Will Mini-Ethnostates Embrace Immigration?
Here are 5 mini article responses I wrote today:
1. Selling Insurance to the Poor
re: Nicholas Decker
Nicholas describes two insurance models: one which pays out for damages (like crop losses), and another which pays out for conditions (like drought). Drought might lead to crop losses, but it might not -- additionally, crop losses could come from other factors, like locusts.
I wanted to think about how else we could think of parametric insurance, like in social interactions. When someone’s mother dies, that is a loss, and society collectively says that we should be nice to that person. They might deserve extra vacation days, or be allowed forgiveness for being dysfunctional. We also consider this in the case of murder -- if someone’s child is killed, if the father kills the perpetrator, this is considered a mitigating factor. We give people more slack for their behavior if they have incurred a loss.
But what if we approached social grace from a parametric perspective? Instead of giving people slack for experiencing loss, we started giving them slack for experiencing adverse conditions -- even if they overcame those conditions. This generates a whole different perspective. Now, instead of giving our greatest sympathy to those who experience loss, we give our greatest sympathy to those who experience difficult conditions.
In the social realm, it is difficult to distinguish between the two, because we generally consider losses as a condition, and negative conditions are losses. But there are areas of differentiation.
Consider a person who works very hard at a difficult job. This is not a loss, since it is voluntary -- or, a better argument, it is a *continuous condition*, not a sudden or discrete one.
I think this is the crux of my argument. We often times will grant people infinite sympathy for experiencing *sudden losses* (like the death of a family member) while not providing much sympathy at all for *continuous conditions* (like working long hours at a job). Obviously there are differences in magnitude between the two, but this does not seem socially optimal at a certain point, if we understand sympathy as a scarce resource.
My argument is that it may be socially good for us to expend less sympathy on those who experience sudden losses, and most sympathy for those who experience harsh conditions. A practical result of this argument would be that a first-world American whose mother dies deserves less sympathy than a third-world African who pulls himself out of poverty and enters the middle class. The first person has experienced a catastrophic loss, but has not endured harsh conditions; the second person is free of catastrophe, but has passed through significant harshness.
To rephrase this in a way that racists can understand more intuitively: think of a woke Zoomer whose mom dies, and compare that to your based grandfather who worked in the coal mines. Who deserves more sympathy? The woke Zoomer, or the based grandfather? If we mete out sympathy in response to sudden trauma, it should be the Zoomer, but if we mete out sympathy on a parametric basis, it should be the grandfather.
2. The CSAM Scam
re: Michael Tracey
Michael notes the following:
“More specifically, “visual depictions” of persons under age 18 wearing “bathing suits, leotards, underwear, or other abbreviated attire” may be legally classified as CSAM.”
What does this mean? It means that if you take a photo of a beach, and 17 year old is wearing a bikini somewhere in the background, then it is entirely up to the discretion of the government to define that photo as “CSAM.” Then, the internet mob can equate CSAM with “child pornography,” and boom, the panic is injected with jet fuel.
Personally, I hate the term CSAM as much as I hate the term “human trafficking.” If I pay a woman for sex, I am not a human trafficker. If I take a photo of 17 year old wearing a bikini on the beach, I am not “generating CSAM.”
To be clear, I am not doing either of those things! But to equate a spectrum of behavior with the worst possible point that spectrum is the definition of moral panic. And these woke government definitions are part of the problem.
If Epstein had depictions of naked children engaged in sexual penetration, that needs to be made clear and explicit. How many images? How did he obtain them? If, on the other hand, he had images of 17 year olds in bikinis on the beach, that should be noted. The inability of the FBI to describe the supposed material out of fear of supposedly “re-victimizing the victims” is nonsense. We already know, via Tracey, that none of these images had anything to do with anyone that Epstein knew personally.
3. Should We Speculate About Voter Backlash?
re: Bryan Caplan
I don’t find Bryan’s argument convincing. While immigration was part of the Brexit debate, it was not the whole of the debate. Yes, immigration is higher now than it was pre-Brexit, but that does not tell us anything about the political effect of high immigration in every country.
It seems eminently plausible to me that Biden’s record-high immigration numbers pushed the electorate toward Trump. If he maintained lower numbers, Trump could not have campaigned on that issue. This is important if you consider that there are other issues that are important besides immigration, like tariffs.
Sacrificing all other issues on the altar of immigration does not seem reasonable to me.
Bryan can counter-argue that, even if Biden closed the borders, Kamala still would have lost. I highly doubt that. But let’s assume that it’s true. Here’s the rub: we have to speculate. Bryan says we can’t, or shouldn’t, but we must. We must speculate on the effects that policies have on the electorate, or else we will lose.
However, where I can agree with Bryan is that we should advocate for the ideal, while realizing that sometimes the ideal must diverge with policy for reasons of democratic expediency. One can advocate for a policy which is democratically impossible, because the goal is to shift opinions long-term, while recognizing the impracticality of implementation in the short term.
4. Marriage is Affordability
re: Derek Thompson
“Part of the decline of young homeownership in the U.S. is the decline of young marriage itself…”
If every single person in America got married, what would happen to their rent payments? They would cut in half. The cost of anti-marriage norms can be quantified by taking the decline in marital rate, the average cost of rent, and multiplying.
If 10 million Americans aren’t married, and they’re paying $5k per year more in rent than they would as a married couple, that $10 billion lost due to a change in marital norms.
5. Do Racist Laws Make Racist Culture?
re: David R Henderson
David argues that, by allowing racially restrictive covenants, we could increase support for immigration. I want to play devil’s advocate.
Let’s say that restrictive covenants remained legal since the 1940s. In that case, we would have 80 years of restrictive covenants.
What David seems to be missing here is Hanania’s theory of culture as downstream from law. If the law said that racism is legal, we can speculate that more people would be racist.
Personally, if I grew up a neighborhood that was legally white, I would think of racism as a tolerable opinion -- not a horrible vice. Conversely, I grew up learning that segregated neighborhoods are evil and illegal; that informed me that racism is intolerable and punishable by law.
David seems to underestimate the extent to which culture follows law. David can counter-argue and say that some people will always be racist no matter what -- I agree, but we’re asking here about the relevance of freedom of association to immigration.
If you want to maximize immigration, banning racism might help open people up to it. Allowing racism might shift the long-term direction of the culture.
For the record, I think freedom of association should be legal because the alternative is zoning law, which is very expensive and disproportionately hurts young people -- it’s a gerontocratic policy. But I acknowledge that it will lead to more racism, and this could result in limits on immigration down the line. This is all speculative, to be sure, but I don’t see why David’s argument is any better.