Looking at this exclusively from an economic perspective is a strategic mistake. The Irish say it puts the cart before the horse.
Migration does not merely bring units of labour or transfers of capital. In fact that is the most benign aspect of this subject. Nobody has a problem with his fellow man looking for his next opportunity, not even the most rabid nationalists I know, and doubtless as NRX I know more than most.
The central problem is something that at first appears to have nothing to do with migration. Namely; how is wealth actually created?
There are many answers to this question. Nearly all the obvious ones are wrong. This is amply demonstrated by the fact that almost every aid program, every economic structuring program in developing countries has repeatedly failed.
I suggest that we don't actually know the answer. Perhaps we do not have all the correct axioms. Perhaps extrapolating from having the correct axioms is just infeasible. We do not know why nations rise or fall. There are just people who pretend to.
What we do know is history and the present.
In history we know 4 centuries ago English and the Dutch began growing at quite a different trajectory to the others. They were gradually followed by most European states.
In the present the most powerful nations on earth are the result of that outgrowth, with the Asian Giants only coming onstream very recently roughly a half century ago.
I believe there are two things to take note here.
1. Whatever economic growth is, it doesn't transmit itself parsimoniously via word of mouth. We also know it has nothing to do with education, unbelievable though that may seem, there is ample evidence for this. North Korea is quite literate. The Communists were in general quite well read even as they fucked their countries into the ground. There are many African schools filled with enthusiastic learners (and disappointment when the economy proffers no value to much of this learning).
2. Economic growth is very discriminating. Based on culture. I think of culture as a collective idea network. There is a Occidental culture, there is an Oriental culture. The Occidental one grokked economic growth first, followed by the Japanese, Singporeans, Koreans, Taiwanese and then the Chinese with their SEZ. With the exception of the Japanese, that was very slow... suggesting that there is something... not simple... going on. The Asians after all are often very talented individuals. This is something about the collective.
Plainly the cultures that did not grok economic growth at all are the Africans and the Middle Easterners ex Israel. That may be starting to change with Iran but it is early days yet. Having oil is like winning a lottery ticket, the native economies are extremely impoverished and w/o oil...
Plainly the 'Protestant Work Ethic' is rot. Economic growth is not native to white people and certainly not a particular religion. Despite that, the cultural explanation makes most sense in light of the economic disparities.
The interesting thing is that we know it is culture because of colonization. We know it is in the particular people but not necessarily in the genetics or their education.
If you have large numbers of migrants from MENA, places that have not grokked economic growth, then they are bringing a dysfunction with them. They may be carrying a silent burden, a deadly memetic anti-matter, and don't even know it.
The individuals may be nice. Non-terrorists. Non-religious even. Friendly and civic minded neighbors. None of that matters if their network, which does not produce economic growth interferes with our network that does.
This is the great fear that afflicts nationalists instinctively.
Because again, if culture is what drives economic growth, and signs points to yes, then absorbing another culture which does not will lead to lots of little zero sum games, culminating in crime, terrorism and finally in broad conflict. You see it happening in France today, it is gradually but surely turning into a horror show.
That is the problem I never see addressed by migration discussions. No, not race, not genes, but the network problem.
Economists by the way know all of this. They just choose to call what I'm talking about 'institutions'. They really are spineless. What are institutions but groups of people acting in a certain way, namely; a culture.
Most liberals, I guess, were ignoring the problem you have described even during the Brexit. [1]
I recall this Sam Harris piece [2] in this respect.
[1] most liberals are forcing the natives to tolerate even the intolerances that the immigrants are bringing with themselves due to their cultures
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YCWf0tHy7M
I think what terrifies me the most, that genuinely keeps me up at night, is not wars or pandemics, but powerlessness in the face of a steady inexplicable decline that nobody can really understand.
That I find scary, because it has actually happened, and I suspect a complex systems collapse (the technical term) is by far our greatest threat.
The Maya are an example of a civilization that collapsed in a complex way: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-did-the-may...
Can you please elaborate a little on "complex system collapse" concept? I couldn't get it.
The Mayan example given here by someguydave shown some kind of system collapse. Is a similar thing that terrifies you or what?
The Maya are an example but there are thousands of them.
There is a reoccurring phenomenon where a society gets more sophisticated and then abruptly vanishes into the jungle or tears itself apart for little discernible rationale. Everything is going fine and then suddenly it gets really weird and nobody knows why.
Just as civilizations are emergent phenomena, so too is their breakdown. In fact it is like clockwork or an algorithm, there is something chillingly mechanical about the phenomenon.
The bible on this subject is a book called The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter. It is one of the most fascinating reads I've ever read. It is also the nearest thing the real world contains to Lovecraftian Horror. Much of it is plain creepy and this is from one of the most respected guys in archeology.
You might worry too much.
One of the most fascinating conspiracy theories I ever encountered postulates that the dark ages never happened. That is, this vast decline of the Roman Empire and ensuing centuries of neglect and intellectual emptiness (which inspires most contemporary worrying about the decline of great civilisations) was not a real thing at all but rather an artifact of how we've dated historical events.
The theory itself is very large, complicated, and weakened considerably by its original authors attempt to re-build his own completely different historical timeline after spending most of his theory on showing how we really have very little idea of what was going on before about 1000 AD.
But the gist of it is that as you go further and further back, history stops being a coherent timeline of events and starts being a series of snapshots with only rather weak signals used to arrange them and order them. Many of those signals are calibrated against each other, and often evidence that throws doubt on the 'consensus timeline' (as he calls it) is simply discarded, ignored, dismissed as a mistake by the original authors of the material or just written off as a mystery.
Just one example among many: Athens is hardly mentioned in works we believe were written during the dark ages, even in books written by people who travelled in the region. On the few occasions that it merits a mention it's described as if it were a small village of no particular importance. But the history books would have us believe that at this time Athens contained the vast ruins of a once great civilisation. It seems very strange that explorers and travellers who wrote about their adventures in that part of the world somehow just systematically forgot to visit Athens, of all places.
The theory explains this by suggesting that the construction of the great works in Athens have been misdated quite significantly, and the reason these works don't mention things like the Parthenon is because at the time they were written, these things hadn't been built yet. It claims that many of the things we assume are now ancient and separated from our world by centuries of abandonment and decline are actually early medieval in origin.
Anyway, fascinating theory, if only because there's so much potential for hole poking and resultant learning. The debunkings I found on the internet were rather weaker than I had expected and ever since I've been curious as to what exactly was supposed to have created and then ended this mysterious centuries-long "decline".
> You might worry too much.
I don't bite my nails over it but it definitely niggles away at me.
> One of the most fascinating conspiracy theories I ever encountered postulates that the dark ages never happened.
Yeah, the Phantom Time Hypothesis, right? There might be more than one.
> That is, this vast decline of the Roman Empire and ensuing centuries of neglect and intellectual emptiness (which inspires most contemporary worrying about the decline of great civilisations) was not a real thing at all but rather an artifact of how we've dated historical events.
I have become attached to a cyclical interpretation of history. Mostly because it is not fashionable nowadays. I'll come up with a more convincing rationale later.
> But the gist of it is that as you go further and further back, history stops being a coherent timeline of events and starts being a series of snapshots with only rather weak signals used to arrange them and order them. Many of those signals are calibrated against each other, and often evidence that throws doubt on the 'consensus timeline' (as he calls it) is simply discarded, ignored, dismissed as a mistake by the original authors of the material or just written off as a mystery.
It certainly is interesting. It makes an historians job similar to that of a crime scene detective. Of course it is a bit of a rabbit hole, you have to trust history didn't begin yesterday or you might go slightly mad.
This is the great advantage of those secret surveillance satellites. Our ancestors in an ascendant civilization phase might visit one in a thousand years and discover the 'tape' has been running all the while.
> Athens is hardly mentioned in works we believe were written during the dark ages, even in books written by people who travelled in the region. On the few occasions that it merits a mention it's described as if it were a small village of no particular importance. But the history books would have us believe that at this time Athens contained the vast ruins of a once great civilisation. It seems very strange that explorers and travellers who wrote about their adventures in that part of the world somehow just systematically forgot to visit Athens, of all places.
Ah but the list of books is not very long and most were destroyed. The Irish saved the Western world with a scriptorium (or maybe we made it all up). Have you seen the TV series Civilization (the first episode entitled 'The Skin of the Teeth' or similar). It is very much in the spirit of this thing.
Now you've intrigued me though, and I shall investigate the disappearance of Athens in the Phantom Time Hypothesis.
I've not heard it called the Phantom Time Hypothesis. The one I was referring to is described in this series of books:
https://www.amazon.com/History-mathematical-statistics-Eclip...
A lot of the stuff in there is dubious, but it's a vast series of books and an absolutely fascinating collection of historical mysteries even if you don't subscribe to the theory one iota.
Some of it is available online from the authors. Here's the chapter that deals with medieval Athens:
http://chronologia.org/en/seven/1N07-EN-410-445.pdf
With respect to "most of the books were destroyed", indeed there aren't many from this time, but that's part of what makes it so hard to figure out if ancient history is properly understood. Somehow there's a wealth of books from the early Roman and Greek civilisations thoroughly preserved by endless armies of monks, but a dearth of them much later. Fomenko's theory states that this is because many of the books we believe were written in ancient Rome were either mis-dated or flat out forged. Doubts about historical texts are not a new phenomenon: Isaac Newton was famously sceptical and here's a book from the 1800's that studies one of the big works of Roman literature:
http://www.searchengine.org.uk/pdfs/4/287.pdf
By institutions they mean rule of law, law enforcement, a banking system, etc. Quite different from what you're saying here.
Not so. Those are a portion of the institutions I mean.
Food for thought. Banking is not strictly legal under Islam.
Oh, there is a thing they call banking. The broad strokes are that religious leaders must approve (read as siphon, redistribute or otherwise fiddle with) transactions for them to be halal. Interest is called riba, and riba is illegal. Instead they complicate matters with superfluous nonsense which is basically cargo cult banking to pretend interest rates don't exist and then it has to pass the imprimatur of a theologian.
Rule of law is definitely not legal under Islam either.
There is Sharia. Again with the religious imprimatur.
Basically all institutions are subordinate to the rule of the religious authorities and their police.
There are words they use in the Middle East but they do not contain our meanings of them.
You can have a shiny sign and a web address, fancy lighting and polite staff offering mortgages and loans on a high street, but if it does not contain the correct algorithm then it is not actually a bank. It is a simulation. It is propped up by oil money and a subservient population. Not an organic self sustaining creation, it cannot truly self replicate.
I don't think this kind of thing is a case of 'fake it until you make it'. It is more a case of copying everything about the thing except the very thing itself, a negation.