detained in prison, the great majority to be repatriated. Ministers denied in parliament that they used banishment to expel trade unionists from the colony.
[3]
> In no small part, modern empires were created in an effort to realize what the British Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, Winston Churchill, in 1908 called 'a harmonious disposition of the world among its peoples'. At the cold heart of liberal visions of free trade and progress was a ruthless global and racial division of labour. Europeans monitored movement obsessively, enumerating and marshaling people towards their mines, plantations and households. Colonial regimes' ability to control subjects beyond their own borders, often in the name of exercising 'protection' over them, became a yardstick of their authority and a challenge to their prestige. Who were all these people, and to whom did they belong? Who was what they said they were, and who was not, and how could it be proven?
[1] - Underground Asia, pp. 56
[2] - Ibid, pp. 61
[3] - Ibid, pp. 62-63
They're also products of both the information-state (being able to know who's in the country through identity document systems) and the jet age. Before the steamship the only real border enforcement was on trade at ports.
The British Empire had "freedom of movement" that effectively lasted only as long as people weren't using it in significant numbers. People could move from the colonies to the centre, and indeed after WW2 the government actively solicited Jamaicans to do so (Empire Windrush), but resistance from the public has increased since then.
To exclude them from what? That's the question. You give one of the answers here: sometimes people would want to exclude them because they lower wages. But in reality, people who are alarmed by lower wages are rarely in the position to say anything about what happens at the border. The people who get a say about that are the people who are alarmed by higher wages.
The only significant group in the region which some might identify as a distinct "race" are the Roma. That minority lives in all of the countries and they didn't cause countries to split up.
> you can't have open borders and social welfare programs
i guess the assumption is those people wouldnt be working?
At least in Europe, a sizeable amount of illegal migrants has only very rudimentary education, and the # of job openings for unqualified people is very limited. Some literally cannot read even in their own language.
As a result, immigrants from Africa and the Middle East are, on average, significantly overrepresented among welfare collectors and significantly underrepresented among taxpayers.
Of course, as long as the numbers involved are tiny, you can try to educate at least their kids, but once a fairly low threshold is crossed, parallel societies develop in full. Having classrooms where 90 per cent of the kids don't even speak the official language of the country is quite an intractable problem. And that threshold beyond which the schooling system basically gives up has been crossed in many regions of many countries such as Sweden or France.
TL;DR: You cannot maintain a modern welfare state with premodern population.
You’re going to have to show up with some evidence for this claim. You’re not asserting that the outcome is a byproduct of borders, a happy accident useful to businesses. You’re asserting that the driving reason for the concept of a border is for businesses to disrupt organized labor.
A major sticking point with Brexit - the UK wanted to be in the market without worker free movement (because immigrants)
Every deceased Emperor, Chief, King, Earl, Duke, Lord and other ruler of lands and holder of fiefdoms would disagree with this.
Large companies are able to navigate the border issues because they are able to make deals with a government and can (at least promise) to bring in a lot of investment and wealth that the government might be able to realize in taxes, either directly from the company's revenues, or indirectly through other businesses and property that grows along with the company's investment.
That company's can do this more effectively than individuals is less a function of some kind of cynical conspiracy to cut out of the worker (though that might be a side benefit that both sides appreciate), than it is a simple pragmatic response to the fact that it is much easier to deal with a small number of people about a large sum of money than it is with a large number of people about small sums of money.
This is similar to why the U.S. government is so amenable to working so often with dictatorships to secure it's international interests. They can work with (or influence or bribe) a single person or small group to make large deals quickly and without having to worry about the messy politics and oversight associated with a democratic government that has to approve major policy decisions.
Congestion charge is a rather modern invention as well, because the amount of cars in some city centers exceeded the tolerance of the locals and the capacity of the roads.
Borders can be soft/open as long as a modest amount of people crosses them. In a world of 8 billion people and relatively cheap travel, open borders would result in massive flows of people into several desirable locations - whose citizens aren't happy about such prospects.
Would you be kind and provide some scholarly proof for the rather modern invention? It might not have been called "border" and have the gate with digital IDs to pass by but well defined (for their time) territories existed for thousands of years as evidenced by territory disputes between bordering sovereign groups in all lived-on continents.
> Migration was generally speaking, unhindered and each emigrant could decide on the time of his departure, his arrival or his return, to suit his own convenience. But World War I brought harsh restrictions on freedom of movement. [0]
> The concept of a worldwide passport standard is relatively new, created in the aftermath of the First World War. ...the United States at the turn of the last century emerges: a near constant rush of immigrants, most destined to pass through Ellis Island. There they were given a cursory disease check, questioned, and in most cases, allowed to proceed on their journeys inward. This was easy enough to do without a global standard for identifying documents. [1]
> On the outbreak of the First World War, countries imposed border controls to block the entry of subversives and the exit of men with skills useful to the war effort. Passports were issued to allow travellers access through these restrictions. When peace came in 1918 most countries retained both border controls and passports. [2]
There used to be more restrictions on commerce than on people. Now it is the opposite. Money can move freely across international borders, and labor has become something to arbitrage.
[0] https://fee.org/articles/passports-were-a-temporary-war-meas...
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/a-history-...
[2] https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/when-passports-...
A few things you would have to consider before immigrating in the pre-modern world:
- Where are you going? There's no internet, books are rare, and maps are inaccurate (and often plain wrong)
- How will you get there? Transportation is expensive and unreliable
- How will you preserve wealth? A global financial system accessible to normal folks does not exist yet
- What will you do to support yourself? Pre-modern communication infrastructure makes scoping out foreign labor markets difficult
- How will you learn the language? You'll have to find someone to teach it to you, instructional material will be limited
- Who will you leave behind? Any family members that don't come with you will likely never be seen or heard from again
- What if people decide you're not welcome? Well-enforced protections against discrimination do not exist yet
People did immigrate, so obviously immigration was not impossible. Not all of these questions apply to every situation (people migrating to an adjacent country would not have to deal with many of these concerns). But immigration was far harder than it is today, and fraught with risk. Pre-modern borders were, by virtue of being pre-modern, effectively closed.
Wouldn't this mean that eventually the world will be more integrated in every dimension, regardless of the desires of those controlling borders, that lower barriers to communication and transportation will continue to make the world a smaller place? Will it be possible to stop this as the decades and centuries go by?
There's already millions of people crossing borders every year, like the southern U.S. border, refugees from Africa and the Middle East into Europe, migrants leaving Russia and Ukraine, migrants between countries in Africa, Asia, and South America, etc. One might expect those numbers to increase over time, as it gets easier to travel.
Perhaps it is inevitable that the world will continue to integrate.
That said, passports have been around near as long as borders, just did not have the smart chip embedded in them. Letters of recommendations or safe passage to pass a port have been around nearly as long as the notion of sovereign boundaries. It might have been a parchment with a wax seal, a ring, or a stick with a burn-mark, maybe even clay tablet, but the purpose of the "passport" is the same - passage into and across a territory controlled by another group other than the person holding the "passport" - i.e. safe passage.
Your reference last states King Henry the 5th of England had "pass porte" in the early 15th century. The Greek city states had safe-passage documents between each other way before the English. There is a bilingual "letters of recommendation" in Chinese and Tibetan from the 10th century to allow safe passage for a pilgrimage. A thing that allows a non-local to pass safely into and out of a territory. (British Library IOL Tib J 754) https://www.princeton.edu/news/2014/11/17/bringing-ancient-b...
I wonder about borders, too. I wonder when they started guarding borders like they do today. I know there were places with minimal border control, like the U.S. before the world wars. Were there places a hundred years ago and earlier where boarders were guarded like they are today? Did they want to keep the serfs in place? Did rulers care about peasants moving back and forth? Weren't boarders usually less populated areas, with nobody keeping track of crossings? Or are modern borders, imperfect as they are, only possible at this time due to modern governments and the military resources they can dedicate to such things?
My guess is that modern borders and modern passports came about around the same time. There's no sense in requiring documentation for every person crossing a border unless a country has the wherewithal to enforce that rule.
Case in point, Honolulu has a cost of living on par with (or exceeding) New York, SF, etc, but with wages on par with an average mid sized midwestern city.
What this means is people who were born and raised on the island either live with parents or move to the mainland
The theory is that for a whole range of lucrative jobs, “everywhere with Internet” can offer residents those jobs through remote work. So a neighborhood doesn’t need to compete to attract a big office building.
Personally I think that remains to be seen… we’re clearly still in the hangover from the pandemic. Society might look very different 10 years from now, and 10 years is a reasonable horizon for major civic planning. Most of the things that attracted Amazon to Crystal City were put in years or decades prior to their little competition.
> A business that doesn’t employ anyone or consume any inputs from other state businesses is not going to be a particularly interesting business to incentivize.
Exactly, that’s the whole point of the piece. If all the most lucrative jobs for your residents are remote, then maybe your civic planning will need to revolve around attracting people rather than incentivizing businesses.
Again, remains to be seen IMO. One big downside, from the perspective of local governments, is that taxes on individuals will have to go up. Quite a lot of local tax revenue passes through businesses, hidden in prices. You can’t hide on a W2 or property tax bill though.
I agree, but I also think many places compete poorly.
I recently moved to a fast-growing (read: developer-friendly) region of the USA that often claims to be a "top place to live". And I might just leave, for many reasons:
* The water tastes terrible. But I bought a filter so whatever...
* The schools are bad. But I can try to lottery into the magnet school, okay..
* The services suck because they are not made to keep up with demand. Worse yet this is "normalized", seen as completely okay by the culture.
* Can't make a DMV appointment yet, next appointments available in three months
* None of the post offices accessible to me have passport appointments available. The only walk in service available is in another county
* I can't drive, transit exists but is too infrequent to be a good option to get to that other county for a very specific appointment
That's just a small slice of government-enabled things which happen to affect me. But what of it? No one in power gives a shit. So f--k me for having high expectations, I guess.
For example, The Netherlands has a 30% tax advantage for all immigrants, for 5 years. Thats huuuuuge.
[1]: https://www.iamsterdam.com/en/live-work-study/living/officia...
This is not at all a 30% tax advantage lol.
The immigrant gets €77,281.98 annually after tax.
Thats 27% more money in your bank account for the same work done.
And there is another huge benefit for those moving from the USA... Any income from shares or overseas income are taxed at the USA tax rate rather than the dutch tax rate.
A nitpick, but that's not "for the same work done", but for the same gross salary.
The benefit is in recognition of the extra home-making costs (and work) a highly skilled immigrant would have upon moving there.
A local would usually have local support system (friends, family, inheritance, knowledge of language...).
Politically I think they originally justified it as covering expenses for people living in a new country (without having to declare e.g. trips home), but practically it’s a tool to help employers attract internationals and make it cheaper to offer internationally competitive salaries for professionals.
> Highly skilled migrants...
Interestingly you can apparently, if you're careful about it, register your own foreign company there and avail of the 30% ruling so long as you register your company before you move. I have an Irish limited company and am working on figuring out how to do that so I can move to NL and avail of this tax benefit.
Making a success of large scale immigration will be essential to the future prospects of those nations/communities.
Care to specify which systems are causing the falling birthrates?
I'd say that falling birthrates have much more to do with modern medicine (antibiotics and effective contraception anyone?) and better sanitation systems, as well as industrialization, than with government policies (China's failed "one child" policy notwithstanding).
If you're a farmer, more kids means more (relatively free) help on the farm. When almost half[0] of the children born died before the age of five, more kids were conceived, since many wouldn't survive to adulthood.
That's not government policy, that's technology.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041693/united-states-al...
What's wrong with immigrants? My father was an immigrant. My mother's parents were immigrants. Babies are "immigrants" from someone's womb.
I'd note that all humans are immigrants to every place except Africa.
Further, I'd ask why you care where the person (or their parents) who installs the side view mirror on your car at the factory comes from? What practical difference does that make in your life?
Well, except for being able to get decent Pho[0], quality bagels[1], pizza[2], pasta[3] and all manner of other stuff that immigrants brought/bring to this country. Making our culture richer and more interesting.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pho
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagel
Not to mention it is in the interest of any organism, any living being, to produce descendants, so any policy that promises long-term sub-replacement fertility is dangerous from that point of view alone. It frankly boggles the mind this is something I have to explain.
Americans aren't Americans because we live in America. Americans are Americans because we believe (or should. Do you?) in the Constitution and the rule of law.
Our society is based on those things, not place of birth.
One doesn't need to be born here for that. In making that argument, you're dissing our culture, society and ideals.
And which "minority" are you talking about? The Jews? The Italians? The Irish? The Russians? The WASPs? They're all minorities here. As are you. Except the part about being Americans. But you seem to not care about that part. Why is that?
"White" isn't an ethnicity or a separate grouping. Rather it's just a specific genetic adaptation to colder climates in the amount of melanin in the skin.
What's more, Natalie Portman from Israel, Arnold Schwarzenegger from Austria, Sergei Brin from Russia, Albert Einstein from Germany, Cesar Chavez from Mexico, Mila Kunis from Ukraine, Joseph Pulitzer from Hungary, Madeline Allbright from the Czech Republic and many, many others from every continent except Antarctica are all just as American as you or any other American.
>Not to mention it is in the interest of any organism, any living being, to produce descendants, so any policy that promises long-term sub-replacement fertility is dangerous from that point of view alone. It frankly boggles the mind this is something I have to explain.
And we do. The human population has grown from ~2.5 Billion to almost 8.5 Billion since 1950. I think that covers the "producing descendants" bit.
Because every human is very closely related[0]. In fact, so much so that a member of a hunter-gatherer tribe in the Amazon is likely to be more genetically similar to you than your next door neighbor or mailman[1].
And so, we're doing just fine in keeping Homo Sapiens (the only human "race" currently in existence, although broadly, our genomes also contain genes from Neanderthals and Denisovans) going -- more than tripling the population in ~70 years.
tl;dr: You're talking out of your ass and it smells that way too. Yuck.
[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/humans-are-all-mo...
I'm not American. But that's not the citizenship condition your founding fathers passed. It's not even the citizenship condition today.
> And which "minority" are you talking about?
It doesn't matter - all of them living in the US (or any other country) will be subject to the same sub-replacement conditions I argue are harmful to a nation, in the sense that a nation is not just the legal and ideological system, but also people.
> "White" isn't an ethnicity or a separate grouping. Rather it's just a specific genetic adaptation to colder climates in the amount of melanin in the skin.
You're saying human groups were separate long enough to develop different adaptations to the climate.. but no other adaptations? Despite your claim about how similar we all are, genetic tests easily determine geographic ancestry, as a PCA plot of genetic diversity shows [1]. The claim that we are more similar rests on single-gene variation, which is a meaningless test, since nearly all traits are polygenic. Even your claim about Neanderthal genes is wrong - sub-Saharan Africans don't have them. And Scientific American has admitted to putting political goals ahead of science [2], so their credibility in this area is nil.
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:3D_PCA_plot_of_Xavan...
[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/science-must-not-...
Fuck off.
Let's circle back in 2080 or so.
Good. We don't need or want scum like you.
See also my comment from a previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34909400
Tyler Cowen, its author, is a noted economist (with libertarian leanings), and he favors competition in many forms. Anyone curious about him and his views should read his blog Marginal Revolution and listen to his podcast. They're both smart:
https://marginalrevolution.com/
https://conversationswithtyler.com/
Tyler has written extensively about stagnation in the American economy. Part of that stagnation is the decreasing mobility of Americans.
I very much agree with him that governments should compete for residents, especially the right kind of residents.
It takes hard work to build a successful city.
If we look at San Francisco, we see a city that has done everything it can to drive away many residents, and in so doing, destroyed its tax base, leading to a budget crisis. A great lesson in what not to do!
Why should there not be a market for talent, where the towns and cities of America compete to make themselves more livable, better centers of serendipity, better providers of public services? That sounds great to me.
In an earlier America, some cities took this mandate very seriously. For anyone curious, Stanley Marcus of Neiman Marcus tells the story of about the leaders of Dallas deliberately made it attractive to early residents in order to build their town. His biographical book is called "Minding the Store."
In the last few years, the city government could have adopted very different policies toward policing, homelessness, COVID, housing and education, all of which would have made it more competitive than it is.
SF's commercial leases, while underperforming on a national level, are a whole different issue to the one Tyler is addressing, which is about competing for residents, not businesses.
... aren't we there already?
But XX century changed that.
Hence the Prussians bringing Poles to work on the farms in Silesia abandoned by Germans for the factories in the Ruhr, the Russians bringing Mennonites to settle the Volga (of course, it helped that the imperial family was German), the Austrians encouraging Serbs to exchange Ottoman for Habsburg rule, and many more such cases.
Or Poles moving from Galicia (now Western Ukraine) to Argentina or Chicago.
At the time it wasn't possible to keep citizens tied within borders so higher personal taxes were impractical.
We got a taste of this effect when remote working became common. A lot of people moved to other states and cities they wouldn't or couldn't live in before when they were expected to live near the office. But of course remote working isn't possible for many industries, particularly for blue collar labor, so if you want those people to move into your area, you need to have job opportunities to offer them.
I wouldn't bet on a surge of people. Even in Anchorage, the sun comes up mid-morning and sets mid-afternoon in the winter. And about half the year the high temperature struggles to get above freezing. A typical summer temperature tops out in the mid 60s, and summer is short.
Sure, some people will still move there, but it's not just jobs that makes Alaska a tough sell.
How so? I was in west Manhattan when that happened. We got the jobs and capital, not Queens.
It’s unsubsidised. But there was a hiring boom originally planned for Queens—I know people who were planning on living in Queens who had to about turn to Chelsea.
You’re correct that Queens lost because of opposition, not subsidies per se, but a lot of that opposition was churned by anti-subsidy politics.
With that in mind, to what extent do you consider this a "vindication"?
In reality that's not what happened. Amazon has had a very large unsubsidized office in Manhattan which predates their "HQ2" proposal and has quietly grown even larger in the years since I interviewed there. That they have significantly expanded their corporate offices in Hudson Yards without subsidy suggests that the tax breaks were unnecessary to begin with. Amazon was always going to staff up in NYC regardless of whether they got the tax break or not.
In general, subsidies of that sort for companies operating out of desirable locations like SF and NYC are unnecessary because the employer needs access to the highly educated talent pool in those cities far more than the city needs any individual employer.
But yeah, the right coupling of business and government is as unhealthy as religion.
The #1 reason people move is for employment opportunities. Although, promising some companies tax breaks doesn't guarantee you're going to meaningfully create jobs. But the same goes the other way around, giving residents low taxes or other incentives also doesn't guarantee they'll move there, if they can't get a job.
I am as capitalist as they come, but I don't disagree with this assessment at all. I find it bizarre how some cities almost became hostile to their own citizens and got away with it because of a monopoly on the good jobs.
Barring a serious housing surplus, or similar major economic problems, there are ~no upsides for political leaders who actually work to attract more residents to an area. (Attracting more & higher bidders, for the limited housing stock, is a different story.)
Vs. "attracting new business"? That attracts plenty of favorable press, bragging rights, etc. And for local governments - which live on property taxes and have to fund the schools & local services - every dollar worth of business properties is a money farm, and every dollar worth of residential housing is a money pit.
Workers who have high career capital are mobile and can generally choose where they want to live.
Nothing about this is unserious just because it doesn’t fit your worldview.
There may be a large number of small towns, but most people and most economic activity happens in larger urban areas, and that’s what is germane to the article’s argument.
The article is about attracting more wealthy residents to an area. It doesn't say it that directly, but it does directly reference the new work-from-home upper-middle-class, and how they can live anywhere now.
I don't think the indirectness is being sneaky, it's more trying to be polite.
> If Amazon stiffs Northern Virginia, future politicians elsewhere may be less eager to promise tax breaks and infrastructure investments, not to mention spend their reputational capital. Politically speaking, it will be harder for urban and suburban leaders to rise to the top by attracting a new major corporate tenants. “Pro-business” local governments may be less common in the years to come.
If anything, the politicians who blocked Amazon from coming to Queens actually got more bragging rights.
This can't possibly be true in any of the municipalities I've ever lived in. Property taxes are insane, like fancy private school tuition insane and it's definitely not going into the roads. Actually lets break it down:
Power, water, and sewer are paid for by their consumption. My local utilities actually have the problem that they _make_ too much money.
Roads are paid for by fuel/registration taxes/insane vehicle sales tax.
Schools are paid by property tax, but every public school in every jurisdiction I've ever lived in has been inferior to private while costing me almost as much via property tax.
Then there's Fire and Police, but those costs should be minimal and distributed over the huge number of residents.
Then there's the mail, oh wait that's again funded by usage.
Zoning and code compliance? Again, absolutely minimal costs there. Permits cost $... so again funded by usage!
Central planning for development? _What_ planning? lol.
I know where this is coming from, poorly researched and often-dishonest narrative from "not just bikes" and their ilk. In reality residential communities are huge tax farms. Every watt of power, gallon of water, etc is *paid for* (including a healthy markup). The damn roads don't cost $15k/year.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/4/30/my-city-has-ma...
First, commercial property taxes in California are generally higher than residential. Which is an incentive to attract business, not residents. https://www.hechtgroup.com/the-different-taxes-imposed-on-co...
Second, you're seriously underestimating the cost of roads. As https://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Free-Parking-Updated/dp/193... pointed out, the bit of road your car is parked on usually costs more than the car. Now walk around your neighborhood and look at how much road there is. ALL of it costs that much. Most of us don't think about it, but it has to be paid for somehow. And it really isn't cheap.
Sure, but businesses making _more_ for an area doesn't mean residential areas aren't profitable.
>the bit of road your car is parked on usually costs more than the car.
Sensational nonsense. ~100sq ft of black tar asphalt, barring some kind of bananna republic corruption scheme, could never cost _more_ than an average automobile. Think about how absurd that statement is, and reevaluate why your internal filters allowed that statement through.
>Now walk around your neighborhood and look at how much road there is. ALL of it costs that much. Most of us don't think about it, but it has to be paid for somehow. And it really isn't cheap.
The premise is absurd, so the conclusion from it is invalid.
About the road, a standard parking space is 180 square feet. At $100 per square foot for the land that's $18,000.
Now compare to the car. Per https://hedgescompany.com/blog/2022/02/how-old-are-cars/ the median car is about 12 years old. If you want to buy a 2011 car right now, https://www.truecar.com/used-cars-for-sale/listings/year-201... shows you a whole lot of options. All are substantially less than that.
The median car really does cost less than the space where it is parked. For more on this, see https://streetwidths.its.ucla.edu/
Former educator: This mostly comes down to being able to select for students from house holds that have large disposable income and care enough about their child's education to send them to a private school.
This usually gets you a lot of benefits:
1. Less disruptive kids (get too disruptive and they kick you out)
2. More engaged kids
3. Parents with leisure time to volunteer
4. Easier fundraising (private school in my area rakes in ~$1ml/yr in fundraising, vs $500k for the public school).
I really want to re-iterate how powerful the effect of being able to kick people out of the school is. Like in most things 20% of the families generate 80% of disruptions in public schools and private schools basically get to elide that by not being a public service.
Capping spending ratios would also be horrific for the US specifically because we implement many of our social welfare programs for kids through the schools: school lunches, speech therapy, etc. (incidentally, this overinflates our spending on students relative to peer nations). You'd be relegating poor kids to even worse outcomes than they already face which would have some seriously negative downstream effects once they become adults.
(And if "yes", could the problem mostly be fixed by (say) changing "2x" to "3x"?)
The poorer left competing at the public schools all have their various challenges and struggles. IMO the best we can do for them is afford them equality of OPPORTUNITY for use of numerical amount of public funds. Johnny gets 10k Billy gets 10k, maybe 20k at most. There's no guarantee you'll get equality of outcome, but at least you got equal shot at the public funds and one poor kid doesn't lose out a huge amount so the other kid gets 5x the money. At some point sure more money is almost always better than less, but we have to remember that comes at the cost of other poor kids.
As for lunches... I don't know why those aren't just given to all kids in public school by default. That would make it equal and satisfy the criteria.
>Quantifying that is difficult
This sounds accurate but I have to point out you've expressed the private schools are finding effective ways to identify disruptors.
Competing for residents IS competing for businesses, with maybe a few exceptions for resource extraction.
What else does better as a medium of attraction for worthwhile people? Walkability? Save that for the Europeans who pretend like boasting Paris and (formerly) London qualifies them to talk about managing large cities. Civil services? I'm salaried and I've got a car, the only reason I'd use most common civil services is either because my ride is in the shop or I was literally stabbed and needed the ER. Otherwise you couldn't /pay/ me to deal with the kinds of people who take the bus. Meanwhile parks and libraries are for the homeless and parents in denial about the times.
So what's left to brag about to attract people?
They are representatives of their nations, and their duty is to their people, to whom they are guardians, of said people and their homelands. They should not be 'competing' for more residents just as families shouldn't compete to attract other's children.
Around the world, governments act like abusive parents. If people could migrate freely (creating a competition for residents), much more people would live without the abuse of authoritarian governments.
When we in the United States try to claim that immigration would hurt our sovereignty as a people, we're referring to an almost fictional nation that's supposedly being overrun—we have always been an eclectic group of immigrants from many places, and the people who have deep ancestral ties to the land are generally marginalized already.
But when people in a true nation state express the same concerns, we in the US should understand that the context is very different. This isn't the case of third generation Americans trying to claim that this land is theirs and no one else should be able to come here—instead we're talking about people whose families have been there literally since time immemorial.
I'm not writing this to take a stand on immigration in Europe or anywhere else, but it's important for us in the US to not project our own sensibilities into a completely different context.
A good article on this topic: https://acoup.blog/2021/07/02/collections-my-country-isnt-a-...
1. There's such a thing as a true nation 2. That how long a person's family has lived in a region should entitle them to keep others out
The first one is bound to wander into circuitous philosophical debate, but I'm curious what the rationale is for the second.
> I'm not writing this to take a stand on immigration in Europe or anywhere else, but it's important for us in the US to not project our own sensibilities into a completely different context.
As for the first assumption, I'll grant you I was making that. Whether or not the concept of a nation exists in reality, it undeniably exists in people's heads, and it's less obviously artificial in Europe and elsewhere than it is in the United States.
EDIT: Although, note that I didn't actually use the phrase "true nation", I said "true nation state", and I think the existence of a nation state is less up for debate than the existence of a nation.
That seems muddled. A nation-state is a state whose population are dominantly formed out of a single "nation." Generally the nation implies some kind ethnic or ancestral ties (and granted the definition can be fuzzy) - but if concept of a nation is in doubt ... then so in the concept of a nation state. They are necessarily coupled.
I think the key thing is that for a nation state, anything that can significantly impact the composition of the citizenry to change the scope of what the nation means is effectively an existential consideration. The US is explicitly not a nation-state, though americans have mixed opinion on the matter. Europe is comprised of nation states, but may of them these days seem to consider that a bit of an historical embarrassment and want to transition to be some form of multicultural state, especially as part of the multinational confederation of the EU.
That said, I think in the long run people see through propaganda and correctly perceive their own self interest. Knowledge workers in NYC and SV are following their own self interest in aligning themselves with global capital on the immigration issue—they benefit from a globalized economy with free movement of labor—while plumbers in Iowa are acting in their self interest to opposite it.
It’s hard for a minority of Americans, who happen to control the media and institutions, to understand. That minority is freaking out because Trump voters in Idaho have a similar understanding of nation and nationality to ordinary people in Bangladesh or India or China.
You’re correct that it’s important for Americans not to project their sensibilities onto others. But it’s also important for cosmopolitan urban Americans not to project their sensibilities onto other Americans. A significant chunk of America is populated by the immigrant groups that developed the region in the first place. The Midwest is very much still a product of the German, Dutch, and Scandinavian settlers who immigrated there 200 years ago. My wife’s family were among the first white settlers in Oregon. Maybe the native Americans have a legitimate beef against them, but the Oregon that exists today is the product of her people and it’s entirely legitimate for them to think of their society as theirs in the same way as my family in Bangladesh thinks of our country as theirs.
For the record, I'm not a cosmopolitan urban American. I'm in a deep red state in flyover country. My ancestors (and my wife's) were the first settlers here. I'm proud of my ancestry, and I feel a deep connection with that past. I know exactly what it's like to be living in a place that your ancestors settled and to feel like it's changing.
However, I also take great issue with the Republican rhetoric surrounding immigration. I'm not talking about stereotyped rhetoric imagined in the left-wing media, I'm talking about conversations I regularly have over dinner or around the water cooler. I'm talking about growing up under the impression that Hispanic people were either lazy or drug dealers and that if we let too many of them in they'd ruin the country for "real" Americans.
I'm opposed to American nationalism because when I finally had the chance to interact with large numbers of immigrants, they not only didn't match the stereotypes, they were exactly the opposite in every way. I'm opposed to American nationalism because my ancestors left their homes and moved out West looking to get away from prejudice and hate—because they built a new world out here in collaboration with a lot of people who were very different than they were—and I owe it to their memories to be willing to do the same. They were no strangers to change, so I don't know why I should expect to be.
I think that's something the left is increasingly uncomfortable with; the idea that some countries aren't as developed as others because of its people and that simply transplanting people across countries won't change anything to it.
And to swing elections. Notice the completely different treatment of "Dreamers" (illegal immigrants) to that of legal children of immigrants (especially Indians). The former are given special status and can stay in America forever, the later are to be deported on their 21st birthday unless they manage to secure a visa. So much for following the rules...
And although I'm sure this is not a popular sentiment, I think governments are too biased towards people already living in their jurisdiction, even if those people are there by mere coincidence (i.e. they happened to be born there). People shouldn't be held to higher standards simply because they were born somewhere else, which is something they don't control.
An ideal immigration policy would be to allow anyone making above the median income, or otherwise anyone who would be an "above average" resident to become a citizen instantly, and the government should work hard to attract these people. Conversely, they should encourage "below average" residents to relocate to more affordable/lower tier areas, and not give them any special privileges just because they are "legacy residents."
It is just a statement of fact that the geographic location a person is born is coincidence.
I disagree with nhchris’s response of
> It is their inheritance, their birthright, the fruit of their ancestors' labors.
Because there is no natural law that something is “your” inheritance, birthright, or that you have claim to the fruit of your ancestors’ labor. Might makes right is how nature works, and it just so happens that you were born in a time and place where certain “rights” are being upheld, and there is not a stronger party that wants and is able to take them from you.
You can even go further and replace place X and Y with parents X and Y.
and still: for the person born to "deserve" living with these benefits nebulously assumes the person, and the "deserving", were there first, and THEN you are born and by sheer chance, you got it - or not. Again, when you stop thinking this way, sort of "thinking of an abstract person" first, but rather realize that there are no abstract people, just real ones, this starts to feel weird.
The answer is: yes, people returned to many places after they were totally demolished, suffered from systematic resource drainage and were background of inhumane genocides. TLDR: massive scale war is nothing new.
Sadly
This is, in my view, one of the reasons america is so culturally weird. It’s generation after generation of the most antisocial families from other countries.
That's a direct result of democratic government: people choose those who promise to work in their best interest.
If you dislike this, who would you vote for? Someone who'd look to "expel" you from your local community?
> ...making above the median income...
Ok, so instead of having diversity, you believe it's best if there is no intermingling of classes?
But then, why stop at above/below median? Why would the top 1% want you in their area? Or the top 5% in theirs? Or...
And why have the buck stop at income? I am sure an area would be proud to be home to an adult population that's 95% PhDs. And then they can split up between tenured professors or not.
Not to mention disallowing people from having a long term home as their circumstances bearably change.
This is so fundamentally not thought through.
Let me pick at specifically Russia/Ukraine. A short time ago, these countries economic ties were vast. There were many Ukrainians whose personal wealth stemmed from e.g. the country's ties to Russian petrochemical industry.
Others, seeing that, said "You are accruing personal wealth by strengthening a foreign power's hold on our nation." To which the response was occasionally "Are you racist? Are you nationalist?" We see now how this turned out.
The dirty secret is that history vindicates all forms of identity group tribalism, in principal. That includes racism. There is no shortage in history of examples like the above, nor of examples of destroyed nations.
If anything, I feel the problem is that contemporary countries do not represent the nations the purport to.
When you’re talking about different groups of people from different cultures that’s not “racism.” My parents, who grew up in Bangladesh, an extremely hierarchical and traditional society, couldn’t be more different from my wife’s parents, who are descendent from frontier pioneers. Like they can get along as individuals but neither would want to live in a society built by the other. And that’s exactly what happens when you introduce large scale immigration into a democracy.
That’s entirely unrelated to “racism” or “xenophobia,” which is stereotyping or prejudice based on superficial rather than substantive differences.
There's a benign version of the argument you're making here, the one that protects cultural and religious tolerance while establishing some set of core values (pluralism, the rule of law, representative government, separation of church and state) set above all other concerns. But you're making, and re-making, a case for excluding people because their differences of religion (your example) and culture make native-born people unhappy. That's not OK, and I'm pretty sure I've got the founders on my side of this argument.
It’s not “racism” at all because it has nothing to do with “race,” which is a superficial construct. It’s about substantive differences in people’s worldview, beliefs, values, etc., which are relevant to living with people in communities and sharing a government with people.
> But you're making, and re-making, a case for excluding people because their differences of religion (your example) and culture make native-born people unhappy. That's not OK, and I'm pretty sure I've got the founders on my side of this argument.
Whether the founders envisioned it or not has nothing to do with whether it’s “racism.” There is no moral obligation to allow people with different values into your community and allow them to vote on the government that you live in. To the contrary, that notion violates the human right of self determination.
Besides that, the founders were not multiculturalists. America at the time was a collection of mostly monocultural communities. Massachusetts and several other states still had an established church. The founders created a framework where those disparate groups could cooperate in a limited fashion through a federal government of limited and enumerated powers.
That ship, however, said long ago. If a federal Department of Education exists and says what kids learn in schools and the federal government says that 99.9% Protestant communities in Iowa can’t have prayer in schools you can’t invoke what the framers thought about how pluralism should work.
"[T]he door of this part of the federal government is open to merit of every description, whether native or adoptive, whether young or old, and without regard to poverty or wealth, or to any particular profession of religious faith."
There may be countries in the world that don't have a moral obligation to allow people from different cultures and religions (I'm avoiding "values" here, since it's a squiggly concept). But we're not one of them.
The moral question here is more fundamental than your over-generalization of the founders’ intent. Human beings have a right to self determination, and they have the freedom of association. You don’t lose that right just because you were born in America.
Show me where it says there is a moral obligation to accept immigrants who will move into your community and change its culture? You’re reading all that into a single sentence:
“A representative of the United States must be of the age of twenty-five years; must have been seven years a citizen of the United States; must, at the time of his election, be an inhabitant of the State he is to represent; and, during the time of his service, must be in no office under the United States. Under these reasonable limitations, the door of this part of the federal government is open to merit of every description, whether native or adoptive, whether young or old, and without regard to poverty or wealth, or to any particular profession of religious faith.”
The sentence is saying that elected office should be broadly available to all citizens, which is a point nobody is disputing.
> The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants,” lead supporter Sen. Edward “Ted” Kennedy (D-Mass.) told the Senate during debate. “It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.”
The limit citizenship to "free White persons of good character" founding fathers [1]? Or Thomas Jefferson, who considered that, when freed, Blacks should be "removed beyond the reach of mixture" [2]? James Madison, who wrote "To be consistent with existing and probably unalterable prejudices in the U. S. the freed blacks ought to be permanently removed beyond the region occupied by or allotted to a White population." [3]? Or Benjamin Franklin, writing "the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small [..] I could wish their Numbers were increased [..] But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind." [4]?
As an American you were probably exposed to much propaganda about how the US is a "nation founded on an idea", or similar nonsense. But as a foreign observer, let me assure you nothing could be further from the truth. Did you never ask yourself, if the founders were such racial egalitarians, how is it that, aside from the descendants of Black slaves (10%), the US was nearly entirely white (87.5%) until 1950? That leaves just 2.5% for immigration from the entire rest of the world.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalization_Act_of_1790
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/03/what-je...
[3] https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch15s65...
[4] https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-04-02-00...
Sure, I'll try to be clearer. You wrote "I'm making a simple positive argument about the clearly stated goal of the founders."
Which goal, and where was it stated?
I like how Republicans act as master and judge and issue the judgement "incorrect" and go on to adopt a blatantly racist stance under the currently fashionable republican sound bite of "unacceptable cultural differences", while immediately switching to the directly opposite sound bite "diversity of ideas" without flinching. Republicans have a reputation for being racist for very good reasons.
Nearly all the people immigrating to the US come from countries that believe the same thing as republicans: one cultural group has no moral obligation to invite another cultural group over the border to share democratic governance of their country with them. Indians believe that, Chinese people believe that. Japanese people, Koreans, everyone in the Middle East. Mexicans would flip out if mass immigration from Guatemala was flipping elections in their country.
Ironically, the liberal American view of this reduces to the assertion that a handful of mostly European descended people in the developed world are correct about the nature of nationhood while everyone else is wrong.
If Hispanics and Muslims were coming here and voting their social values instead of their economic ones you can bet the narrative would be different.
Dude, stop bringing up Bangladesh as context for anything and everything. What you are calling "cultural differences" in 1971, was simply called genocide because of racism by everyone else.
But you are going for the racism and genocide is A-ok, as it's just an expression of "cultural differences". You can continue with your word play in your replies again.
Liberals reading into this and seeing racism is itself an example of this phenomenon. They hear something like "diversity of ideas" and instantly a big red moral stop sign shows up in their head. It shows how when everyone has fundamentally different values, and everyone's different sets of moral landmines are overlaid on the same map, it becomes basically impossible to walk through the space of ideas without sooner or later stepping on one.
You absolutely have the right to improve your lot, if by lot you mean the portion of land you were born in. I would even go as far as to say you have the duty to care for it. However, you don't have the right to take other peoples lot, their identity and society from them just because you were born unlucky and they were in your opinion born unfairly lucky. What you are advocating in practice is the destruction of all smaller ethnic groups, local traditions and cultural diversity of the world by overriding everything with unstable and internally conflicting pseudo-culture (or maybe a bit more politely worded pop-culture) and identity policies promoted by the wokeist Americans. This modern, woke American imperialism hiding behind the cover of liberty and personal freedoms is in practice almost as evil and destructive as the reactionary imperialism of Russia.
The solution to emigration for a polity shouldn't be keeping their citizenry prisoner or forcing others to treat their residents more poorly because of some imagined 'race to the bottom', but to instead make their own land more attractive to stay and live in.
That I agree with. While it is entirely up to a country's discretion whether they permit immigration, leaving a country must not be prevented.
* Utilities such as roads, water, high speed internet feel like table stakes now. Fiber internet is quickly spreading in rural areas, and I know people with septic tanks and a fiber line. Ten years ago Google Fiber was a major selling point for Kansas City.
* Governments have little control over climate, nearby geographic features, time zone, and a million other details. They can highlight their strengths in marketing campaigns.
* Cost of living only works for so long. We've seen areas in the last decades that have an influx of population and they usually see a corresponding increase in COL. There are approaches governments can take to slow down the growth of COL, but it seems inevitable.
* Taxes and local regulations might help attract some workers. Cannabis consumers might be more inclined to move somewhere they can gain access legally. High income workers might be attracted to places without state income tax. Women might migrate to a state that aligns with their abortion politics. Motorcyclists might prefer places with lane splitting.
* Large projects such as professional sports teams, well connected airports, large hospitals or ski lodges might play a role. Governments can attract these types of projects.
This IMO is the big issue though. Governments need to be aware of long-term population trends as stay ahead of them when it comes to planning. I consistently feel like local governments find themselves surprised at demographic changes that have been obvious for several years.
COL increases because it is difficult or impossible to build new housing, and because single-use zoning requires creating massive amounts of infrastructure since it is illegal to build work and shopping near where people actually live. In addition, taxing property value disincentivizes developing land, leaving empty lots in even the most valuable places to build: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJqCaklMv6M
I would describe COL increases as local resources and infrastructure being put under more demand and investments into importing resources or building infrastructure is more expensive than using existing infrastructure. Property taxes are a large source of funding for these investments. Dense housing might reduce the additional load on infrastructure but it doesn't remove it.
The idea isn't to get rid of property taxes and do without that revenue; the idea is to tax things that aren't beneficial that we want more of.
I think our perspectives are different on how much of a handbrake bad policy is on the market's ability to create what people want.