This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.-
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.
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
This makes the opposite error in assuming that there is a fixed number of jobs.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link