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PaperclipPerfector  30d ago (text post)   26247 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024

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A recent article in NR provides a good example of the nature of today's pro-life movement (emphasis added):

The Future of the Pro-Life Movement Is Going to Be Built in Our Own Homes

When I reflect back on the past year, one story keeps coming to mind. It’s not a cultural trend or a court case, but rather a very personal, hidden story that for all I know speaks to so many other hidden stories like it.

One of the most radiant, joyful people I know chose life against the odds when she was just 15 years old; she told her story on social media only this year. This woman, Veronica Keene, is one of untold numbers of women who chose life against the advice of most who knew her well enough to offer it.

{snip}

When I look at her life — and at her children, her grandchildren, and her happy 34-year marriage — I wonder how many women would have chosen life if they’d felt strong enough to reject all of the voices telling them not to.

{snip}

So challenge your young men. Encourage them to become responsible, loving men who will respect, honor, and take care of the women in their lives. Model strength and grace for them. Show up for them every day. Give them the love and guidance they need to help build healthy, supportive relationships as adults.

Set your daughters’ standards high, too. Make sure they know they can come to you for advice and support when or if they make destructive decisions. Make sure they know they are worthy of respect, deserving of love.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/12/the-future-of-the-pro-life-movement-is-going-to-be-built-in-our-own-homes/

I suspect that some people support or at least do not oppose pro-life because they see it as a "cultural" defeat for feminism. But ask yourself, is this really any better? There's the same gender-based double standards, but only one side is telling them the path to having a 34-year marriage is getting pregnant at 15 years old. (Yes, I know girls used to marry and have children at 16 back in the 19th century, the keyword there is married, very different from the trailer-park behavior this article is promoting.)

[ETA: you can read the article by using archive.ph]

I know girls used to marry and have children at 16 back in the 19th century,

Beyond the Hajnal Line, that is. Definitely not in either the US or Britain. (It's true that the average age at first marriage dropped significantly for both men and women immediately after WW2 in the US, but that trend only lasted a few years and never repeated.)

This wasn't unheard of for American women (for instance, Rachel Plummer married at 14).

I suspect that it was more common on the frontier, though.

It wasn't unheard of indeed, but wasn't the norm either. Probably not even in the frontier.

Indeed. In the 1550s in England, the average age at first marriage was 26 for women and 29 for men.

Why would this say anything more about the actual nature of the pro-life movement than what NPR wants it to be?

Presumably because this is from NR, the National Review, a mainstream conservative publication — not National Public Radio.

NPR (National Public Radio) != NR (National Review)

a "cultural" defeat for feminism

...

So challenge your young men. Encourage them to become responsible, loving men who will respect, honor, and take care of the women in their lives.

Set your daughters’ standards high, too. Make sure they know they can come to you for advice and support when or if they make destructive decisions.

This is what your run-of-the-mill anti-feminists don't get. Women nagging men into protecting them from the consequences of their decisions isn't particular to these or those ideological tenets. The law she lives by is that law and nothing else.

Yeah, as I recently mentioned, there's a lot of ideological agreement across much of the board when it comes to blaming men for the consequences of women's coffee decisions.

I think, technically, the pro-life position is "do not abort your child" - but it's true that Pro Life Tribe is bigger than that, and does have broader positions.

I don't understand the complaint you have here, though - based on the article, there's no recommendation of trailer-park behavior like getting pregnant at 15. There's an isolated instance where, from what I can tell, someone chose not to abort their child and has now been married for 34 years and has grandchildren. (It's unclear to me if she married the father of her child). This outcome seems good to me and I don't take the story to be recommending the route used to get there. Similarly, given that some number of people will, I am told, get pregnant at 15, keeping the child and getting married seems to me to be a preferable outcome to aborting the child and remaining unwed.

Maybe you can elaborate on what you find objectionable? Or did I miss something? As far as I can tell, National Review is not promoting out-of-wedlock teenage pregnancies as being a starting route to successful marriages, and if Veronica Keene married as a teenager the article doesn't mention it.

there's no recommendation of trailer-park behavior like getting pregnant at 15

There's no condemnation of it either.

Similarly, given that some number of people will, I am told, get pregnant at 15

What I find objectionable is the mentality that teenage pregnancies just randomly fall on some proportion of the population. In fact, they are far more likely to occur in some subcultures than others, specifically those that treat it as something that just randomly happens.

What I find objectionable is the mentality that teenage pregnancies just randomly fall on some proportion of the population. In fact, they are far more likely to occur in some subcultures than others, specifically those that treat it as something that just randomly happens.

From what I've seen, conservative and particularly religiously conservative communities – and there's a strong overlap here with pro-lifers (and, you might be relieved to hear, National Review!) are much more likely to articulate getting pregnant out of wedlock as a moral choice rather than a sort of chance occurrence [although I am unpersuaded that anyone really believes that] – so I think perhaps you're misattributing that mentality to pro-lifers.

But I also think pro-lifers have noticed that one driver of abortion is shame, and (since their view is that an unborn child shouldn't be aborted) they think "see, pregnancy is not the end of your life, you can be a happy and successful person even if you get pregnant unexpectedly" is a better message than "you moron, you complete idiot, you skank, you got yourself knocked up."

I think it can be hard to articulate a holistic message of "women shouldn't get pregnant out of marriage, that is a moral failing on their part if it is volitional, but if they do they should bring the child to term and trust that good things can still come out of that life" because there is some degree of tension or mixed messaging there, but I do think this is what a majority of strong pro-lifers in the United States believe and a position National Review is much more likely to air than, say, the New York Times.

only one side is telling them the path to having a 34-year marriage is getting pregnant at 15 years old

That isn't what the words you've quoted have said. They say that is a path, not the path. Any sane pro lifer in this day and age would probably Counsel waiting until graduating high school before marrying the sweet heart and, maybe naively, they'd Counsel not having sex until then. But if you do have sex before then, and that sex does result in a pregnancy, they'd say you should not abort the pregnancy and instead raise the kid, leaning on your family and the family of the father for support in doing this which they also think should be provided.

"Any sane pro lifer in this day and age would probably Counsel waiting until graduating high school before marrying the sweet heart and, maybe naively, they'd Counsel not having sex until then."

Then why doesn't the article say that?

Then why doesn't the article say that?

Presumably the same reason it didn't wade into tax policy or include a pot roast recipe. It isn't an article attempting to lay out structured life advise for young people. It uses a story about some girl who made the best of a bad situation and they want to celebrate that choice without litigating a counterfactual world where she behaved better up until the point of the needing to make that choice. And then it goes on about needing to reach and inspire young people to also not get abortions. It say nothing at all about whether it was good to pregnant at 15, they're probably christian and the sex was almost certainly out of wedlock so one can presume they disapprove of it. The point is that if you find yourself in that situation they want you to keep the baby.

This is an article by pro life people speaking to pro life people, they probably expect the good faith of the reader to not assume they are encouraging something that not many encourage. Or maybe they have some other article supporting 15 year old marriages that I'm not aware of?

Presumably the same reason it didn't wade into tax policy or include a pot roast recipe. It isn't an article attempting to lay out structured life advise for young people.

The title of the article is "The Future of the Pro-Life Movement Is Going to Be Built in Our Own Homes." Subtitle is "We have a tremendous opportunity to actively build the future of our culture, starting with our kids."

It's a meta level up, it's giving advice to kids, it's giving advice to parents and some larger vague community. The difference between and article meant to be read by teachers and students.

What’s naive about it? There are lots of people who don’t have sex before marriage, which is what the pro-life position would actually advocate.

Abstinence before marriage is a fine choice, but given that it is far from universal, an ideology that aspires to mass-influence should probably make some accommodation or at least nod at reality.

It is not naive to advocate for what you want, it's naive to do so without any awareness that it's a very minority position.

Part of the pro-life program is making that position mainstream. Abstinence has been a core part of pro-life since pro-life became a thing.

Sure. And complete cessation of all animal products & testing is a core part of PETA. But in the meantime they still agitate for lesser goals that they hope are stepping stones to that reality.

I was astonished when my fiancee's family got indignant and saw it as a red flag that we were waiting until marriage to have sex.

I'm astonished you were astonished, and I'm curious just what rock you've been living under to be unaware that the average person would see that as a very odd life choice these days, and probably indicative of other trad religious leanings they might disapprove of.

Yes, I was a lot younger and not yet so aware of how out of hand the situation had gotten in general.

EDIT:

probably indicative of other trad religious leanings they might disapprove of

Also, yes.

If that happened to me I'd be worried that my in-laws-to-be were indignant because they know someone else has already smashed it first, and didn't want shit to suddenly hit the fan one day when I found out.

Lmao, good point. If that's what was gonna happen much better it comes out for everyone before marriage.

How did that even come up? Seems like an odd topic to discuss over dinner.

I suspect the topic didn't arise over dinner but during a private conversation between the fiancee and her mother.

For some reason this reminds me of the joke that when your in-laws are asking you when you and their daughter will start trying for a baby, they're effectively asking you when you're going to start creampieing their daughter.

Isn't it normally implicitly taken for granted that your daughter is getting creampied after getting married?

That’s seriously a joke? What a bizarre, pornographic thing to think, let alone say.

Actually, in light of the discussion below, I have a different question to ask you: if you had a daughter, would you ever want her to have sex with anyone? It seems to me that a parent with a healthy relationship with his or her daughter would absolutely want her to have sex with her husband and then to bear children as the fruit of that union. Your recent comments, on the other hand, seem to imply that you believe anything other than perpetual virginity is a shameful thing in a daughter.

Meh. I wouldn’t fret over this issue. We’re only human, and people’s priorities can change in a short time when circumstances change. If you’re the daughter of an intact middle-class suburban family, you’ll probably be expected by your parents to avoid pregnancy at any cost while you’re a student. But then a couple of years pass and one day you’ll suddenly be expected by them and your other relatives in general to find a husband as soon as possible and get nutted into with the specific intent of getting pregnant. It does seem odd. It’s like one of the Asian-American(?) female commenters here who provided and anecdote about her mother. She kept pestering her with the question “When are you becoming a doctor?” after sending her off to university. Later it instantly turned into “When am I becoming a grandma?” – WTF? That’s the complete opposite of what she kept asking for! I imagine this is what @Sloot was referring to in general.

That’s seriously a joke? What a bizarre, pornographic thing to think, let alone say.

That's the nature of non-Dad-adjacent jokes, that there'll be some people out there who'll get their knickers a bit twisted upon hearing them.

It seems to me that a parent with a healthy relationship with his or her daughter would absolutely want her to have sex with her husband and then to bear children as the fruit of that union.

Yes, that'd be preferred if my real or hypothetical daughter had sex with her husband within the confines of marriage to produce children. I'm thankful that many of my female relatives did as such to bless us all with more young family members. I'm not a Stork-truther so I presume those pregnancies, when they occurred, were the outcome of marital sex.

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What a bizarre, pornographic thing to think, let alone say.

Does "trying for a child" have a meaning other than attempting to get pregnant, usually achieved by a man ejeculating into a woman (in slang called a "creampie")? Unless it does, I do not anything worthy of this extreme level of pearl-clutching over a funny rephrase with the exactly same meaning, but with less obfuscation.

It actually goes beyond that. If we’re talking about a man and a woman who aged out of their peak fertility already, which in the current state of society is normally the case at first marriage, basically their entire lifestyles need to be oriented around the specific goal of successful conception if they want to have a child ASAP. That is, they need to pay attention to their diets, the ovulation cycle, biological clock, hormone levels etc. Whatever psychological blocks they may have standing in the way of that - which may be entirely possible, as they're basically expected to copulate with the specific intent of breeding for the first time in their lives - also need to be removed through therapy.

Most people have a concept of propriety, and most people understand that words have contextual or connotative meanings beyond the literal, physical act which they denote. "Make love", "have sex", and "fuck" all refer to the same action in a broad sense, but they obviously have very different meanings when you come across them in the wild.

Likewise, "I would like to have a child with your daughter", "I would like to breed your daughter", and "I would like to creampie your daughter" may all indicate that the person would like to have vaginal sex with the daughter in a way that's open to the possibility of conception and pregnancy, but obviously the connotations are very different.

Lewis2 is correct here - 'creampie' specifically is pornographic slang. It's contextually inappropriate because it communicates disrespect. Botond173 made an edgy and offensive joke.

Maybe you like edgy jokes, and if so that's fine for you, but pretending that it's not clear why someone might object is silly.

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Someone made an offhand comment about how 'old-fashioned' it was (in general, and pejoratively) and I disagreed and it went from there.

Right, I have in the past argued that it is actually not too much to ask for young people to not have sex in high school. I just didn't want to make this a post about that argument so I gave theoretical ground.

Well, who'd be doing the asking? In the current cultural milieu, parents are unable or unwilling to thot-patrol their daughters. If parents can't or won't, what chance does anyone else have without a coup-complete solution?

Some parents are even outright enablers. For example, I saw this comment on DSL a few weeks ago and I was like alan_grant_removing_sunglasses.gif. Buying your teenaged daughter a larger bed so some boy can more comfortably rail her is taking the daughter cuckoldry to new heights. What's next, buying a chair for a corner of her room so you can better cheer on your little girl?

Thot-patrol is not how parents would typically put it, but that DSL comment is very much the exception- the electronic leash gets ever tighter, teen sex keeps declining, and with typical parental attitudes towards teen sex(especially parents of daughters) it doesn’t take a genius to connect the two.

That DSL commenter is European.

I think calling it thott patroling is probably not going to be very helpful. We're working on a kid now, if it's a daughter I may be naive but I think I can help her understand what constitutes good behavior in her own long term interest. I was receptive to this kind of reasoning as a kid.

Buying your teenaged daughter a larger bed so some boy can more comfortably rail her is taking the daughter cuckoldry to new heights.

What if she was married to him?

We live in a society where teen marriage is very rare, and matrilocality is simply not part of our history(even if you go far back enough to have extended families as the norm, they were patrilocal).

Moderately in the direction of what @BurdensomeCount said.

It'd still feel weird to me, but orders-of-magnitude better than the situation in the linked comment. It'd feel less so but also weird to buy a larger bed for a married son, but for somewhat different reasons. Channeling my inner Tony Soprano and Lucille Bluth: "What's wrong with you, Junior? You can't afford a larger mattress and bedframe to better bang your wife? How much could a set cost, like $10?"

Presumably a hypothetical married daughter and son-in-law would have their own house and income, so I wouldn't be enabling, hosting, and subsidizing their trysts. And, if they split, at least my daughter would be compensated via a mostly-consensual divorce settlement (and thus indirectly, me, for not having to do a complete bail-out of my daughter). Plus, all else equal, a married daughter would be older than an unmarried one, and the biological clock is ticking...

According to the linked comment, she received the bed as a gift for her 16th birthday, to make her boyfriend feel more comfortable.

That's very different. At that point the husband is a part of the family just as much as the daughter (or at least in a functioning social system would be seen that way). In fact now the husband is financially responsible for your daughter instead of you (in a functioning system again), so who's really getting cuckolded here we may ask if we want to go down that line of enquiry...

I have to ask this straight at this point, would you breed with your own daughter if inbreeding and social backlash was not in the cards?

  • -21

This is not a question. This is an insult masquerading as a question.

You've been warned about this before. Stop doing it or you will be banned.

How would you clarify whether there's anything behind a person's repeated, ambiguously ironic evocation of the "daughter is the ultimate cuck" meme without it sounding like an insult? Cuckoldry is a term referring to your wife being fucked by another man. Therefore, if you're being cucked when someone fucks your daughter, she must be your wife.

We have (had) self-proclaimed pedofascists here, so I can't really assume asking whether my interlocutor is one must be taken as an insult.

I do not believe for one second that you asked him if he'd "breed with his daughter" as anything other than an insult. You find his views offensive and you reached for what you hoped would be an effective way to express your disgust. I am not deceived about your intentions and I am telling you to stop. Express your offense in another manner.

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That's a pretty typical attempt at well-poisoning when any man prefers, or is suspected to prefer, a real or hypothetical daughter to be chaste. "Hur dur, you just want to fuck your own daughter." Note women don't receive such attempts at well-poisoning when they prefer a real or hypothetical son to be tall/athletic/etc.

The purity ring dances were the most incestuous father-daughter events possible outside of literal orgies. This well was poisoned by purity ring enthusiasts circa 15 years ago.

That's a pretty typical attempt at well-poisoning when any man prefers, or is suspected to prefer, a real or hypothetical daughter to be chaste.

I disagree. While it is sometimes used to well-poison in this way (and while I do think that our society severely undervalues chastity and parents do have a moral responsibility to protect the chastity of their children and particularly their daughters), I think that "your behavior strongly suggests a subconscious-at-best desire to fuck your own daughter" is an insult that is deserved far more often than it is issued.

Perhaps it is precisely because of the complex collapse of traditional sexual morality in our society that so many fathers are unable to articulate a desire to protect their daughters' virtue that does not ironically sound disgustingly incestuous. (I would certainly expect that this is a large part of the problem; the pathology I'm pointing at rings so false to me because it seems detached from any hope of eventually finding one's daughter a suitable husband. It's like a male-pattern counterpart to empty nest syndrome, at least as afraid of one's daughter growing up and getting married and moving out as it is of her falling victim to some cad. Watch out for rhetoric suggesting that the reason the daughter's chastity should be preserved is to extend her easy low-maintenance childhood; this implies both that the father specifically objects to the thought of his daughter getting married young and that he'll be fine with her becoming a slut once she gets too old to maintain the facade of childhood anymore.) In any case, though, I don't think that this behavior helps to preserve traditional sexual morality on either a personal or societal level.

("Rules for dating my daughter" t-shirts, pointedly-gun-cleaning-in-front-of-the-boyfriend rituals, etc, aposematically convey to me: "I am unable to distinguish between the concepts of protecting my daughter from men with ill intent and kidnapping her to go live together in a cabin in the woods, and I am very close to doing the latter; I have often considered the logistics of setting up a Josef Fritzl basement.")

Trads probably don't get to blame 100% of this problem on modernity, though. A lot of it does seem rooted in (echoes of the long-gone) patriarchal model, in which women are property first of their father and then of their husband, and, IE, rape is understood as a form of property crime. While such a model does have a lot to recommend it, it also clearly has a lot to disrecommend it, and though I have a very low opinion of feminism, I think one of the more compelling (and fringe) complaints they've made is that traditional societies seem to have had a lot of unreported incestuous rape going on. The parallel construction of father-daughter and husband-wife is clearly very easy to fuck up and confuse both in ancient and modern contexts, and I would generally urge people to maintain a clearer delineation between these roles.

Libertines would like us to think that the offputting thing about purity balls, purity rings, and the like is the purity, the thing that libertines want to destroy. The actual offputting thing is the balls, the rings, signifiers of marriage where no marriage can actually exist, with the father in the husband role. These young women should be getting married off ASAP, not LARPing as pseudowives for their fathers. I would also suggest that, when fathers participate in their daughters' weddings, they should take care not to equate themselves too directly with their new son-in-laws, and to generally be watchful of innuendo and scandal. General talk of "giving away my daughter" is iffy; talk of "giving this man my daughter to love as I once loved her, though we'll always know that I was first" is right out.

Of course, there are also men who deserve this insult for reasons that have nothing to do with some malformed defense of chastity. (Sometimes, indeed, because they are insufficiently protective of their daughters' chastity; because they proudly parade their daughters around in a sexualized fashion, unbothered.) Certainly, for everything positive one can say about Donald Trump, and there is a lot, this is an attack he has invited upon himself.

Obviously, I find things like purity balls, purity rings, “rules for dating my daughter” t-shirts, “pointedly-gun-cleaning-in-front-of-the-boyfriend rituals” to be colossally cringe. However, from those would be a massive leap to Fritzi-maxxing.

And I too find Trump’s comments and actions toward his daughter to be weird and cringe. I’m slightly, somewhat surprised that anti-Trumpers have not attempted to make more hay out of this over the past few years, but they also likely feel a bit handcuffed since Hunter and Beau Biden are eskimo brothers, and thus don’t want to work the incest angle too hard.

I would also suggest that, when fathers participate in their daughters' weddings, they should take care not to equate themselves too directly with their new son-in-laws, and to generally be watchful of innuendo and scandal. General talk of "giving away my daughter" is iffy; talk of "giving this man my daughter to love as I once loved her, though we'll always know that I was first" is right out.

I have attended many weddings in my adult life, but thankfully I’ve been spared from witnessing such cringe. If/when a daughter gets married, at her wedding I’ll likely be thinking “thank goodness this is finally someone else’s problem.”

That being said, this general phenomenon (not wanting your teenaged or young adult daughter to get fucked outside of marriage) is hardly limited culturally, temporally, geographically. For example, in some parts of Latin America, teenaged boys or young men will sometimes call the fathers of their attractive female acquaintances “suegro” in person; this is perceived as impolite and disrespectful, and said fathers will often seethe.

“Suegro” just means “father-in-law,” although sometimes it can be used to refer to father of unmarried boyfriend or girlfriend. Thus, it’s not inherently gross or sexual in and of itself.

However, why does such a father seethe and react as if the teenaged boy or young man referred to his wife as “novia” (girlfriend) or “esposa” (wife)? Shouldn’t it be a compliment that a teenaged boy or young man finds your daughter desirable?

Does the father just secretly want to fuck his daughter? Or is he reacting as most men across time and cultures would do, in having an instinctive disgust response to his daughter potentially getting fucked outside of a committed, lifetime relationship (which these teenaged boys and young men presumably do not intend on providing)?

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"Rules for dating my daughter" t-shirts, pointedly-gun-cleaning-in-front-of-the-boyfriend rituals, etc,

All those plus purity balls and the like are nothing but desperate, dim-witted but humanly understandable reactions to the harsh reality of the 'complex collapse of traditional sexual morality'. They also seem to be based on the rather flimsy assumption that a great bunch of sexually attractive, thuggish chads are tripping over one another to win the daughter's hand. The sad social reality is that she'll probably get proposed by one, maybe two ordinary dudes, provided that dad isn't around with his silly antics.

("Rules for dating my daughter" t-shirts, pointedly-gun-cleaning-in-front-of-the-boyfriend rituals, etc, aposematically convey to me: "I am unable to distinguish between the concepts of protecting my daughter from men with ill intent and kidnapping her to go live together in a cabin in the woods, and I am very close to doing the latter; I have often considered the logistics of setting up a Josef Fritzl basement.")

I am not seeing how "hurt my daughter and I kill you" equates to "I am unable to distinguish between 'hurt my daughter and I kill you' and being a rapist kidnapper".

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the reason the daughter's chastity should be preserved is to extend her easy low-maintenance childhood

This naturally follows from the notion that women are property, though; it is your God-given unimpeachable right to prolong that adolescence as long as possible, and as such you may do as you wish. (The same applies to the incest thing, for what should be obvious reasons- of course, feminists have abused the privilege to rewrite 'marital rape' to mean 'wife who is only doing it to keep up the marriage', but from 1910 through now we thought the answer to 'unrestrained male selfishness' was 'unrestrained female selfishness' [and traditionalists by their nature had no good counterargument] so that's just what we get, I guess.)

"They're not even human beings until 25" (and the earlier age of consent laws, which traditionalists absolutely fawn over) were wonderful gifts to the traditionalists of that bent, especially because "preserve my child as being a child" is a natural small-c conservative impulse. In fact, that's a very womanly impulse, which should be highly insulting to those would-be property owners (who will state "our sex is endowed with a healthier sense of risk management" as a reason why women should be property) but I digress.

Remember, the most sexually libertine period in US history was also the closest to the traditionalist ideal; marriages still happened fast and young (despite only 1/5th of high schoolers retaining their virginities- guess that whole 'but muh virgin marriage' thing wasn't that important after all, and maybe simply having (on average) a more beautiful wife at marriage does a lot to sand that edge down). The fact that traditionalists failed to capitalize on the economic circumstances that led society to turn away from the sexual revolution (since this could have been a viable path as opposed to what the progressives laid down in the '80s) is, uh, all on the traditionalists.

Libertines would like us to think that the offputting thing about purity balls, purity rings, and the like is the purity, the thing that libertines want to destroy.

It's more about the stagnation and waste that an obsession with purity creates (just like the stagnation and waste that an obsession with ownership creates). Which your neo-traditionalism will naturally have to overcome- that is why you want marriages where none are set up to exist, because that is a way to overcome that (that doesn't enable the wicked wasting away of your daughters like the aformentioned progressive-endorsed LARPing does)- in other words, it is progress. Property rights come with property responsibilities.

Replacing it with nothing was, is, and will continue to be unworkable.

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I'm tempted to nominate this for an AAQC.

See, @sun_the_second, this is how you imply you're wondering if someone wants to fuck their daughter without being directly insulting.

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It's a typical response to literally referring to a man's protectiveness of his daughter's chastity (a woman he is expected to not be fucking) with the same terminology as a man's protectiveness of his wife's faithfullness (a woman he is expected to be fucking). It's quite rich to glug the poison straight from the skull and bones vial in front of everyone and then claim you were poisoned.

I'm not attacking possessiveness or general "thot-patrolling" here, my question is about the specific choice of language. Do you want to make your daughter your wife, and if not, why do you imply someone fucking your daughter would make you the same thing as someone fucking your wife? You hide behind "but other people at other venues ask such questions for other reasons, and anyway those other people don't sufficiently interrogate women like that".

Note that women will absolutely receive accusations of wanting their son for themselves if they chase away all his girlfriends and marriage prospects, if I can help it.

why do you imply someone fucking your daughter would make you the same thing as someone fucking your wife?

Because, as should be obvious, I'm not equating the two; I just find it an amusing metaphor and hyperbole.

  1. A lot of men feel a certain sense of a disgust at the thought of random boys/men fucking his wife
  2. A lot of men feel a certain sense of a disgust at the thought of random boys/men fucking his daughter

If the first one occurs, one would say he got cucked. It's not hard to see why "cucked" could then be extended as a metaphor for the second. Cuckold itself is a metaphor derived from the cuckoo bird.

Do you get similarly indignant and performatively bewildered when someone uses a term like "Republicuck" or "wagecuck", or says that he or she got "cucked" by a blue-shell in Mario Kart right before the finish line? A week and a half back I microhumorously referred to myself as "wagecucking" or "salarycucking" in describing myself working a fulltime job; if you saw it at the time, would you have thrown a challenge flag to grandstand and "interrogate" me as to why I'd compare my employment status to my wife getting plowed by another man? If you did see it at the time, why didn't you?

You hide behind "but other people at other venues ask such questions for other reasons, and anyway those other people don't sufficiently interrogate women like that".

Or maybe I just didn't feel like indulging your snide attempt at well-poisoning beyond the response I gave. Bad practice to reward bad behavior.

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You are the one who brought in "cuckoldry", which is normally understood to denote your sexual partner being taken by somebody else (and possibly you enjoying the (f)act). What did you mean, then? The fantastic cuck chair hypothetical you wrote after makes no sense either if you are really only using the phrase as hyperbole for "I would prefer her to not have sex, but I subsidise her having sex" and nothing more. Would you really be using the same vocabulary if we were instead talking about your cat getting it on with the neighbourhood strays when you did not want to deal with kittens?

Also, I don't see how wanting your son to be tall/athletic is anything like not wanting your daughter to have sex. One will get someone who shares your genes laid more; the other will not.

Most of this I recently covered here.

Would you really be using the same vocabulary if we were instead talking about your cat getting it on with the neighbourhood strays when you did not want to deal with kittens?

That does in fact sound like the kind of microhumor that would be well-within my personal Overton window. If I owned a cat that got knocked-up by some neighborhood strays and I recounted the story and wrote here that I got cucked—maybe there'd be some peal-clutching from those who don't like such types of (micro)humor—but I doubt there'd be salty comments demanding to know why I used "cucked" in such a manner and asking me if I want to fuck my cat.

Also, I don't see how wanting your son to be tall/athletic is anything like not wanting your daughter to have sex. One will get someone who shares your genes laid more; the other will not.

Along the lines of what @erwgv3g34 said—most men, if they could help it, do not one want their daughters getting "laid more" outside of marriage. Even for sons, there are limitations to this. Some men, albeit a minority, want their sons to wait until marriage akin as they would want for their daughters. Just instinctively, without any mental calculus, I wouldn't want a real or hypothetical son to be banging hookers, single mothers, or ugly chicks, even if there's no physical consequences and that means he's getting "laid more."

Also, I don't see how wanting your son to be tall/athletic is anything like not wanting your daughter to have sex. One will get someone who shares your genes laid more; the other will not.

The concept of "getting laid" does not make sense when applied to women. Any women who wants to have sex can do so by the simple expedient of spreading her legs. Men have to actually work for it.

Given this, the bottleneck for women's reproductive success is not having sex, which again any woman can do, but having sex with a man who has both the ability and the willingness to stick around and provide for her and her children and protect both from harm.

A woman who has sex with men without taking those facts into account is rightly derided as a slut or a whore, and she and her children would die out in the streets if the state did not steal money at gunpoint from productive, hardworking men to support her bastards.

I think there are two separate though somewhat linked questions in the whole debate over Vivek's recent extremely controversial post:

  1. Is it good to let foreigners immigrate into the US? If so, which foreigners?
  2. Is it good to import the Asian work model?

I think that the answer to #1 is a very complex one and largely boils down to what you value. Clearly high-skill immigrants who assimilate benefit the economy, but they also take away jobs from possible US native-born competitors. A lot of one's answer to this question will depend on whether you want to maximize your at least short term market value and are willing to accept a sort of socialist nativism to try to maximize it, or whether you value other things more. There are also obvious questions of the possible dilution of culture by immigrants, fears of future race wars, and all sorts of complicated issues.

I would like to focus on #2. Is the Asian work model actually better than the US one? To me, the answer is pretty clearly no, and this is what offends me mainly about Vivek's post. The whole idea that Americans are too lazy and we should have a work ethic more like Asians.

I don't think many would doubt that the Asian work ethic is in many ways personally damaging to people who follow it. It is both emotionally and physically damaging. I have met more Asians who complain about that work ethic than Asians who support it.

But does it even bring objectively better economic results? To me the answer seems clearly to be no, it does not. Take Japan for example. It has had more than 70 uninterrupted years of peace and capitalism, yet despite its Asian work model, it has never managed to economically catch up with the US. Now to me it seems clear that Japan is in many ways a better place to live than the US is - it has much lower levels of violent crime, it seems to have a better solution to finding people housing, and so on. But I think those things, while correlated with their work culture, are also potentially separable from their work culture. I see no fundamental reason why Japanese could not adopt a more Western type of work model while also retaining the low violent crime rates and the better housing situation.

Japanese have less per-capita wealth than Americans. If working constantly was truly superior, then why do they have this outcome? Of course America has many advantages, like a historical head-start on liberal capitalism and great geography and winning wars and so on. But it's been 70 years now... the geography is what it is, but certainly modern Japan has not been plagued by a lack of capitalism or by wars or by authoritarianism. If they slave away working so hard, or pretending to work so hard, all the time, then why are they still significantly poorer than we are? To me this suggests that the Asian work model is not essentially superior to the Western one, and it would not only be personally damaging to me if we were to import it here in the US, but it would not even make up for that by yielding better economic outcomes.

But I think those things, while correlated with their work culture, are also potentially separable from their work culture.

I'm not so sure.

The (East) Asian work culture is in part a model for economic labor: overall, it seems to be best suited for transitioning away from a low productivity regime to a high one, after which point it manages to stumble through okay but not exceptionally.

But it's also a social model. You hear about crazy hours etc., but those are in large part inflated, with large spans of doing nothing. What the hours do is bind the worker to a larger collective. Even aside from idle hands and all that, the social connections formed working act as a kind of behavioral safety net, particularly for men who would otherwise end up doing antisocial things. You have authority figures you have to answer to. You face shame for not meeting some minimal standards. You have to be presentable, and you have to develop the executive capability to at least physically turn up somewhere at a specific time. A large part of your limited social budget is forced to be spent with a more diverse group than total fuckups.

In America, those same people vulnerable to behavioral dysfunction put in their time doing marginal work before going home to (at best) isolated electronic activities or (worse) go out with people who will exacerbate their worst instincts. Or, increasingly likely, they won't work at all.

It's a kind of socialism that redistributes good behavior. In a world where behavioral norms are hurt far worse by the bottom 25% than helped by the top 25%, that's a massive win. (A variation of this argument applies to education as well.)

Is the social aspect separable? I don't know of a place where you can get the social benefits while moving to a better work model, though I'm all ears if you have an example in mind.

But it's also a social model … What the hours do is bind the worker to a larger collective. Even aside from idle hands and all that, the social connections formed working act as a kind of behavioral safety net

This is an intriguing take, and one which I had never thought of before, but it makes a lot of intuitive sense! This blog post by an American who purports to have spent extensive time working for Japanese organizations, gestures at a similar idea. Do give it a read, if you haven’t already.

I don't think many would doubt that the Asian work ethic is in many ways personally damaging to people who follow it. It is both emotionally and physically damaging. I have met more Asians who complain about that work ethic than Asians who support it.

Isn't the clearest evidence of a dysfunctional life model, by right-wingers own lights, the cratering birth rate of East Asian countries?

It doesn't seem difficult to draw a straight line correlation between the two.

It's also unclear to what extend a small country model is applicable to a larger country. Does the East Asian model work without the United States to lean on?

East Asia has some pretty big countries…

Yes, but...

Is it good to import the Asian work model?

USA isn't doing bad productivity wise in comparison with Asian countries. The hyper competitive nature of Korean especially society might be related to their really low fertility rate.

But I don't think that what Vivek is advocating is the Asian work model. They are looking to justify mass migration by claiming that workers are higher quality and willing to work for worse conditions and pay. The later is true, sometimes subsidized with welfare.

It isn't good for American workers if the norms change in that direction.

Since the claim is more about justifying 1. that is unavoidable. The massive economic elephant in the room in regards to migration is the discrimination against white Americans that was already a problem and would increase with more Indians migrants who have this narrative of their superiority, as a means of justification. This discrimination is part of the current situation, and caused in part by the influence of not only the migrants themselves who discriminate such as Indians who are especially nepotistic, but also of many who have this pro migration philosophy that is strongly associated with progressive stack type discrimination. See here as an example: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-black-lives-matter-equal-opportunity-corporate-diversity/

In relevance with 1: this blog addresses it in more detail: https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/increasing-skilled-immigration-is

But I think those things, while correlated with their work culture, are also potentially separable from their work culture.

But are the Japanese actually that much more hard working than Americans? This model might represent in part some Asian migrants or some Asian communities, and also in part just exaggeration.

I am not convinced it represents the "Asian" norm. There is something to it with Japan and Korea and some practices among some Asian migrants. But even then when it comes to Japan in particular, considering that Americans are hard working, I am not sure that Japanese are more hard working.

I would say that Americans are already a hard working people who choose to balance working longer and harder over vacations in comparison with the rest of the world. Including when comparing their practices with European countries. Even if there was some economic benefit in doing so, putting the balance even more in the work category seems to not be worth it considering the trade offs in other facets of life. This model is more related with bragging and the more desperate situation of migrants. But such people are also of lower human capital and also subsidized by welfare and benefit through discrimination policies.

But a part of this is due to oligarchs wanting cheaper labor who they can more easily get rid of. They might also desire to force workers in general to adopt these standards and bring wages down.

A culture that is too hyper competitive can also lead to people wasting time to prove superiority in internal competitions. If smart people have fewer children due to that then the end result is negative. Therefore, it would be a bad idea to adopt such norms.

There is actually a potential, like some of them did in the past, for a left that isn't anti-native, to take the side of its own native labor. I am not a leftist economically, but there is a balance to this. Certainly 8 hour week and some level of worker rights is not valueless.

Historically there was slavery but there were also even children that weren't slaves working in abysmal conditions and dying in the industrial revolution. While a balance that allows productive work over laziness is good, it isn't a good idea to allow oligarchs to push for norms further in the direction of desperate workers willing to accept terrible working standards.

They are looking to justify mass migration by claiming that workers are higher quality and willing to work for worse conditions and pay.

Supposedly, very hypothetically, H1B workers are legally required to make prevailing wages. It's explicitly not a wage suppression scheme. But, I have had horrible conversations with such workers in which they say they would never ask for a raise.

In my practical experience it seems like a wage suppression scheme. Also they can't easily change jobs and if they quit they get deported. So it really seems like a scheme targeted at people like me.

Increasing labor supply drives down the prevailing wages in and of itself (else being equal).

They are looking to justify mass migration by claiming that workers are higher quality and willing to work for worse conditions and pay.

From a certain point of view, labour provided on the cheap IS higher quality labour. If I can hire someone to do 90% of the work for 70% of the cost, I may be able to either accept my 90% as is or use some of the saved resources to get me to the full 100%. This is an abstraction and may not work in all cases, but that's the general idea.

Steelman of two of Vivek’s points:

Americans have been obsessed with productivity for a long time. Search passages by the Founders for “industry” or “industrious” and you will find thousands of hits, often lauding the virtue of productivity. In the early 1900s we had scientific management, described in the 1940s book and movie Cheaper by the Dozen (about the 1920s). The movie is interesting for lauding both productivity and fertility.

Dad always practiced what he preached, and it was just about impossible to tell where his scientific management company ended and his family life began […] Dad took moving pictures of us children washing dishes, so that he could figure out how we could reduce our motions and thus hurry through the task, irregular jobs, such as painting the back porch or removing a stump from the front lawn, were awarded on a low-bid basis. Each child who wanted extra pocket money submitted a sealed bid saying what he would do the job for. The lowest bidder got the contract.

Dad installed process and work charts in the bathrooms. Every child old enough to write — and Dad expected his offspring to start writing at a tender age — was required to initial the charts in the morning after he had brushed his teeth, taken a bath, combed his hair, and made his bed. At night, each child had to weigh himself, plot the figure on a graph, and initial the process charts again after he had done his homework, washed his hands and face, and brushed his teeth

Vivek is also right that we promote the wrong ideal in children. Our sports culture is ridiculous. Children shouldn’t look up to athletes and student athletes shouldn’t practice every day. This has no history in the first century of America, where a sport was enjoyed for its benefits and not as an end in itself. If you were a child in the 1800s you would look up to an historical hero, a national hero, or possibly some business titan. But not a sports player. Consumer sports obsession doesn’t even promote health, it discourages health by demotivating participation in local sports and encouraging sedentary activity.

awarded on a low-bid basis

This is a small number of participants who personally know each other. Conspire to price fix. Of course dad will suddenly refuse to honor this system. But at least it defeats his system.

What about inducing young men to be regimented, putting the team in front of self, and creating situations to bond?

Seems to me the problem is local sports have devalued competition.

Does school not regiment them enough? It’s definitely important to learn teamwork and to bond, but you can do when everyone merely plays sports, without making it an obsession that requires 1000 hours of skill training. Have a sports competition every week and control each time for skill, so that each time has a nearly 50% chance of winning. This incentivizes the prosocial qualities, plus exercise, without all of the waste. And having guys organize these themselves is better than having a coach tyrannically dictate everything — I don’t think most training has enough downtime to truly bond, or allow enough argument to truly involve teamwork.

Random question about US history - when did US high school and college sport become driven by semi-professional spectator sport? In the British schools which take team sports seriously (now mostly the more trad private schools, admittedly) the core of "Games" was and still is ubiquitous intramural competition, with the unathletic kids expected and supported to participate at their level. And if there were enough pitches, an external match would include "B" and "C" teams so as many kids as possible could participate extramurally. But school matches normally happened on games afternoons when the people who were not playing would be competing intramurally - not spectating. Typically most of the spectators at a British school football game would be the parents of the players.

Does school not regiment them enough?

Arguably not at all. A core component of regimentation is the idea of the regiment, IE being part of a larger whole.

Kids generally aren't trying to score higher on a test to bring the class' average up, they're doing it to bring their own average up.

If you were a child in the 1800s you would look up to an historical hero, a national hero, or possibly some business titan

I dunno. Britain had a recognizable celebrity culture around boxing (see e.g. Pierce Egan's Boxiana) and cricket (Aubrey-Maturin, Flashman--by convention the only legitimately citable fiction) by 1805 or so. My initial reaction was to wonder whether the same thing was in the water supply in America, or whether instead this was an under-discussed difference between the two. Thinking about it some more, though, I reckon that this stuff is properly considered as adjacent to animal sports (a famous early boxer was even nicknamed the Game Chicken), which were surely popular in the colonies--Andrew Jackson bred racehorses and so forth. Which doesn't necessarily contradict your point.

That cricket was an enjoyed pastime and some man developed a reputation for being good is not the same as the sports-celebrity culture today. Boys can name twenty athletes at minimum, they watch most of the games of their favorite team, buy the jerseys and shoes, play FIFA (315 million* copies sold) or Madden (130 million copies sold), invest significant childhood time on competitive sports. I doubt middle class children in England grew up worshipping pugilists or cricket players.

And I mean, maybe pugilism was prosocial when your destiny as an illiterate lower class Englishman was to soldier overseas or die of malaria; it instills courage and desensitivity to pain. But that wasn’t the world of the other classes, and now we are all in these other classes.

Nothing I've said is a knock-down argument against your historical claim, but you're scarcely providing any argument for it either, just a lot of pointing and spluttering about "kids today" and bald assertions that it couldn't possibly have been so in days gone by (coupled with trivialities about modern mass media and so on). As a side note, projecting the modern concept of childhood back to a time when midshipmen were routinely commissioned at 13 is a chancy business.

some man developed a reputation for being good

At least in boxing, it was a good deal more than that. Champions dined with royals, drew aristocratic sinecures, and seem to have been household names (to the extent that any names were household names in a pre-mass-media era). John Gully, for one, became an MP. I recall references to news of prizefights and cricket matches being avidly sought after by East India Company men. All very recognizable.

invest significant childhood time on competitive sports

"Significant" and "competitive" are rather weaselly words, but the aristocratic boarding schools certainly expected participation in their house games (Rugby football was officially codified in the 1830s and played for generations before that) and it doesn't seem to have been uncommon for aristocratic scions to play nationally competitive amateur cricket by at least the 1830s. Have you read Tom Brown's Schooldays? Well worth it for its own sake, and may shed some light on early 19th century British sporting culture. Hell, I'd recommend Boxiana as well, albeit perhaps as toilet reading due to its episodic nature.

maybe pugilism was prosocial

I make no claims whatsoever about pro- or anti-sociality, to be clear.

I can’t offer any definitive proof that @coffee_enjoyer’s claim is correct, but as someone who spends a great deal of time dealing with 19th century American primary sources and who has read many autobiographies of men and women who grew up in that time, I’d say the lack of sports idols rings very true to me.

Newspapers were ubiquitous back then, serving not only as disseminators of news but also fulfilling the role that social media plays today. If you want to get a good sense of regular life during the 19th century, you can hardly do better than to just read 19th century newspapers. If you do, you’ll notice a striking absence of sports news. By the end of the century, a medium-sized newspaper might have a page or two per week devoted to their local sports teams’ games, but usually hardly more than that, while smaller papers didn’t even have that level of coverage. And if you read autobiographies of men and women who grew up in America in the early- to mid-19th centuries, you’ll typically find many references to playing sports, but few to no references to any sports idols.

This is in part because there weren’t any major sports leagues at that time. The first professional baseball team wasn’t founded until 1869, the first professional football players weren’t paid to play until 1892, and the first professional basketball league wasn’t founded until 1925.

All that said, while I think coffee_enjoyer is correct about the lack of sports heroes, I think he’s kind of wrong about young boys’ real heroes back in that day. Sure, they learned about great men of history and were taught to admire and emulate their virtues, but I don’t recall ever reading of a boy who had any real gripping, emotional connection to those men, as many boys do with sports superstars today. Instead, going by memoirs and autobiographies, most boys’ idols seem to have been older brothers, fathers, upperclassmen, teachers, fashionable young men around town, etc.

See, this is fairly compelling! Thanks.

most boys’ idols seem to have been older brothers, fathers, upperclassmen, teachers, fashionable young men around town

Many of whom were at least locally distinguished in folk sports (e.g. wrestling), it seems to me, but this is of course quite different than modern spectator sport culture.

Clearly high-skill immigrants who assimilate benefit the economy, but they also take away jobs from possible US native-born competitors.

"The economy" is not just an abstraction. Benefitting the economy doesn't mean line going up, it means cheaper rice and McDonalds burgers and cars and phones and AI girlfriends for the American working class. It's interesting for the anti-immigration right, after years of saying how importing low-skill immigrants will take jobs away from and lower the wages of Americans who had the misfortune to be born without a high enough IQ to code in python, now objects to us importing Indians with exactly enough IQ to barely write python. The effect on wages depends on the occupation - in theory, allowing in a hundred thousand seasonal fruit pickers should make everyone better off overall, but would lower the wages of existing apple-pickers. But allowing in a hundred thousand javascript monkeys should, because everyone's better off overall, raise the wages of the native fruit pickers! And it's harder to feel sorry for the heritage American FAANG engineers or accountants who'll make 85k a year instead of 95k a year because of Indian competition than it is the 'working class'.

interesting for the anti-immigration right, after years of saying how importing low-skill immigrants will take jobs away from and lower the wages of Americans who had the misfortune to be born without a high enough IQ to code in python, now objects to us importing Indians

It's not "interesting" at all, it is the same principle being applied consistently.

That is that importing labor from overseas dillutes supply/lowers wages and that this is a bad thing. IQ doesn't factor into it at all. The principle holds regardless of whether we are discussing fruit pickers or python coders.

Though as an aside, having a background in mathematics and computer science i would question the assertion that writing code in python is a "high skilled" job.

The whole point of my comment is that overseas labor does not lower wages overall. It raises real wages overall, by the basic econ 101 logic of comparative advantage and specialization*. It lowers local wages in specific specific sectors where there's a concentration of foreign labor. But by that same logic a concentration of labor in CS is good for farmworkers.

i would question the assertion that writing code in python is a "high skilled" job.

The irony there was intentional - most H1Bs are significantly above average skill, but hardly top 1%.

*I mean in the relatively small amounts from the H1B program here. At larger amounts you could get 'their culture is bad / their iq is too low to work in our economic system' effects, but not at small amounts.

The whole point of my comment is that overseas labor does not lower wages overall.

And i don't buy it. Especially when one of the core arguments in favor of importing foriegn labor is that it's cheaper/more cost effective than hiring Americans. I have yet to encounter a compelling argument for why the rules of supply and demand shouldn't apply to labor.

The rules apply to specific sectors! But they don't apply to the economy as a whole because, in a sense, every action everyone takes is labor. So adding more labor doesn't reduce the real "price of labor", because the whole thing we're doing is exchanging our labor for the labor of others. Adding more labor reduces the price of labor in dollars (assuming the amount of money in circulation isn't actively adjusted based on the amount of labor, which it does, but whatever), but that doesn't matter because you don't have a fixed amount of dollars, you have a fixed amount of time to spend doing labor! So reducing the price of labor in dollars reduces the amount of money you have, but you can buy more with it - nominal vs real wages. And then what matters from importing new immigrants is whether they make the economy overall more efficient, and in general specialization and comparative advantage means it does.

In general, all economic arguments against immigration in general, without respect to immigrant characteristics, such as the one you're making, are also arguments against pronatalist population growth. And population growth doesn't seem to have been bad for America's economy historically. Arguments that take into account immigrant characteristics work better!

Just to be clear.

You are asking me to believe that it is impossible for changes in the supply of labor to the effect the price of labor.

It would seem to me that history is rife with counter-examples.

... I am arguing that, absent changes in the money supply, it reduces the nominal price of labor, but not the real price of labor?

Like, the population of the United States 3xed in the last 100 years. This was a huge increase in the supply of labor. But it did not reduce the 'real' price of labor, or the value of the goods and services that we consume, because labor creates those goods and we exchange our labor for the consumption of those goods, which balance out. And then the second-order effect on the nominal price is specialization, but that's the main effect for the real price. Again, absent concerns specific to characteristics of immigrants, like culture or genetic ones, which are reasonable. But your argument applies equally well to population growth via new births reducing wages ... and it ... doesn't do that.

I kind of want to say that a lot of people here have a blindspot in their reasoning for anti-immigration arguments, in the same way that people on the left have a blindspot in their reasoning for anti-racism arguments?

I have yet to encounter a compelling argument for why the rules of supply and demand shouldn't apply to labor.

They do, that's the "lowers local wages in specific specific sectors where there's a concentration of foreign labor" effect. If you want an intuition pump for how that doesn't lower (real) wages overall, consider that money isn't real, it's just an account of value. Some total amount of goods and services are produced in the economy, and the more goods and services are produced per person, the richer the average person is.

Completely agreed. American tech workers are seriously overpaid relative to other developed countries. It should be made clear to them that either they compete for jobs on a fair footing with the best from all over the world or else they'll be the immigrants applying for the job because now it's based in London.

  • -11

American tech companies make enormous profits per employee. I'd say they are underpaying their workers. I don't count Europeans being underdeveloped as an excuse to increase the profits per employee of American tech companies by cutting wages.

American tech workers are seriously overpaid relative to other developed countries.

No they aren't.

Now, you might say that this is merely me making a naked assertion, negating the naked assertion you've originally provided. But in fact, I can back this assertion by pointing to a) the market producing the salaries you consider excessive, and b) the relative success of the American companies providing those salaries versus foreign tech companies employing foreign workers.

Further, it's interesting to me that you are so transparently hostile to the one segment of the American economy that offers be best and most obvious hope for widespread economic growth and prosperity. How much poorer should Americans in general be, in your view? Which class seems to you to enjoy appropriate compensation?

Is it Quants?

I am not hostile to tech, I actually like it a lot; in fact my day to day job is basically as a ML-esque programmer and if needs be with a bit of retooling I think I'd be able to transition to somewhere like Deepmind if push came to shove. Tech is basically my long term exit plan from finance and so I have a personal interest in seeing it do well in the UK/Europe beyond the general benefits to humanity that removing barriers to trade have. The people I'm talking about being overpaid are not OpenAI/Anthropic engineers (they are appropriately paid) but the ones who don't understand shit about computers but get paid $150k+ to stack frameworks on top of frameworks until hey presto the compiler shits out yet another CRUD/advertising app. Meanwhile my friends with PhDs in computational biology who went into biotech are earning like $60k in the UK and the lucky ones who managed to land a position in California are earning $90k-$130k.

Just because the rest of the developed world shoots itself in the foot with regards to overregulation which leads to US companies winning by default doesn't mean they deserve their excess profits any more than a monopoly that doesn't get challenged deserves its excess profits. They got lucky by being born on the correct piece of soil where the government in charge doesn't regularly commit self harm and now they wish to protect the fruits of this accident by birth even though it directly hurts Humanity if a US programming job (where the lack of overregulation leads to a higher force multiplier in how much good the worker is able to do for the world) goes to a mediocre American vs a talented Briton.

Quants are underpaid relative to the value we generate for the capital employing us but that's a discussion for another day. Plus the discrepancy between US vs UK quant pay is small enough that you can genuinely say that people choose to forgo a little bit of money for a better ambiance while the gap for tech is so high that it only makes sense if UK tech developers (amongst which group I count many friends) are artificially prevented from moving to greener pastures, which is exactly what is happening.

The ad apps, while simple and presumably beneath an intellect of your caliber, make value for the capital employing them. Yet you do not think that the people who make said apps should be paid based on the value they provide the capital employing them:

The people I'm talking about being overpaid...the ones who don't understand shit about computers but get paid $150k+ to stack frameworks on top of frameworks until hey presto the compiler shits out yet another CRUD/advertising app.

But you, the noble quant, should be judged by that same value. And in fact you are underpaid for your value to the capital employing you:

Quants are underpaid relative to the value we generate for the capital employing us


UK tech developers (amongst which group I count many friends) are artificially prevented from moving to greener pastures, which is exactly what is happening.

Have you considered that maybe its because all your really talented British developer friends aren't actually really talented? Maybe they are actually kind of dumb? Like there is this supposedly really lucrative thing they can do, its so easy they can "shit it out", they don't even need to know how computers work, they have the app store in the UK so they don't even need to be in California, but like... they don't actually do it?

Just because the rest of the developed world shoots itself in the foot with regards to overregulation which leads to US companies winning by default doesn't mean they deserve their excess profits any more than a monopoly that doesn't get challenged deserves its excess profits.

There it is. Its you. Claiming to know who deserves what. That's what it always boils down to.

American everythings are way overpaid relative to the rest of the world.

Yes, but American Software Engineers are especially so even compared to other jobs.

The American tech sector has a big advantage though.

The jobs aren't moving to London because you don't want to even try in Europe (including the UK, since the attitudes aren't that different even though it's not in the EU anymore). You will be regulated to death immediately. Europe follows a mostly corporate (in the old sense) economic model. There's little room for entrepreneurship, and that's by design, even though few politicians would openly admit that.

The whole Indians debate is perfect example of why high skilled immigration is a bad idea.

The side pushing for more Indians is largely Indian with another prominent figure being Elon who is an immigrant himself. The America first crowd is noticeably more rooted in America. US politics is devolving into the farce that is democracy in Iraq. They don't really need elections as they could just use the census data to assign seats to the Kurdish party, Sunni parti, Shia party etc. The system isn't going to have any long term visions, any cohesion or any sense of national interests. It is going to be each little group squabbling to maximize short sighted self interest.

Agreed. We need another 40 year period of extremely low immigration in order for ethnogenesis and assimilation to occur.

But Elon did clarify the amount of immigration he thought was necessary to maintain US dominance and it's not high. He's talking about 15,000 people per year. Current immigration is at least 100x greater than that.

We need some common sense reforms that make it easy for true geniuses to move here without allowing legions of low-skill H1Bs.

If Elon only wants 15,000 of the best of the best, then the current EB1 and O1 visa processes should be sufficient. EB1 is a green card "for highly skilled foreign workers who have extraordinary ability, are outstanding professors or researchers, or are multinational executives or managers" with a quota of 40k per year, and O1 is a three-year, extensible-until-end-of-contract nonimmigrant visa for "people with extraordinary skills" which admits about 20k per year (22,430 and 23,680 people admitted in 2014 and 2015).

So it sounds like Elon is lying, and wants more than 15,000 individuals. I presume his incentives would be in the direction of having more employer-dependent skilled labor visas like the H1B, but having a higher quota and making them more predictable (remove the lottery, approve faster). This puts him at odds with MAGA.

EB-1 and O-1 are heavily slanted towards academics. The criteria are not good for working software people, probably not for working engineers either.

Thanks. The only person I know with an EB1 works at Apple, so I assumed its usage was roughly equivalent to H1B.

At the risk of repeating the same points I make every time Tiger Moms come up, I think the traditional elite Anglo work model (largely neglected in the US and UK since WW2) remains the gold standard for producing top-quality elites. A strong emphasis on polymathy, including physical excellence; deep language skills as the no-bullshit zone of the humanities; debate and public speaking as a proving ground.

This is the kind of education I benefited from, and to which I attribute most of my virtues (my vices, on the other hand, I take full personal credit for). Sadly, as a parent I've found it's almost impossible to buy these days; the kind of solid upper-tier English private schools I attended in my youth are now rarae aves, and at best offer slightly more personalised and 'nurturing' versions of what you'd find in any American or European state school. Probably you can still get the old recipe at the right boarding schools, but those come with their own headaches.

deep language skills as the no-bullshit zone of the humanities

Could you expand on what you mean by this?

You can just pull shit out of your ass about what dickens meant by whatever. But if you try that with, say, French, everyone will realize that you don’t speak French.

Mastery of Latin, Ancient Greek, and (to a lesser extent) contemporary languages is something that can't be faked or bullshitted in the same way as argumentative essays. Being able to translate Thucydides or Cicero requires significant time investment in learning large amounts of vocabulary and complex grammatical rules, as well as cross-textual and historical knowledge. Because elite-status in the humanities used to be gated behind being able to do these things, it served as a selection mechanism for the humanities that meant that 95%+ of people couldn't cut it, and the humanities had a way of choosing a genuine cognitive elite.

You can't fake foreign language mastery the same way you can, say, literary analysis

ChatGPT enters the room

Timed and invigilated exams rise up to counter ChatGPT.

Sure. That is of course a solution. But a much more costly one.

Mastering Latin and English?

how do you "master" English? Or any language? I think all of us speak, read, and write it pretty well, but there's always room for improvement.

Watch a few sessions of Prime Minister Questions and listen to how they use the language. That's mastery of the language in my ooinion!

The curricula at modern top public schools in the UK seems to offer students more choice, but at most it still seems possible to have a largely ‘traditional’ education - cricket and rugby, Latin and Greek, classical civilization, literature and math.

Where were you educated?

A medium-sized private school in the provinces of England. Sadly, these places have mostly gone woke, and dropped Ancient Greek for Spanish, Rugby for football, etc.

I think there is a distinction to be made between the Asian work model as institutionalized through a network of cram schools, tiger parents, and autistic focus on maximizing a small set of quanitifiable parameters, and the more generalized immigrant striver mindset that can be observed in everyone from Mexicans to Nigerians and is probably closer to what Vivek was trying to articulate. The former is almost always unhealthy, while the latter combination of grit, frugality, and focus on education and getting a good job seems to me like a much more reasonable thing to promote. Of course, the descendants of immigrants will eventually regress to the mean, and despite the fact that their parents and grandparents would describe this as "becoming lazy Americans," it is really at this point that it becomes more relevant what their origins are.

A couple of points-

  1. East Asians have an IQ advantage. We should bear this in mind before praising certain trends or practices in Asia- Japan has half a standard deviation on the US in IQ, of course they produce more geniuses per capita. Asian Americans who have something closer to normie blue tribe approaches to education and work-life balance do better than they did in the old country.

  2. As far as anyone can tell, Asian societies are still much poorer than America, even with the IQ advantage and working 80 hour weeks. Yes, their societies are nice places to live which have solved many problems América finds intractable. But they live in tiny dwellings and can’t afford cars. Their model clearly doesn’t work that well when developed east Asia is poorer than Western Europe, never mind the Anglosphere.

  3. India is a third world country and working insane hours is normal for very poor countries, because low productivity means you need a lot of hours to make ends meet. We shouldn’t try to copy their work ethic because we don’t have to do this.

  4. Working or studying ridiculous hours comes at a cost. People need to socialize, they need to sleep, they need to engage in healthy recreation. Korean or Japanese or Chinese society has a level of hyper competitiveness which absolutely grinds out these human needs because it mandates spending insane amounts in zero sum competition where everyone just kinda winds up where they would have anyways. It’s pure wasted value.

Agree with all of these.

I've always had a difficult time squaring points #1 and #2 together though. Why do societies that produce so many more geniuses per capita have such difficult times pushing the innovation frontier relative to the West? Is it just their conservative/conformist culture that squelches much of their talent? Are the measured IQ differences illusory from the tests, as Asians are more likely to study harder?

Asian societies are as innovative or moreso than much wealthier white majority societies. They simply don’t have as much wealth to show for it. By all appearances the IQ advantage is 1) real and 2) economically squandered so hard they wind up poorer than dumber, younger, more fertile, less innovative countries in the west.

That doesn’t mean Japan doesn’t do anything right. But they are legitimately poorer than even southern Europe, let alone the USA.

As far as your second point, I think just going off the salaries to determine who is better off is probably not all that good. Having your entire society be a nice, high trust place to live where you can safely walk around at all hours and you have good, safe, and efficient public transportation would seem to make up for a smaller apartment and no car. Having more money but tripping over homeless people and seeing trash everywhere doesn’t seem a good trade to me.

Having more money but tripping over homeless people and seeing trash everywhere doesn’t seem a good trade to me.

And yet by revealed preference, people want to live in San Francisco. Anyway, entire societies that are nice, high trust places to live where you can safely walk around at all hours and have good, safe, efficient public transportation but are poor... well, they're the stuff of fantasy, I suspect.

Japanese have less per-capita wealth than Americans. If working constantly was truly superior, then why do they have this outcome?

They aren’t actually constantly working though. They are just “at work” to save face. They are academically quite sharp though and this is where they shine, although not at all moreso than Americans

I think a big issue is ethnic resentment of whites having to compete with against minorities who are increasingly being favoured. I saw a stat recently that only 6 percent of new jobs go to white males. If true, that’s a pretty stunning statistic. I guess it’s possible most whites aren’t switch jobs but still it seems dire for new grads

Clearly high-skill immigrants who assimilate benefit the economy, but they also take away jobs from possible US native-born competitors.

It's not just that. If the argument was "Yes, some native-born Americans will lose their jobs to immigrants, but the economy will improve overall for everyone," it might be an easier sell to those who aren't ethnonationalists. But I don't see a lot of evidence that middle class whites or working class Latinos or lower-class blacks benefit from a bunch of H1-Bs flooding certain markets, to say nothing of illegal immigrants. All that wealth they generate seems to mostly circulate within their own community or get sent back home. So it's not just techbros crying that they got laid off for an Indian H1-B and unable to see how America is benefitting by recruiting the "top 0.1%" as Elon would have us believe. It's that the techbros get laid off and their replacements aren't actually doing anything for "America"; they are generating wealth for themselves and their masters.

As for Japan, I agree with you that the Asian work model is not categorically superior to ours. (I have long pointed out, before it was fashionable, that all the people praising how great Japanese and Korean and Chinese kids are at math have never actually interacted with them in a classroom and tried to get them to produce an original idea that wasn't rote-memorized from a textbook.) However, I'll also point out, for those with short memories, that the 80s was the decade of Rising Sun. Japan was ascendant and buying up half of California, and a frequent meme was that Japan had lost World War II and was now winning the economic war in revenge. Why did their economy end up tanking in the end? It's complicated and I won't pretend to have a concise answer for that, but I will say that very few people were predicting it back then; if there were signs of an inherent weakness in the Japanese economy that would spell their eventually failure (as many people are now saying is true of China), they weren't obvious. Look at how many near-future SF tales from the era depicted Japan as the future global superpower. (Just as many people today now think it will be the Chinese century, though I think there is more justified skepticism of this as well.)

All that wealth they generate seems to mostly circulate within their own community or get sent back home.

I don't know why you think that the wealth circulates in their own community - they buy goods and services like any other Americans. Cognizant H1Bs aren't getting haircuts from other Cognizant employees.

They do send remittances, but what's wrong with that? Taking money out of circulation in America reduces the price level.

It's my understanding that taking money out of circulation is bad for the nation's economy, but I am open to explanation as to how it's actually good for billions of dollars to be earned in the US and sent to other countries.

What's your view on fiscal multipliers from local consumer spending?

The basic premise of the multiplier effect is that the benefit to GDP is larger than the actual amount of currency spent, and while there are different types / uses / implications, a basic point is that the value gained from the local spending by the remittance-sender can be more than the actual dollars spent. The UN estimates that on average migrants send only about 15% of their income back home as remittances. Of that remaining 85%, if you have a multiplier effect of 1.2 you're at 102%- i.e. not only not losing net money, but even still ahead.

Of course, that assumes a global standard of remittance %, but it also assumes a low multiplier effect of only 1.2, as opposed to something lower... or considerably higher. In the US I've seen variations as high as 2, as in a dollar spent is doubling in value of the economy. While there are general theories for the variations- local spending has higher multiplier effects thanks to more immediate reuse than spending on international chains where the money goes away- it's generally understood to be positive.

As long as it is positive, however, you have to have some very wonky dynamics for the addition of a migrant- and thus an additional job to the economy- to produce less net multiplier benefit than the job sans the migrant.

Say you have a net-value job worth net-1, standard benefit to the economy. Even if the remittance-migrant taking the job lowers the net benefit to net-0.5, the person who the migrant-taking-the-job affects (displaces) has to go from a net-1 job to a sub net-0.5 to provide a worse net effect... as opposed to a worse-paying net-0.8 job (new net gain of 1.3 versus 1), or an-even-better net-1.1 job enabled by the migrant (now net 1.6).

This is, uh, not the common economic case over time. It's not impossible for it to happen- if people are permanently unemployed and don't re-enter the workforce- but for that to happen at a systemic level you're probably talking far more along the lines of 'barbarians have sacked civilization and are enslaving the artisans' than 'remittance-migrants are undercutting salaries.'

Returning to the remittance, though- as long as the balance of the relationship is favorable (more benefit than harm), then you're just seeing a cost tied to a net-benefit. As long as that holds true- as long it remains a net benefit- then you want to scale up, not down, that cost, because the scaling of the cost is also scaling the benefit.

For example, go back to our UN % of remittances as 15% of income. Wiki estimates the US was the world's largest source of remittances at 148 billion in 2017. For simplicity, let's round that to 150 billion in remittance outflow.

If we take that UN 15%, that means that 150 billion of outflow is a result of 850 billion not outflowing. Which, in turn, means $850 billion for spending on the normal things that already eat up the %s of income, like taxes / housing / food / transportation / healthcare / and so on.

Since the outflows (remittances) and inflows (everything else) are tied to the same entity (the migrant with both categories attached to them), 'saving' $150 billion by blocking the worker from arriving in the first place also means not gaining- also known as losing- the $850 billion they weren't sending out of the country.

That's not impossible to be the 'right play,' but it's making some serious assumptions.

If you don't make new assumptions though- then as long as the ratios and relationship hold true, the bigger the cost, then by consequence the greater the net benefit.

If remittances stay at 15% and the remittance relationship is net positive 150 billion < 850 billion is not as good as 150 trillion < 850 trillion

It doesn't actually matter how big the outflow goes, because what matters isn't the absolute cost, but the relative relationship. You could argue the merits of tweaking the relationship- it'd be better if the remittances were a lower percent over time- but that already occurs. It's called generational turnover, which corresponds with both assimilation (migrants establishing roots) and generational turnover (people being more willing to send to still-living parents than dead ones, and less willing to send money to cousins than siblings).

Say you have a net-value job worth net-1, standard benefit to the economy. Even if the remittance-migrant taking the job lowers the net benefit to net-0.5, the person who the migrant-taking-the-job affects (displaces) has to go from a net-1 job to a sub net-0.5 to provide a worse net effect... as opposed to a worse-paying net-0.8 job (new net gain of 1.3 versus 1), or an-even-better net-1.1 job enabled by the migrant (now net 1.6).

that entire paragraph sounds to me like there is an assumption of infinite jobs up for the taking, something that is not true. The displaced 25 years old coder has to work in McDonalds now that they were replaced from their job by a HB-1 and thus a teenager than in other circumstances would have occupied that position spends the rest of his time playing videogames. How do you square that?

EDIT.-

  1. What migrants send back home represents only 15 per cent of what they earn On average, migrant workers send between US$200 and $300 home every one or two months. Contrary maybe to popular belief, this represents only 15 per cent of what they earn: the rest –85 per cent – stays in the countries where they actually earn the money, and is re-ingested into the local economy, or saved.

checking your source one problem I see is that their source looks to be themselves and isn't available to peruse and the last bit of "is re-ingested into the local economy, or saved." what they fail to say is that the saved wealth goes with the migrant worker to his country of origin when he leaves, be it permanently or during vacations.

that entire paragraph sounds to me like there is an assumption of infinite jobs up for the taking, something that is not true. The displaced 25 years old coder has to work in McDonalds now that they were replaced from their job by a HB-1 and thus a teenager than in other circumstances would have occupied that position spends the rest of his time playing videogames. How do you square that?

By questioning an economic model where the next-best job for a coder is a McD's, but then noting you just made the economic case for migration more compelling, not less, by increasing the relative net-gain for the economy by the implication of the relative value equivalence of the two jobs.

First, there do not need to be infinite job openings for Coder to just undercut the entire market of existing coders equivalent to himself by accepting paycuts. The fewer job openings the stronger this angle is, because there doesn't need to be a new job opening for Coder to displace some other Coder-employee in the work force. The reason Coder wouldn't do this (beyond skill issue) is that Coder's self-interest is that the paycut will still be preferable to the McD's job until the McD's job is preferable to a coder-with-paycut.

If you present a model where a coder's next-best-job is as a mcdonald's clerk, and not a as a coder-with-a-paycut, then you're presenting a model where the economic value of the coder and the mcdonald's clerk are both roughly equivalent. There are a lot of jobs that are IRL inbetween the value / income spectrum of software coder and McD's employee, and if the coder wasn't already taking them for his own self-interest, that would indicate they weren't options because they were over his/her value threshold. That implies the Coder's value of net-1 is closer to the value of Mc'D's job than Coder-with-paycut.

Just the setup of the premise requires that Coder > McDonald's Clerk > Coder-with-paycut. If that coder-with-a-paycut was 20% reduction and that was still worse, then that would mean C = 1 > McD > 0.8, meaning McD is somewhere between 1 and 0.8 net value. Coder wouldn't take the McD job over the Coder-with-cut transition otherwise.

But that means the McD net value is greater than net 0.8. For the economy to get a net less from this transition when Migrant-Remittancer comes in, the net-value of the migrant-remittancer would need to be 0.2 or less. If Migrant was 'just' 0.7, that would mean the two of them together are 1.5, which is great net gain of 50% over Coder pre-migrant. If Migrant was 'just' 0.3, it'd still be a net gain. For this to be actively negative- when the next-best job is McD's paycheck level- you have to start having some really weird or extreme issues... and if those are true but Coder's former employer still prefers the migrant to them, that implies bad things about Coder's actual and absolute value.

In the real world, if someone's next-best job from a technical specialist position is entry-level menial labor like McD's, that starts to imply that Coder was incompetent and over-paid, and possibly only employed as a coder in the first place as a result of some form of corruption.

checking your source one problem I see is that their source looks to be themselves and isn't available to peruse and the last bit of "is re-ingested into the local economy, or saved." what they fail to say is that the saved wealth goes with the migrant worker to his country of origin when he leaves, be it permanently or during vacations.

It doesn't actually matter what the exact numbers are for the relationship to be valid. You're confusing a demonstration that was explicitly simplified with a foundational claim.

The 15% remittance rate was used as a baseline, not a dependent claim, to demonstrate that a modest multiplier effect (1.2 for a 15% remittance rate, when multipliers can range far higher) would address the argument of net value leaving the economy from allowing migrants in the first place. If you change that remittance rate up or down X%, then all that means is that the multiplier rate requirement for that relationship to stay valid would go up and down. But the argument doesn't rest on a claim of what the multiplier actually is, and so contesting the remittance rate (which could just as well be lower- remittances are after essential expenses, which take %s of poorer people's income) doesn't contest the argument.

The displaced 25 years old coder has to work in McDonalds now that they were replaced from their job by a HB-1 and thus a teenager than in other circumstances would have occupied that position spends the rest of his time playing videogames.

This makes the opposite error in assuming that there is a fixed number of jobs.

What's your view on fiscal multipliers from local consumer spending?

Speaking personally, I don't have a view on "fiscal multipliers from local consumer spending". I'm not confident I could even define what that is.

What general group of people is in charge of measuring "fiscal multipliers on local consumer spending"?

What level of credibility do you personally assign to their measurements?

What legible consequences do you observe accruing to this group of people when they get this sort of question wrong?

If it turns out that their estimates are wrong, what follows?

We've had lots and lots of immigration over the last few decades. Can you point to the effect of "fiscal multipliers from local consumer spending" in the historical economic data?

Thanks. That does indeed shift my opinion a bit, though I am still not convinced that immigration (and especially our current H1B program) is overall a net good. The discourse from the pro-immigration side on Twitter (and your analysis, if I am reading you correctly) is that more immigrants = more people working = more net GDP, thus a net gain to everyone. But what if individually it results in a loss on average (e.g., the average native-born American goes from a net-1 job to a net 0.8 job? "An-even-better net-1.1 job enabled by the migrant (now net 1.6)" seems very optimistic.)

I am not a nativist, not entirely persuaded by pure culture war arguments, and like most folks who grew up in the "colorblindness is good" and "America is a melting pot" beforetimes, I really want to believe that infinity immigrants (or infinity minus the fig leaf we use to supposedly filter out those who will be a pure drag on the economy) will benefit us overall. But I have to admit, I am coming around to the anti-immigrationist position. You seem to be saying that the arguments Elon and Vivik are getting ratioed for on Twitter are actually correct?

Thanks. That does indeed shift my opinion a bit, though I am still not convinced that immigration (and especially our current H1B program) is overall a net good. The discourse from the pro-immigration side on Twitter (and your analysis, if I am reading you correctly) is that more immigrants = more people working = more net GDP, thus a net gain to everyone. But what if individually it results in a loss on average (e.g., the average native-born American goes from a net-1 job to a net 0.8 job? "An-even-better net-1.1 job enabled by the migrant (now net 1.6)" seems very optimistic.)

Then we're shifting the goalposts of whether the standard of success is harm to the economy, or the average current worker. Rather than a criticism, though, I am very sympathetic for that concern! The neoliberal consensus cracked because the advocates argued there would be no losers, and then stood by as regions were devastated because the multiplicative effect worked in reverse as industrial areas de-industrialized and saw money leave. Nations have a responsibility, or at least a compelling electoral interest, to the losers of economic disruption. We are in the midst of an ongoing political realignment of American class-politics, and new alliances are being made / tested that couldn't have credibly tried before.

But that's a social/political argument, not an economic argument, even though it was initially provided in the form of an economic argument. This is part of why the 'nativist' arguments against migration also get discredited- because they try and seize various mottes ('immigration is bad for the economy') which is relatively easily cracked. (Another one is 'migrants don't pay taxes'- the amount of tax-capture of even undocumented migrants is quite high, because many of the methods of undocumented migrant hiring don't involve evading things like payroll taxes or sales taxes and so on.)

The harder argument is whether migration lowers average jobs. This is also a much older argument in which the American cultural acceptance of capitalistic costs / lower social cohesion / constant churn that leads to a general view on how wealth is generated to make those net-1 jobs in the first place. Net-1 jobs are a result, not the start, of a system process, and that system is constantly raising and lowering the net-benefit of jobs based on market demands. Regulations to protect established interests- like people who want to avoid competition- are the same as regulations that raise costs for consumers who could benefit from not only primary actor savings (the consumer charged more due to input costs), but secondary market benefits (the consumer who is charged less, can now spend more on other people's other things).

Like, say that formally net-1 job is now a net 0.8 job. So what, if that transition (lower employment costs) can translate into second order benefits beyond those two participants (say by raising 20 other jobs by net +0.01). Then we're quibling over division of spoils, not net loss. Which goes back to being a social/political rather than economic argument.

But this argument gets very convoluted, hard to explain in clear terms, harder to prove, and politically difficult at best compared to simpler and stronger (even if wrong) memes.

I am not a nativist, not entirely persuaded by pure culture war arguments, and like most folks who grew up in the "colorblindness is good" and "America is a melting pot" beforetimes, I really want to believe that infinity immigrants (or infinity minus the fig leaf we use to supposedly filter out those who will be a pure drag on the economy) will benefit us overall. But I have to admit, I am coming around to the anti-immigrationist position. You seem to be saying that the arguments Elon and Vivik are getting ratioed for on Twitter are actually correct?

I am... neutral on the position of a platform I make a point to avoid? I'm not familiar with their specific arguments, and I don't consider myself enough of an expert in the relevant policy fields to have a strong option. I certainly wouldn't be surprised if politically contentious people were being ratioed for politically contentious views, especially if other actors (including those with bot nets) had an incentive to maximize the impression of opposition. I wouldn't be surprised if they got ratioed regardlless of correctness.

I will say that arguments that appeal to per-unit quality over volume are quite often wrong, and more so when there's a self-serving interest on the part of the person making them (which is almost always true if they can't compete with volume). From a system / population performance level, 'better' is often less important than 'good enough', and as long as you have 'good enough' then more is generally better. This applies in system engineering (not over-engineering to raise costs), manpower (you don't need the best person in the world, only the best person who is good enough and available), ethics (demands of moral perfection obstructing imperfect improvements), information (overly complicated long-form arguments are less compelling than floods of simple-but-generally-sound constructs), and so on. This was long a regular refrain for why Chinese manufacturing wasn't a long-term industrial threat- because China wouldn't be able to compete on quality. Well, China has quality-enough that a lot of quality and more expensive producers went out of the business or went out of the country.

Part of the issue with the visa issue is that economic benefit is a necessary component of the advocates of either direction not coming off as selfish, as their position of advocacy probably really does benefit them. Someone is urging more a more distorted form of the 'ideal' market. This is where general market theory would go into consumer surplus / savings concepts, where artificially higher restrictions- such as maintaining a cartel dynamic- creates market inefficiencies that rob the consumers of market efficiencies.

And this creates the issue that employees resisting HB1 visas are not consumers in this model- they are producers, and their employers are their customers, and the HB1 visa market debate is a debate of how many producers/suppliers of labor should be allowed in the market. As a supply principle, ease of entry into a market increases supply, thus lowering costs and increasing quantity provided. Which is why labor unions exist- as a measure to restrain supply.

Historically the American labor movements have lost that fight, or at best had only conditional support. I have no strong feeling how it will turn this time, in part because (a) I don't think it matters on economic truth, and (b) I think some of the controversy is just an extension of politics.

I don't think it does! Think about it this way - say I make a dollar, and then send it to India. Either that dollar makes its way back to the US, or it doesn't. If it does make its way back to the US, then that's as good as the guy who earned it spending it. And if the dollar doesn't come back to the US, from the perspective of the 'real economy' I created value for others and asked for nothing in return, which is even better! (This is the reduction in the price level)

If it does make its way back to the US, then that's as good as the guy who earned it spending it.

More like burning it.

No? With respect to the health of the economy, it's consumption whether the guy buys a $100 thingy and enjoys it himself, or pays $100 to have some thingy shipped to India. There might be other concerns not directly about the economy but OP was talking specifically about economy

What, exactly, is the harm? The benefit is, as I said, a reduction in the price level.

Note that remittances are 0.7% of GDP and so any effect (good or bad) is probably indistinguishable from zero.

I think those things, while correlated with their work culture, are also potentially separable from their work culture

This is a question I ask myself almost every day.

For now, I want to push back slightly on the wealth/GDP comparison. I've posted before about my struggles in thinking about it. The numbers show Americans are at median higher in per capita wealth and GDP, but it is difficult for me to square that with my personal experience actually living in the US vs East Asia. In a phrase, it feels like when I'm in the US I'm always paying more for less. Food tastes worse, interactions with a service workers feel worse, I'm shaken down for tips even on take-out, public spaces are covered in literal piss and shit, public transit is garbage, there's lower trust, principal-agent problems seem to play out with a high rate of defections, etc.

If GDP is the sum total of all money flows, how should I feel about getting paid >3x while I'm also having to shell out >2x for everything but it's all worse. PPP is supposed to account for this, but I don't think it quite captures the full picture, particularly the part where everything is lower quality. Every transaction in the US will nickel and dime you to death. In comparison, I generally feel a much greater utility surplus in places like Japan.

  • When Japanese waiters just do their job because it's culturally expected while American waiters drag their feet and still whine about 20% tips not being 25%, that's not captured by GDP.

  • When the best ramen shops in Tokyo don't hike up their prices despite massive queues and still put full effort into quality just out of pride in their work while American restaurants are tacking on random surcharges and skimping on ingredients, that's not fully captured by GDP.

  • When the city can just delete most of its trash cans and citizens will still largely refrain from littering while Americans are paying several full time salaries to pick up dog feces, that's not fully captured by GDP.

  • When restaurants don't have to pay for security guards because crime rates are low, that's not fully captured by GDP.

In the thread I linked above, someone gave the example that his wife could increase national GDP by getting a job and paying a nanny and a housekeeper, etc. instead of being a stay-at-home mom. The sense I get is that similar things are at play in every aspect of society and the US culture is one that lies on the former extreme in almost all of them.

Edit: It was pointed out that I went a bit off on a tangent. To get back to your question, my main thoughts comparing US and East Asia are that 1.) The productivity gap isn't as high as the GDP numbers would suggest and 2.) The advantages and disadvantages largely emerge from cultural differences rather than systemic ones. If I were to reduce it to a principal component, I'd put it along a "trust" axis, with East Asian inefficiencies arising from cultural rituals that may or may not be needed to maintain this trust while American inefficiencies arise from the constant defections in the setting of low trust. Given how difficult culture is to change I don't see much opportunity for a Hegelian sublation between the two but if there is one, I'd wager it'd be easier for East Asia than the US, simply because trust is far easier to maintain than it is to build.

When the city can just delete most of its trash cans and citizens will still largely refrain from littering while Americans are paying several full time salaries to pick up dog feces, that's not fully captured by GDP.

Is that net positive? Trash cans seem like a big win in terms of efficiency. It sucks to have to lug around dirty plastic wrappers until you get home, or to have to return your trash to whatever specific store you got it from. And Japan has lots of things that produce plastic waste. It's interesting that this might be one of the times where having some lower social trust people around might improve QoL, since it would force trash cans to be installed.

I'm also not sure Tokyo's great restaurant prices are a feature of social trust. It probably has more to do with density and sheer demand which makes the economics work. But then, cheap and practical fast food arguably started in the US, it just seems to have become much worse at it recently, which is weird.

Personally, I never found it much of an inconvenience. There are trash cans at every place you can buy food and most train stations. Convenience stores have seating and even microwaves to eat when you buy. Vending machines have attached bins for bottle/cans. The only time you'd need to carry your trash around is if you were eating in the middle of walking, which isn't something I personally do much and is culturally frowned upon. I don't think it's a big QoL hit, but others may disagree.

As for restaurant prices, the economies of scale effect certainly contributes. One of the interesting things about many East Asian cities is that it's often cheaper to eat out than to cook at home. Even so, many of these restaurants are almost certainly not maximizing their profit margins in the face of their demand.

When the best ramen shops in Tokyo don't hike up their prices despite massive queues

... Is that good? Not hiking their prices doesn't eliminate the scarcity, so people still end up competing to pay in time waiting in queue, which just burns value in the form of time rather than exchanging it in the form of money. American companies reducing quality when they get big is very common and quite bad though.

From a GDP perspective, absolutely. From a utility perspective, maybe? As a hypothetical, I would obviously benefit monetarily if I worked for an extra hour and put 95% of the net earnings towards skipping an hour-long queue, but sometimes I don't really feel like working that extra hour and would rather stand in a queue reading random stuff on my phone.

I also think more generally that matching prices strictly to scarcity doesn't always improve society-wide utility. Often times you end up restricting to a clientele that has more money than genuine appreciation. Is there really more societal value if most die-hard sports fans end up watching from home because they were priced out by richer people who are there largely because they value money less and wouldn't really care if their conspicuous consumption were directed elsewhere? Obviously true from a monetary perspective, but I still tend to believe that there's more to utils than pure cash flow.

People in the United States have more wealth in other measurable things, though (cars, firearms, computers, square footage of living space, etc.)

I think that the United States is a very big and very varied society, and ultimately on the whole it's not as high trust as e.g. Japan, but it is higher variance. And higher variance arguably means more wealth, since innovations that improve QOL and increase wealth are unusual.

The other thing, though, is that the United States basically got unrestricted access to an entire continent and rode out essentially unscathed a very formative moment in industrial history that saw much of the rest of the world absolutely obliterated (including Japan) and so it got a significant head start in a lot of ways that matter.

True, the geography has helped a lot, but the fact that the US rode out the troubles of the first half of the 20th century almost unscathed and Japan didn't is not necessarily a variable that is independent from the differences between US and Japanese culture. It is possible that had Japan had a more US-like culture in the 1930s, it would never have become dominated by delusional imperialists who then got the country flattened in a war. Indeed, such a Japan would probably have never become isolationist and fallen behind the West to begin with.

Similarly, it is hard for me to imagine that a China with a more US-like culture would have stagnated under a Qing dynasty for centuries and fallen enormously behind the West in technology, then after a brief period of civil war replaced the Qing dynasty with communists who mismanaged the economy to the point that millions of people died as a result.

Of course this is all highly speculative, the reality is that there is no way to tell for sure one way or another.

It is possible that had Japan had a more US-like culture in the 1930s, it would never have become dominated by delusional imperialists who then got the country flattened in a war. Indeed, such a Japan would probably have never become isolationist and fallen behind the West to begin with.

If Japan had a more American culture, in just one way, Japan would have seen very different outcomes in WWII. If Japan had simply chosen to be less racist then they would have obtained a different outcome.

The USA in 1941, which was certainly a more racist society than today, nonetheless was able to field a half million Mexican and Hispanic soldiers, and more Native Americans served proportionally than any other group, most famously in the Navajo code talkers who were used specifically against the Japanese.

Where by contrast, the Japanese made enemies even of the anti-European independence movements within the areas they invaded almost instantly. If the Japanese had been capable of articulating and implementing the vision of the Greater East Asian Co Prosperity Sphere, they would have been able to tap the manpower and resources of Korea, Manchukuo, and South East Asia far more effectively. Would that have put them at parity with the United States? Not necessarily, but it also would have allowed a slower pace of war that would not have necessitated involving the USA in the war as quickly.

Of course, such a society would likely be less mono-ethnic, and hence according to most here less high trust etc today.

Hmm, a lot here.

I think the United States was pretty close to being destined to ride out World War Two unscathed as long as nobody hostile developed a nuclear weapon. I think that's pretty much the only way CONUS gets more than a scratch. It's just very hard to do damage from across the Pacific or Atlantic oceans, and we only managed it on the one hand by taking a bunch of islands within striking range of Japan (and there aren't many of these on the Eastern American seaboard) and on the other hand by having England conveniently right there.

(This isn't the same argument as "the United States was destined to win the war in the Pacific).

Similarly, I'm not sure anything about Japan's technology would have saved it from being stuck between the United States (with 2x its population) and the Soviet Union (with nearly 3x its population).

But I do agree that a slightly different culture would have kept it from getting bombed out of World War Two and made it more competitive in the postwar era - a Japan that doesn't lose World War Two is at a minimum a major regional power.

I also think, FWIW, you probably don't get US culture without US geography. I think crossing the Atlantic and Pacific had a strong filtering effect on Americans that persists to this day.

(Incidentally there is imho a huge underrated and interesting question about long-term space colonization, as imho space colonies are likely to be insanely productive due to founder effects, but may also be prone to regimented thinking.)

(Incidentally there is imho a huge underrated and interesting question about long-term space colonization, as imho space colonies are likely to be insanely productive due to founder effects, but may also be prone to regimented thinking.)

On this note, I've always thought that one of the greatest advantages the US had was in being able to construct its constitution with significantly reduced baggage/inertia. Trying to reform the US constitution today seems essentially impossible. My hope is that if space colonization ever works out that a new set of founders with foresight manage to take the chance at a fresh start at put together an even better constitution for the modern era. It would be a fun discussion to hear what people would want explicitly included.

With any luck(??) we'll get Archipelago In Space, which could be very interesting on a lot of different levels. IMHO the US Constitution is very good ("working exactly as intended") but it was a some what unwieldy compromise because it had to accommodate certain geopolitical realities. That may be less true for SPACE COLONIES than any other civilization before (although I am not sure I would place money on it).

millions of people died as a result.

Tens of millions!

Japan’s culture was more similar to that of, say, Theodore Roosevelt than you think. Like America, they had a sense of Manifest Destiny: that they were a uniquely blessed people with a uniquely excellent culture (which compared to the rest of Asia at the time they really were) and that it was their destiny to civilise their neighbours and then the world.

Two big (relevant) differences are:

  1. Japan saw itself as having been invaded and humiliated by Westerners, and as being on the back foot, so they had a grudge and a sense of precariousness driving them to take more active action.
  2. Japan had clear geographical and resource problems that America didn’t. The Japanese (probably correctly) saw Asian expansion as being absolutely necessary for their future, and were again compelled to be proactive in a way that America wasn’t. I’m not honestly clear on why the felt the need to go to war with America though.

In short, I think that a big part of why Imperial Japan didn’t survive the 20th century and America did was out of geopolitics rather than cultural differences.

(Obviously other cultural differences existed, I am not saying that America had its own rape of Nanking or anything silly like that).

The United States was taking "soft" diplomatic action against Japan before they attacked Pearl, both in terms of an oil embargo and in terms of sending mercenaries and weapons (the "Flying Tigers") to China to fight against them. I think that by 1941 they

  • Had been training to think of the US as their main strategic opponent for some time
  • Saw clear signs of US hostility
  • Knew that the United States had a major naval expansion underway (due to the Naval Act of 1938)
  • Understood that whoever punched first had a clear mover's advantage

I am not an expert into Japanese thought, so perhaps there was much more than this. But that seems sufficient to me, if that makes sense. [Edit to add: the Flying Tigers arrived in China before Pearl Harbor but did not see combat until after. It's unclear to me how secret this was/if this played any part in Japan's thinking, but the oil embargo was, of course, no secret.]

I would add (while still oversimplifying; Japanese history is not my strong suit) that there was a strong internal rivalry between the army (who wanted to fight the USSR) and the navy (who wanted to fight the US/UK). The army faction sort of got their wish in 1938-9 but blew it by being defeated by the Soviets (General Zhukov won his first big victory there.) and were in turn discredited in favor of the naval faction.

This scene depicting that battle is hilariously inaccurate in some ways (No, the Japanese weren't using Kamikaze trucks; they had tanks, planes, and artillery of their own.), but the moral of "Oh fuck, the Soviets have more tanks." was true. Unfortunately for Japan, America had just as much overmatch in ship and airplane production as the Soviets did in tank production.

Japan also never believed they could outright defeat the US. The idea was that Pearl Harbor would give them 6-12 months to build an empire and defensive perimeter around the Japanese home islands, coupled with a mistaken assumption that the US would be willing to negotiate peace with them after seeing how much work it would take to defeat them.

Well, I know Japan had a plan to defeat the US navy in a decisive battle, but I agree that's different from the outright defeat of the sort they ended up receiving.

Bit of a tangent, but imo the question in your first point is answered by colonialism not being a historical grudge at that point. The US had the Philippines, the UK had India and burma, the Dutch had the islands, France had Indochina, Russia was moving south. China was in pieces and looked like it was ripe for taking.

From a 1930s Japanese perspective it looked like they were getting crushed between the western powers and were going to be deindustrialized into another colony by economic warfare (like the oil embargo). Defending hadn't worked for anyone yet, so... Banzai.

There's an interesting question of how willing the US would have been to let Japan beat the other colonial powers. But US expansion sure looks like the most immediate threat to Japan, so it was probably impossible.

Defending hadn't worked for anyone yet

Thailand was never colonized. It was also, weakly, a member of the Axis during WWII.

I agree with everything you’ve said here, but I still feel like you’re not answering OP’s question in the spirit it was intended: could we have all those nice things without ~everyone spending needlessly excessive hours in the office?

In theory, I think the answer is yes. But as the great Yogi Berra once (apocryphally) said, in theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice—in practice, there is.

Hmm, let me give it another go: I think parts of the United States do have those things. From what I can tell, those places typically have older and wealthier populations that have lived there for a long time and that have a sort of set culture. Larger American cities aren't so much that way (in fact they are often celebrated at not being that way!) Even where I am (American Southwest) the restaurants don't have security guards [that I've noticed] and you can get great service (although it's a little hit or miss) even in the poorer/more rural places.

Japan is an aging culture, I don't think it's surprising that it's more considerate even all things being equal (which they aren't, Japan was already a culture known for having a code of polite behavior and America has always been known as being a straightforward place, except for the South.) I think (although I could be wrong) that cultural churn is destructive to polite mores. You can see how America, and particularly American cities, are full of cultural churn:

  • Younger population
  • Multicultural, with plenty of immigration
  • Wealthy, with plenty of internal migration and climbing-the-ladder

I think a large part of politeness is having to live with the consequences of your actions. Even in a large city, one without a lot of "churn" and upwards mobility means that neighbors know each other and live next to each other for years or decades. But America is wealthy, and people are always moving in, moving out, and mostly moving up and away, and so there's not as much incentive to be civil or polite or not to litter. (Although maybe stuff like that is literally just a question of whether or not you catch and punish the X% of the population that litters, I dunno.)

There's the saying that everyone in America is a temporary embarrassed millionaire, and I think that attitude makes more millionaires, and fewer polite waiters and careful ramen chefs. In other words, it's hard for a constantly moving culture to settle around a distinct set of mores. (But I've never been to Japan, so I'm on thin ice making comparisons.)

FWIW I suspect we could get surprisingly close to Asian outcomes in those regards by simply eliminating blacks and the malign influence of their degenerate culture.

I'll assume "simply eliminating blacks" is purely hypothetical and not an expression of desire, but combined with "the malign influence of their degenerate culture" it's pretty clear you just want to sneer at a race you dislike. You are free to argue against the Civil Rights Act, but do so without waging the culture war.

You’re right, this was unbecoming of me. Next time I’ll think twice before drunkposting on a Saturday night

Setting aside the ethical problems of "simply eliminating blacks" I have a few thoughts on this:

Firstly, I don't live in a town with a lot of people of that persuasion and I still had to pick trash off of my lawn this morning, presumably because someone somewhere (probably not a black person!) littered and it blew its way over to me. On the flip side, if you go to certain places, particularly in the Deep American South, you'll find a lot of black people who, as far as I can tell, care a lot about civility and dignity. (You can also find plenty of things to complain about if you're so inclined).

Secondly, about 15 years ago, I went to Rome (the one in Italy) and was not super impressed by the sorts of QOL OP was discussing - there was a lot of smoking and, IIRC, a fair amount of graffiti, although it's been a while. (It also just seemed civilizationally dead but that's another story). Now, something else I noticed in Rome is that Italians are not black (unless you're going with the original Ben Franklin idea of black wherein anyone who isn't a German, Briton or Swede is at least a bit swarthy).

In short: no, I don't think black people are the malignant heart of all problems with civic society.

Now, something else I noticed in Rome is that Italians are not black (unless you're going with the original Ben Franklin idea of black wherein anyone who isn't a German, Briton or Swede is at least a bit swarthy).

Italians are not black (but can I enter an Alford plea on "swarthy"?), but Franklin found that they, along with also the Germans (except Saxons) and Swedes were also swarthy. As well as the Russians and French. Perhaps a problem with his "double spectacles"?

If you read the literature of the time, it is striking how even people from the next county over could be considered "dark," "swarthy" and "foreign." Hence the whole discourse about Heathcliff in the latest version of Wuthering Heights (Brontë describes him as "dark" IIRC, the implication being that he's probably a Gypsy, but somehow the new woke interpretation is that he was a Person of Color and Mr. Earnshaw found a little black boy on the streets of London).

Aha, I must have misremembered the Swedes. But yes his diagnostics are comical by the standards of today's discourse, although I think it makes some sense (basically white people are Anglo-Saxons and close kin). I really wish we had his final verdict on the Irish (who are, as I understand it, the literal palest people in the world).


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