morphism
live long and prosper
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User ID: 2721
morphism
live long and prosper
1d ago
argumentation that amounts to "thing A is negative-value, but if we also did thing B (which, for whatever reason, we are not actually going to do), then the expected value would be positive, so we ought to do thing A".
The argument is that "A non-zero amount of A is happening whether you like it or not, so let's also do B". It's not an argument for unconditional A.
Apart from the circumstance that the case that successful integration is in fact possible has not been made convincingly,
The US in the 19th century looks like a case of successful integration to me.
morphism
live long and prosper
1d ago
Like, if we only have around 65% of the population of working aged individuals engaging in the labour market, doesn't that imply that adding a marginal person does not generate a marginal job (but rather, 65% of one)?
I don't think so? I don't quite understand which theory specifically you mean, my immediately preceding post contains two. On the first one: The marginal person generates demand for labor and adds supply of labor. The 65% figure would be about the supply of labor. If you want to draw conclusions about the demand for labor — which can be entirely different from that figure — you need additional data. For example, you could try to argue that it's a closed system, where labor supply and demand are equal; but with exports, imports, and profit margins, this is not a closed system.
The second theory is about the utilization of the supply of labor. Labor works for some company, which takes a cut of the produced value and pays out the rest as wage. The company could choose to pay higher wages — but they don't.
Perhaps the following calculations illustrates what I mean: A marginal person of working age offers 1 person of labor, but the labor that they demand in order to stay fed and bedded may only be, say, 0.5 persons due to automation. If this single person were a closed loop, there is no good reason for this person to work more than 0.5 persons worth of labor — that will be enough to feed themselves.
If human labor goes extinct, this means that this person would only demand ~0 people worth of labor — nobody has to lift a finger to keep this person well-fed, it's all taken care of by AI growing corn and mowing the lawn.
The trouble is that this person is not a closed loop — they don't have access to that AI growing corn, they have to pay an exorbitant fee. That's the issue about "work saved" that I mean, and the thing that Henry George pointed out in "Progress and Poverty".
The math doesn't pan out exactly in this way, because automation changes what constitutes human labor, so you can get the work of 90 people from year 856 for the price of 1 crane driver and 1 crane in the year 2025. Work saved means that each person can do more, but that in turn may lead to demanding more.
morphism
live long and prosper
1d ago
Thanks for being nice to, uh, the lefty. :D I don't really want to argue about the pros and cons of immigration here, as my main point is about Trump and deception, but in order to argue that deception might be going on here, I can't avoid debating the policy issue.
morphism
live long and prosper
1d ago
Man, are you just shitposting?
No, I'm serious. 😅 I mean, I know that I'm not going to convince anybody, but I want to learn what you think, because of my statement here:
"I do believe that he [Trump] will make the lives of almost everyone worse, including his own supporters, except for the direct beneficiaries of his authoritarian rule."
I genuinely think that Trump's policies are going to harm you, who seems to support him. That is why I can't quite make sense of why you're supporting him. As mentioned, I'm humanist, I do not want you to be harmed, because you are a human being, that's why I'm posting in the first place. Essentially, I'm asking myself "Why are you going to hurt yourself?" 😅 You're probably seeing this differently, and that's fine — all I can hope for here is to gain some more insight into your thoughts.
Is it wise to have immigration when integration is unreliable or just completely outpaced by the formation of parallel societies?
To pick on this point: The problem is that you can't voluntarily choose to not have immigration — people who are desperate enough will try to come and take very high risks. I mean, seriously, which human being in their right mind wants to risk being shot for walking over a border? You'd only risk that if your current live is worse than this risk. This means that if situation on the other side is terrible enough, you will have immigration — and then it's better policy to invest into integration, because that ameliorates follow-up problems later on. "Nah, I don't want to invest into integration because I don't want immigration in the first place" doesn't work out.
Drug dealers should be shot, hanged, and shot again, and illegal immigrants who enter a wealthy country without permission only to proceed to deal drugs should be hanged and shot once more for good measure. What the fuck is the argument here?
This goes against my core value, humanism. Do not inflict bodily harm other human beings, regardless of whom. (There is a subclause on what happens when other people want to inflict bodily harm on you, which I will not go into here). That is why leftists do not condone attempts at assassinating Trump and there was no Jan 6th equivalent. Do not inflict bodily harm.
The refugee one - they had to flee from violence and persecution, that's why we need to accept them in spite of their coming illegally, but as soon as they gain safety they turn into scum?
Do they become "scum" voluntarily? Or is it because they are not allowed to work? If you can't work legally — you have to work illegally, because you have to buy food. The policy of not allowing immigrants to work is actually causing them to work illegally. Duh.
Your ideology is destroying my country, the actual society and culture that make the country what it is, and replacing it with the same easily influenced, easily marketed-to, easily controlled global slurry you can find everywhere else that the third world found a route to. What is our future now?
Genuine question: From this answer, I take it that you are not humanist? That's it's ok to inflict bodily harm on other human beings if they qualify for some criteria? Not sure I'm ok with that, but it seems to me that this a core value that I should check with you.
Your ideology is destroying my country
The thing is this: Whether "my ideology" is destroying your country or not is up to debate. But that's not what I'm really concerned about when posting here — the point that I'm genuinely concerned about that Trumps is destroying your country in a way that you don't realize.
Look, if I wanted to destroy your country, I would do it exactly like Trump — throw random nonsense at the internet, stick to the things that people believe in ("Huh, apparently they care about immigration, sure, let's go with that"), make up some policies that work or do not, I don't care, as long as they are flashy — while enriching myself and those most loyal to me. I would play the difference between what you think is a good idea ("restrict immigration") and what will improve your life in reality ("UBI", universal health care, … — I think so, up to debate), and you would never know the difference. I would use your own beliefs against you.
morphism
live long and prosper
1d ago
You describe genuine issues. But the question is: Are these really caused by immigration? I mean it, for real. You can have the firmest belief in the perception that these issues are causes by immigration. But reality simply does not care what you believe. What if you seriously entertain the possibility that you could be wrong on this? What if stopping immigration simply doesn't do anything on the above issues?
That is the essence of my point: There is a good chance that the issues in housing and health care that you are experiences are not caused by immigration, and — there are people out there who want to profit from your belief on this matter, that's what my quote by Henry George is about. Trump is such a person.
morphism
live long and prosper
1d ago
Indirect economic harms are still economic harms.
No. Indirect economic "harms" are trade-offs. For example, if the price of chocolate rises, then some people cannot afford the amount of chocolate they used to buy. That's not a harm — yes, the chocolate buyer is worse off, but there is a chocolate producer on the other end, who would in turn be worse off if the price were lower.
I'm after a precise definition of "harm" here, because that's relevant to my core values, Humanism. Do not harm human beings. One primary source of harm is loss of integrity of your own body (being subject to violence, …). Higher chocolate prices are ok, a threat to your existence is not. Let me call it "bodily harm" for the sake of discussion. (At some point, economic
Harms to social trust by unilateral disregard of legitimate laws is still harm to social trust. Criminal harms by criminals who partisans protected from deportation because they wanted to spite or defy their outgroup are still harms. Self-righteous support for human trafficking that corresponds with the significant smuggling of addictive and harmful substances that fund violent criminal groups domestically and abroad even as the smuggled migrants compete with citizens for public goods and services while disrupting local social equilibriums is a whole host of harms to be encountered by various people in various ways at various times.
I would agree that these are either bodily harms or do border on bodily harms, yes. But the point is: Are these caused by immigration — or are these caused by how immigration is handled?
- There are no "legitimate" laws. Anybody can claim that that other law is "not legitimate". True scotsman.
- Deportation has a cost, both monetary and bodily (harm). Does stealing merit corporal punishment? No, according to humanism.
- When people are desperate enough, they will try to escape their current conditions — you would, too. The only way to physically stop them is to inflict bodily harm. If immigration were legal, smugglers were out of a job.
- Sellings drugs involves harms people. But: If you can't work legally, do you have a choice? No, you have to work illegally. Why would immigrants volunteer to work in the drug trade? These are people like you, and they would rather not. Drug trade is not immanent to immigration.
Much of what you are attributing to "immigration" is actually "consequence of current handling of immigration". This is a policy question. The thinking that you can stop people who are very desperate does not work out.
This is not about outgroups, this is about core value, humanism: Do not inflict bodily harm on other people, regardless of whom.
The argument with immigration is it makes the problem worse, adding many more people to the pool of people without adding more jobs -- or at least enough jobs to make up for the added labor.
But in the most basic sense of the word, a job is a piece of work that needs to be done — and the immigrants bring that in as well, because they also need lettuce and tooth brushes and haircuts. The underlying issue is not that there's isn't enough work that people can do for each other — if anything, it's that creating a job is typically done by an employer, who needs to be reasonably competent and has their own interests.
her opinion is that AI is coming to extinct human labor in short order, and so massive unemployment is top-of-mind.
I would relish the extinction of human labor, because then I don't have to work anymore and could relish my free time will still being provided with all the services that I need. The issue is not that work goes extinct, the issue is that I, as a lowly peasant do not profit from the work saved — but that's a problem of distribution of wealth. And that's what I also find mind-boggling about voting for Trump — he is so rich that he doesn't have to work anymore, yet promises the restricting immigration will solve my, the peasant's problem, rather than redistributing his very own capital? I don't know, but that looks like deception to me.
morphism
live long and prosper
1d ago
I happen to live near a neighborhood with such tendencies. But is that a consequence of immigration for failed policy for integrating immigrants? For example, if these people are not allowed to work legally — they have to resort to criminal work (drugs) to make a living. It looks like the very attempt to actively restrict illegal immigration is making this perceived problem worse.
I can see how "ingroup of young men with foreign language" tends towards harm. But that's not quite the same as "harm of immigration".
morphism
live long and prosper
1d ago
Yes. The article goes on, and notes
Maintaining the current immigration level, but skewing its composition toward workers who will compete in the labor market’s high-wage segments, will tend to strengthen worker power in the market’s low-wage segments even more quickly than would a policy of restricting immigration broadly.
This is not an argument against immigration — it's actually one for controlled immigration. I don't think that this is what Trump's current policies have in mind, though.
By the way, the main issue with high-wage segments is that they have entry control — you (probably, I think) need a degree in law, medicine, from a US school … in order to enter that segment. In other words, these segments have active import restrictions. Likewise, illegal immigration cannot happen into high-wage segments — you may get away with working illegally on a construction site, but as a registered medical doctor? No chance.
morphism
live long and prosper
1d ago
If a job needs to be done, and I am one of the few people who can do it, I have much better leverage than if I am one of the many people who can. This is a very classic leftist argument (see union shops).
Yes. But the influx of people also means that now two jobs need to be done, and you're no worse off. That's the core of the argument — there is more labor, but there is also more work to be labored on.
Same goes for housing — new people? They are willing to pay for building more houses!
Of course, the time horizons and other restrictions do matter. I'm not saying that the housing market isn't broken, or that sudden shifts in worker availability do not have temporary effects. What I am saying is that blaming it on immigration is not an accurate model of reality — and, even more importantly, Trump is exploiting that for his personal gain.
Why would something need to harm you personally for you to be justified in being against it?
That's a fair point. But there is a difference between being "anti-murder" and being "anti-immigration", because "murder" is obviously violating the bodily integration of a person, whereas it's more difficult to argue that "immigration" is harmful on a personal level — that's what I wanted to hone in on by using the word "personally", though missed the mark by being too specific on the interlocutor.
morphism
live long and prosper
1d ago
I can’t answer for the user you’re replying to, but can for me.
Thanks!
The answer is immigration.
🤔 But — could you describe how immigration harms you personally?
I'm asking because the general argument against immigration is an indirect economic argument. The argument typically goes like this: The land can support a certain size of population. If more people come in, the land will not be able to produce enough food for everyone.
The trouble is just: This argument is precisely the Malthusean theory that my quote of Henry George refers to. And it is unfortunately not an accurate model of reality — it's not true. And hasn't been since 1879. 😅 After the invention of fertilizers, land size is not a big issue anymore — the economy now runs on goods and services that people produce for each other. Sure, immigrants lead to more consumption of goods and services — but in order to be able to buy these, they also need to work to produce them. In other words, "land" has been replaced by "labor" — and while an immigrant can, by definition, not bring the resource "land" with them, they can and do bring the resource "labor" with them anywhere they go.
morphism
live long and prosper
2d ago
What will be the consequences?
For a thorough economic analysis, I recommend Patrick Boyle. The gist is that tariffs are redistributive: They take income from the household sector and transfer it to protected businesses — both within the US. Whether Canada will be thrown into a recession depends on how badly Canadian goods are demanded by US consumers.
The basic economic incentive for international trade is the same why we have different professions for people: by dividing labor, countries can specialize and be more efficient in producing particular good or service, making it cheaper for everyone. Yes, you can grow bananas in Canada, but it's just way cheaper to do it in warm climate. The flip side is that Canada will never gain the expertise needed to grow bananas, and will not have any bananas if the other countries close down shop. This is fine without bananas, but if you replace "banana" with "weapon", then some people start worrying about "natural security".
Up until now I've been more or less indifferent to Trump. While I find him personally and aesthetically unpleasant, the hysteria surrounding his every move – and especially the mainstream media's tendency to misrepresent him, often flagrantly – has sort of balanced things out for me. I confess I felt some cruel enjoyment watching people on the left (many of whom have done great harm to me and my loved ones) melt down both times he won.
This is not directly related to your questions — but I'm genuinely curious. How would you describe the harm that the left has done to you and your loved ones, and how would you say the mainstream media misrepresents Trump?
The reason why I'm asking is that I'm firmly anti-Trump — I have no hate for him, but I do believe that he will make the lives of almost everyone worse, including his own supporters, except for the direct beneficiaries of his authoritarian rule.
And I'm bringing this up with you because I'm curious why his own supporters would support him, even though he will harm them. Obviously, that doesn't make sense to me. 😅
Before I expand on that, I'd like to expound that my core value systems is humanism — essential, every human being is worth caring for. That includes you, every Trump supporter, all leftists, and people of all colors. However, it appears to me that Trump supporters do not necessarily see it the same way, and then it becomes a question of how much care I can afford for a human that is fine with harming me.
Now my quick rundown of Trump: The key tactic of populist figures is to deceive about the actual benefit of their policies. Will Trumps' tarrifs improve the lives of most American consumers? Judging by argument above, the answer is "no". Does Trump care? The answer is — "no". Why would he care? Why would he not lie to everyone? His good character? But he doesn't seem to have a good character? And will people be able to tell the difference? The answer is "no" — that's why the deception works. Most people do not understand well enough what effect tariffs have — and they will harm themselves if they belief they work while the reality is that they don't. It's the discrepancy between belief and reality that is the source of harm. And the populist strategy is to play exactly that: Tell people what they want to believe, reinforce it, throw new beliefs at the wall and see what sticks, without any regard for reality. Everyone who is in on that deception will win, everyone who is not will lose out.
As Henry George put it in his 1879 book "Progress and Poverty":
“A theory that, falling in with the habits of thought of the poorer classes, thus justifies the greed of the rich and the selfishness of the powerful, will spread quickly and strike its roots deep. This has been the case with the theory advanced by Malthus.”
morphism
live long and prosper
1mo ago
I don't believe that you have "sat down and done the calculation."
You are the one who does not seem interested in such a calculation. You cite some GDP figures and rest on your preconception that you're right. I'm not gonna bother discussing data against such attitude towards truth. (EDIT) For example, you make an assumption about me making a trip to Germany, which is factually wrong.
No. Look, if you sit down and actually do the calculation, the combination of GDP, prices, salaries doesn't add up as you claim — and that's before asking the question of which quality of service you're getting.
EDIT: And the statement "salaries are higher, therefore prices must be higher" cannot even be a causation — if anything, it's the other way round: higher prices cause higher salaries (assuming that the workload stays the same). But why should prices for each specific medical procedure or diagnostic in the US be higher? Do they add magic sprinkles to it, so that the health outcome is phenomenally better than in Germany? Price and value are two fundamentally different things, and the question is whether the US offers a good price for the medicine stuff.
morphism
live long and prosper
1mo ago
Well, you know what they say about anecdotes and data. Germany spends about 12% of its GDP on healthcare, and that percent has steadily gone up over time. The US spends 17%, which is certainly higher but not massively so
But comparing GPD is not the same as comparing prices.
Prices for medical procedures in Germany are regulated by the Gebührenordnung für Ärzte (GoÄ), which is publicly visible. For example, the typical cost of a duodenoscopy (optical inspection of the gastrointestinal tract just after the stomach) is ~ 200 EUR. This is the price that a person would pay if they decide to get this procedure out of their own pocket (I have friends who have done this).
I don't know a good source for prices in the US, but let me take this New York based thing as an example. They list an upper endoscopy at $975. That's a 4-5x price difference compared to the price in Germany!
In addition, in Germany, this price is almost always covered by insurance, which is mandatory for everybody. In Germany, it is unheard of for people to go bankrupt due to a health expense. In the US, that's very different — people regularly go broke due to medical costs and ask for monetary support online.
If your figures about GDP are correct, this implies that the US performs dramatically less procedures than Germany. This can be due to efficiency, which I doubt, or due to 4-5x reduced level of care.
morphism
live long and prosper
1mo ago
OK, but you can't just run a large organization with no administration. Some of those administrators do useful work!
Sure. But administrative costs can easily blow 10x for checking rule B that would be unnecessary if rule A did not exist.
Total unemployment spending is like $10 billion a year, and that's mostly just benefits.
Care to cite a reference for this? What percentage is spent on the administration of those $10 billion?
Likewise, you can't just approve any grant that a scientist asks for. It actually seems reasonable that scientists would spend a lot of time proposing different ideas, and then have a separate agency deciding which ones are worth doing.
If you look at the source that I indicated, you will find ample evidence that the current system is dysfunctional, despite it "seeming reasonable". The gist is this: a) You need scientist time to check grants, which could be spent on doing science instead, and b) as science is inherently unpredictable, finding out which ones are doing is actually hard and the separate agency currently mostly fails at that task.
most of the countries that do comparable service at lower cost are also countries with much lower salaries overall, so that goes back to the point about "just lower salaries." Generally the countries with more money, like Switzerland, also spend more on healthcare.
I once took a breadth test in Germany, and a breadth test in the US, close in time. The Germany one is 50 EUR, the US one was $1020. That's a 20x difference, and I don't think that this can be explained by salaries alone.
morphism
live long and prosper
1mo ago
Oh, and here are more big issues for private health care, second-order effects:
- Timely treatment is cheaper than delayed treatment — due to increasing complications as the medical problem festers
- Effective treatment keeps people in the workforce
The issue with health problems is that it is usually cheaper to fix them early and thoroughly, rather than spend money peacemeal and end up with a complex operation to save the patient's life at the end. It's more efficient to do a the stitches today, than to deny care only to amputate the entire arm in two weeks.
On the second point, when a medical insurer is forced to keep paying for a patient that was taken out of the workforce by their illness, the insurer has an incentive to pay for early interventions, because the patient can still contribute to the insurance while they are working. If the patient can't work, they don't generate income for the insurer.
morphism
live long and prosper
1mo ago
I think we're all hoping that there's some big pot of money being totally wasted. […] But I'm not sure that's the case.
It's never as simple as an obviously frivolous budget. However, here are at least two systemic issue that are large sources of inefficiency:
- Information asymmetry. Doctors can and will prescribe treatments that are medically not quite necessary, but where the patient is fundamentally unable to tell the difference. This is actually a problem in Germany.
- Administrative costs. A system with complex rules for who gets denied care and who does not will need accountants who check these rules. This is busywork that could be spent on simply actual care. I have no estimates how this affects that health care sector, but I bet that it's substantial. But I know of at least two other sectors where this problem occurs:
- Checking unemployment benefits vs universal basic income
- Science funding. I can't find the estimate, but for some grants, at least 50% of the work goes into writing the grant, not doing the actual research.
In the end, money is just "liquefied" work that people do for other people. Not all of that work is useful towards the goal of meaningful health care, and not all of these people are paid the same amount of dollars per hour of useful work, rightfully or wrongly.
We could perhaps make an argument for cheaper, but worse, health care.
Well, the fact that countries other than the US have health care systems which deliver comparable service, but at significantly lower cost indicates that a large chunk of money is spent ineffectively.
morphism
live long and prosper
1mo ago
I agree that more transparent price information would improve the market, but that does not yet imply that the market is fit for purpose.
It's a question of market design. Markets have a specific purpose — optimize the allocation and procurement of scarce goods using decentralized decision making, but depending on circumstances, not all of them are effective at this purpose. This topic is closely related to auction theory, where e.g. a second-bid auction is better than pay-as-bid auctions.
The main troubles with market design in health care are:
- Inflexible demand. A person who is sick generally cannot abstain from buying the good "healthcare".
- Information asymmetry. Doctors can generate demand by recommending procedures that are not quite necessary or more expensive than necessary, but the patient does not have a chance of being informed enough to know the difference.
Due to these issues, a "free market" will lead to perverse incentives; other market designs are better at solving the optimization problem. And yes, market design = regulation.
morphism
live long and prosper
1yr ago
people are still having to pay more for goods and services than they did previously; their money is worth less and they are poorer now than they were previously.
This is actually intended by the Federal Reserve — the typical inflation target is 2%. The reasoning behind this is that money is only useful if it is spent for goods and services — people who make the goods and perform the services will only do so if there is demand for it, and the inflation gives a little nudge to spend money rather than hoard it. Put differently, spending money is equivalent to soliciting work from other people. No spending, no working.
As a counterpoint, the creators of cryptocurrencies typically think that this is a terrible line of reasoning, and therefore created their own money.
it becomes more plausible to me that there is an underlying emotional component that is either modulating the symptoms, or leading to some of them.
I'm afraid, but this is a logical non-sequitur.
- The "weirdness" of a physical symptom does not logically imply that it has an emotional cause. Counterexample: People with rabies panic when presented with liquids to drink. I would say that this symptom qualifies as "weird" — unfortunately, the disease is still deadly virtually all of the time.
- Even if the symptom is an emotion, such as irrational fear, this does not imply that the cause is emotional. Counterexample: 1) Rabies as above, 2) Depression can be caused by continued ingestion of fructose during fructose malabsorption.
Even more afraidly, I have to point out that current notions of an "emotional cause" have no basis in science — even though there are codified in popular diagnoses, such as F45 ("somatform disorder") in ICD-10.
Specifically, the problem with F45 is the following:
F45 postulates that the inability to detect a physical cause implies the presence of an emotional cause.
But "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". As Ioper already points out, the physical cause may be unknown and a) there exists no current test for it. In practice, b) the doctor is "too lazy" to test for it.
In fact, the postulated criterion for presence of "emotional cause" is unscientific — by definition, a criterion which is scientific must be falsifiable. Here, this means that there must exist an experiment which is able to reject the hypothesis that XY is the "emotional cause". No such experiment has ever been put forward for F45. (If you know of any such experiment, please do write a reply to this post.)
As for your "weird" symptoms: Mast cell diseases, such as mastocytosis, MCAD or hereditary alpha tryptasemia are known to cause "weird" symptoms.
(This fact is useful, but strictly speaking unnecessary for rejecting F45.)
This is not a bodily harm — but the consequence of not being able to buy food is a bodily harm. The point is that under different policy choices, losing your job does not imply that you can't feed yourself anymore, the two can be decoupled.
Agreed. Losing access to housing is a bodily harm. Violence in the neighborhood is a bodily harm.
What I'm saying is that different policy choices that are unrelated to migration will do more to prevent the above bodily harms. The claim "immigration is harm" is different from the combination of effects "immigration does X", and "X does bodily harm" — a policy choice can affect X instead.
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