The Big Picture - Where's the world going?

[Crazy_Ivan80]

Cultural differences matter with mass migration. Humans are more than consumers and workers.

[crazy canuck]

Cultural differences matter with mass migration. Humans are more than consumers and workers.

I agree completely, I was addressing the economic argument Yi raised.

[Crazy_Ivan80]

Cultural differences matter with mass migration. Humans are more than consumers and workers.

I agree completely, I was addressing the economic argument Yi raised.

I know, but I also have the feeling this part gets overlooked more often than not ( whether on purpose or not I can't say, but I've got suspicions.)

[Grey Fox]

Cultural differences matter with mass migration. Humans are more than consumers and workers.

Sure but everyone becomes a lot more patient with our differences if everyone has shelter & food.

[Crazy_Ivan80]

Cultural differences matter with mass migration. Humans are more than consumers and workers.

Sure but everyone becomes a lot more patient with our differences if everyone has shelter & food.

Depends on the differences and wether or not they involve stabbing, running over or exploding people

[Grey Fox]

Cultural differences matter with mass migration. Humans are more than consumers and workers.

Sure but everyone becomes a lot more patient with our differences if everyone has shelter & food.

Depends on the differences and wether or not they involve stabbing, running over or exploding people

Patience.

[Neil]

Cultural differences matter with mass migration. Humans are more than consumers and workers.

Sure but everyone becomes a lot more patient with our differences if everyone has shelter & food.

Not really.  There's a reason that political extremism is rife in affluent students.  If all their needs are met, people just find something else to be angry about. 

[crazy canuck]

Cultural differences matter with mass migration. Humans are more than consumers and workers.

Sure but everyone becomes a lot more patient with our differences if everyone has shelter & food.

Not really.  There's a reason that political extremism is rife in affluent students.  If all their needs are met, people just find something else to be angry about. 

Sure, but those people are small in number. They may become the leaders of a movement, but more likely they are the first ones up against a wall.

[HVC]

Cultural differences matter with mass migration. Humans are more than consumers and workers.

Sure but everyone becomes a lot more patient with our differences if everyone has shelter & food.

Depends on the differences and wether or not they involve stabbing, running over or exploding people

Patience.

In that sense patience only works if you shut the door behind immigrants. Having a consistent flow of new immigrants means that the extremism never ends. If you're looking at it as an aspect of extremely differing cultures merging. Volume also matters there.

Where Canada has been lucky in the past with integration, as a general rule, is that it was usually people of some means and education coming. Much easier to integrate, and usually more closely aligned view points to begin with. That wasn't always the case, of course, 60 and 70s had a lot of influx of poorer peoples, but we need construction workers .

Of course, the student visa loop hole and the influx in the last decade or so kind of broke that educated middle class immigration stream, and we've had the backlash that accompanies such a change.

[Threviel]

I've been thinking for a while about what's happened and why and this is my stream of consciousness attempt at finding some kind of explanation.

History goes in cycles as we all know, after some time there's often a reaction taking society in a different direction. The strength of the reaction is often based on how far back it needs to react. French absolutism leads to French revolution leads to absolutism leads to constitutional monarchy, extreme example, but can be seen as something a sinus curve mellowing out. Trudeau for a long time in Canada leads to unpopularity leads to not-Trudeau and so on. There are lots of examples and probably lots of counter-examples.

Back in the day Keynes noticed this behaviour in economics and the answer is that we mellow out the tops of the economic sinus wave, we have "filters" making the extremes of economics mellow out and as a thanks for that we haven't had a new depression like 30's one. These sinus waves could probably best be seen as overtones on a general upwards curve.

Society is obviously very complex and cannot be easily described as a sinus curve, but rather as untold amounts of curves acting as overtones on each-other. But one can perhaps se societal development as an aggregate of a lot of curves coalescing into some kind of curve.

The political parties in their views acted as some kind of overtone on the general developmental curve. If you asked a conservative French politician in 1949 whether he wanted women to vote he might say no, but unlike conservative 1820's politician he would not want a return of serfdom. If you asked him in 1989 he would not be against women voting. The general curve had moved, but the different parties still acted as some kind of wave around it.

Look at the 18th and 19th century, middle classes were growing and the populations were more and more demanding political representation. In France it led to the revolution, in the UK progressive reforms mellowed out the excesses in the developmental curve and we all know what happened.

But why was there a revolution in France? It seems that the democratic consensus moved in a different direction from the ruling elite. The consensus wanted political representation and the ruling elite did not want that to happen. In the end the sides were too far apart and a compromise could not be reached and bam, revolution.

But why not in the UK? The consensus moved in the exact same direction as in France, but the ruling elite moved with the curve, compromising just enough to not break the trust too much and fizzle, no revolution.

This development continued into the 21st century. The curve seems to have followed some kind of democratic consensus. Most everyone agreed that, yes, women should vote, we should be democratic, we should have a market economy, we should have state sponsored education and something of a welfare state and so on.

But then something happened. Immigration is a good example. Consensus, as far as I have been able to gather data, seems to always have been that we don't want immigration. Take your poor, tired masses yearning to breathe free and please stay away and so on. For decades the political elite has had a radically different view from the democratic consensus. In itself the issue has not been important enough to warrant the main curve to move very much. Until it became too much.

It really remains to be seen how much the consensus has moved from the political establishment. I don't really think it has moved much enough to warrant fear of violent revolution, the size of the extreme parties on the right seem to flatten out at around 20, perhaps up to 30 per cent. It's really up to the political systems to see if they can adjust to the new reality. In the US the system has obviously failed, but that's the only place where that's happened. Meloni is not making a fool of herself for example.

There's probably lots of other development aside from immigration with the same pattern, woeness, gay rights or whatever, but I don't know the issues enough to say anything about them.

But the political elite needs to get back on the consensus wave, the problems of immigration need to be handled of we don't want the adjustment to be too hard, because where the will of the people want to go it will go.

I don't know if this incoherent babbler makes any sense what so ever, just an attempt to crystallise my thoughts.

I recall once talking with an self-admitted far right supporter who used this excuse that "Its not actually that far right" and "Its just the world is really far left so it looks it".
To which...wut? We live in a super right wing world. We've had 50 years of a basic continuous lurch to the right.
Improvements in rights for minorities sure. But in the actual stuff that impacts your average straight cis white guy's every day life its just been rightwards ho.

Now looked on the grand scope of human history, then sure. We are considerably more left wing today than 200 years ago. Maybe there's some psychohistory deep genetic memory stuff going on there. But I don't think its how people look at things.

On immigration too.... Again I have to say this is a strange idea that gets repeated a lot. That the establishment doesn't want us to talk about immigration. They're really for it whilst the silent majority of normal people naturally hate it, obviously....
But in the UK at least we've had 30 years of non-stop talk about immigration with certain parts of the establishment really keen to make it an issue when most people...just don't care.
I googled it and even today only 51% of people think its an issue- not a top issue, an issue at all. Go back some years and you get even lower numbers. Look for yougov polling on important issues and its generally a small minority worried about that.

With immigration the key problem for most I believe is not the immigrants themselves. Its that they're being blamed for all our other problems. Why build more housing or invest in the health service when you can just say the reason they suck is immigrants.

I've said before but I do think much of this comes down to system 1 and system 2 thinking.
The issues we have in developed western countries are wicked problems. There's no simple answer for what needs to be done and the obvious stuff that would make up any solution- its hard to actually do.
Enter immigration. A simple answer to a complex problem that puts a scary face on the issue.
The right's would-be good faith answers to our problems clearly don't work... so they're embracing the simple non-answers.

Good response. From what data I have seen people haven't cared much and immigration has not been important. But the voters have consistently been against it. That the anti-immigration parties seem to level at around 20% support is sn indication that it's not a super-important question.

Trans issues is, I guess, another similar thing. No-one cares at all, but if an opinion has to be given I would guess that a clear majority would find the whole thing weird and unnatural. And then it became part of the silly culture wars and bam, another absurd talking point for fascist forces.

[The Minsky Moment]

There are unavoidable demographic realities that impact now on all developed countries.  In Europe, the effect is particularly strong, as birth rates are now very low and have been far below replacement for a while now. For the rhetoric about automation and AI, it isn't feasible to substitute capital for labor fast enough to handle that transition without serious economic fallout.  Modern developed economies are overwhelming service based and with a rapidly aging society, the demand for care workers and all kinds of domestic labor will only increase.  And of course, the demographic profile flows into worsening dependency ratios, with potentially catastrophic consequences for public pension schemes.

Therefore, there appears to be a stark policy choice - either accept - indeed encourage - immigration, or face chronic labor shortages, inflationary pressures, and possibly collapse of retirement schemes.

In Europe, that choice has created difficulties because the most obvious source of immigration is from predominantly Muslim countries, resulting in tensions with the secularized post-Christian culture of the "natives".  And yet that cultural tension is not a full explanation of the atavistic resistance to immigration.  Anti-immigrant agitation has flared in the US, even though the bulk of migrants are Christians from predominantly Spanish speaking countries that have an established record of integrating reasonably well into American society.  The fact that extreme voices on the xenophobic nationalist right include names like Enrico Tarrio and Nick Fuentes indicates that the issue in the US is not simple anti-Hispanic prejudice.  It is a political and cultural clash over status.

That describes our present, but the demographic shift already well underway in the most developed countries is also spreading and deepening into Latin America and much of the Muslim world.  It won't be too long before the issue of immigration flows from those countries will be academic as there won't be any surplus labor left to migrate.  At that point, the developed world will be left to confront the full implications of demographic decline.

[Valmy]

That describes our present, but the demographic shift already well underway in the most developed countries is also spreading and deepening into Latin America and much of the Muslim world.  It won't be too long before the issue of immigration flows from those countries will be academic as there won't be any surplus labor left to migrate.  At that point, the developed world will be left to confront the full implications of demographic decline.

Yep. Immigration will not be a viable strategy for long. The future will need another plan. Elon Musk will have to repopulate the world single handedly.

[Jacob]

Yeah I'm really trying to wrap my head around the depopulation scenario(s).

Some things I think are fairly clear (I think) - the tension between the growing need for further retirement and old-age care services and shrinking work forces is pretty clear, and how to structure an economy in those conditions.

Most likely, I assume, it'll result in deflationary pressure on the local economy.

I wonder if it'll drive up the value of human labour, echoing the aftermath of the Black Death?

The immigration piece (in the Western World) is interesting. Anti-immigration sentiment is growing, I think, so the "import youth from elsewhere" strategy seems to be off the table.

Internationally, I wonder if (and how) the change in population percentages is going to work out - India will be much more populous than China, for example; and the African population will become comparatively bigger.

[crazy canuck]

Why do you think it will be deflationary?  Whenever there is a labour force decrease prices tend to go up because of the cost of labour goes up.

[Jacob]

My assumption is that population shrinkage will result in less aggregate demand and therefore shrink the economy, but I am far from certain