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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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I think when the arcane, longterm, complicated multivariable analyses on economic cause and effect conflict with common logic, we must trust common logic unless there are clear real world cases to disprove it. I have never seen anything approximating a simplified model that explains how increasing the low wage labor pool would not result in worsened quality of life when the wealthy hoard resources and min-max for greed. I have never seen any persuasive argument that supply and demand suddenly stops to work as a principle when you constrict the supply of workers.

If I start a business that requires COBOL engineers, I have one choice and one choice only: hiring COBOL engineers. If there are many to pick from who desire work, I can keep more resources and pay them less. If there are fewer on the market, I need to pay more, end of story. There can be so few COBOL engineers that I can’t hire them to start my business, but before this occurs I would cease to be a billionaire or multi-million! Clearly our country is very far away from having insufficient workers if there is still so much wealth inequality. In every scenario I can think of, in every industry, reducing the labor pool should result in greater wealth equality by forcing C-Suite and investors to let go of resources to use them to recruit and retain talent. God, it’s just so simple… why would any NBA team pay 50 mil for Steph Curry? It doesn’t matter if they don’t want to, they need to, if they want to win, and winning means money. How does this not apply to ever industry, magically, only in complicated studies?

You are looking only at short-term effects. The studies look at more medium and long-term effects. Those immigrants do not just increase the labor supply; they also increase the demand for goodsm which in turn increases the demand for labor. That is why "complicated analysis," not mere "common sense" is necessary to evaluate the effect of immigration on the labor market.

When you add a lower wage employee, that employee’s demand for goods would be less than adding a middle wage employee, because they have less discretionary income. You are decreasing the “median American’s demand for goods”. As an example in America, a new Honduran immigrant who has three sets of outfits and eats primarily rice/beans/carnitas made at home has a very low demand for goods. Very wealthy people have a high demand for goods, yet they buy a lot of wasteful goods when those resources would be better spread downward… what am I missing here? For lower wage workers, I don’t see how their increase of sum total demand for goods could ever come close to approaching the resources that they miss out on because of surplus labor.

I don't know why you are talking about adding employees, rather than about adding residents, which is what the issue is.

Regardless, I that you are relying on a far more complex model than the one you initially posited, one which includes variables for the level of consumption for different types of consumers. So, apparently, common sense is not enough.

Is this also an argument against TFR > 2.1?

I thought it was the argument against it.

TFR is directly driven by rural VS Urban and cost of living.

Those who live in rural areas have more kids.

Forcing Urbanization by importing immigrants who settle in cities rapidly increases both urbanization AND the cost of living, cascading TFR downwards.

You're making the problem worse and forcing the children produced by the native rural population to support a bunch of aliens when their old age comes in 20 years (you don't get to be the kind of skilled immigrant slected for in your 20s or even early 30s)

Ethnic Expulsions would be the best thing for birth rates.

Lowered cost of living and rapidly increased perception of risk correlates heavily with higher TFR. There's a reason over 50% of Gaza is under 18

I think you missed my point.

The arguments brought up above against immigrants apply every bit as much to children. All those kids are going to be taking up jobs, housing, etc. People should have just one kid at most to ensure that the good times keep rolling and the CEOs have to keep paying more and more.

Is this supposed to be a gotcha? Are you implying that you can't see any functional difference between the two options? Or are you just trying to bait them into saying something that you can label as racist/eugenicist?

I don't really care about baiting people on a pseudonymous Internet forum for wrongthinkers.

My question is simply, what is the distinction? You mention eugenics, but smart immigrants are actually much worse for the housing market because they earn more money and can pay more for housing.

If a population could mutually agree to all have fewer babies, while pensioners agreed to stop collecting to make way for new generations, it might be good; if that's somehow easier than the rich all agreeing to build as many houses as possible, and so on. But if your rivals/enemies/the lowest-functioning are having lots of kids, you don't want them to be the only ones. All those kids are going to be taking up jobs, housing, etc., but at least your kids are in that group, and having more kids means more success chances for your family overall. Importing a bunch of foreign competitors doesn't benefit you even genetically.

Or maybe I went off half-cocked, and I'm missing the point just like you say Kulak did. Seems kind of rude of me to have butted into the exchange and demanded an answer, really.

it might be good

I really don't think so.

But if your rivals/enemies/the lowest-functioning are having lots of kids, you don't want them to be the only ones. All those kids are going to be taking up jobs, housing, etc., but at least your kids are in that group, and having more kids means more success chances for your family overall. Importing a bunch of foreign competitors doesn't benefit you even genetically.

This doesn't really add up.

  • my neighbor having kids doesn't benefit me even genetically, no more than a guy immigrating from Nigeria

  • people making arguments like this against immigration are rarely in favor of something like open borders for e.g. law abiding 110 IQ immigrants, which leads me to think that the quality of immigrants is not the crux of the issue

  • If you want your family/clan to thrive, they need other people to have kids with. Who if not your neighbor?
  • Didn't you just say that smart immigrants are worse?
  • If you have a growing internal population, why do you need immigrants?
More comments

Ethnic Expulsions would be the best thing for birth rates.

This is the theory. Now, let us look at the example of countries that recently tried this recipe for growth.

Croatia Birth Rate

Serbia Birth Rate

Bosnia And Herzegovina Birth Rate

Civil war, ethnic cleansing and atrocities galore, but any rebound and growth is not evident.

Now compare and contrast Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Israel post 48...

That it sucked to be an Eastern or Central european post-communist seems to me the unique factor in those examples