Renegen on 1/7/2006 at 22:40

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Very insightful; governments do try to balance their book because if they don't they get into debt problems. Deficit anyone?

If you're going to have free movement of labor you're not going to have illegal immigrants and they will be well tracked and will pay their taxes, don't compare the current immigrants to a possibly bigger workforce from free movement of labor.


Yes, and they are not related to the age of the population, and it's even debatable that they're not related to population increases. In a sense, they are fixed costs because they won't go up when suddently the Mexicans show up. Fixed costs can go up or down, but they do not proportionally go up with every single new person. Social security on the other hand, does.

demagogue on 1/7/2006 at 23:40

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Well, immigration, esp for economic reasons, is the one aspect of globalization that is the most visible and that most people have some sort of experience with. So it's not surprising people keep going back to discussing it any time some "internationalization" issue comes up.

But I tend to think like paloalto that it's the stuff we *don't* see going on in some back room in Geneva or The Hague that is maybe even more worrying just because people aren't as aware it's there. One thing, the media really needs to catch up ... international governance is growing faster than people can assimilate what's going on.

Although, then again, I'm one of the optimists that thinks the trend is leading to more good than bad.



Will do. I have to put everything on hold for the bar, though. This year is painful on so many levels ... they better be right about that whole "delayed gratification" idea or heads are going to roll.

paloalto on 2/7/2006 at 17:46

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Not unless everybody from Canada to Mexico is going to get a Social Security
card at birth from the country of what CanAMexico?They may not be illegal but they are still immigrants.

Otherwise you will be doubling up on paper work and the time it takes to track everybody and that will take more government and more tax dollars.

And the more homogenized the economies become the more all three countries economic consideraions will have to be blended.

A person who is a free laborer who can work in all three countries,who will pay his retirement or Social Security benefits if he is not a citizen of the country he works in?If he works in another country he is going to be adding to the pool of benefits to a country he is not a citizen of.This is not a problem when immigration and foreign labor is controlled.But make it more accesible and then what?

And why isn't the media covering it I wonder?

My theory is the crumb theory.Where they gradually take away your soverignty and "native" country rights crumb by crumb,so as not to arouse,unlike taking a big chunk and alerting someone and I think the media is involved in this.

Hard to bielieve the media is controlled per se?Not when I see how many stories have AP Newservice or whatever on most of the national news coverage. Local news of course is different.

demagogue on 2/7/2006 at 20:28

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I don't know if Convict was thinking this, but the response that I'm thinking of is that: Convict wasn't (or shouldn't have been) talking about just expenditure for *any* gov't program, but the ones where population-size is relevant, that is, so the focus moves more to expenditures for long-term strategic goals (e.g., economy building) rather than shorter-term take-care-of-non-working-population goals (health & education). What changes as population growth increases/decreases is not so much how much money is spent, but *where* money is concentrated, e.g., whether the State needs to pour more money into taking care of kids or not. (If this isn't his argument, then I'll just say it's mine.)

But I have to confess that the argument works best when talking about developing States going from a birthrate of 5+ kids/per couple to like 2- kids, though (so, e.g., NASA and the Army aren't even in the picture). The economies of developed States are more insulated from population differences, and the birthrate is already low so it can't vary much more, but a lot of the ideas carry over, too.

The idea as I understand it is: the higher the birthrate is, the more the gov't is forced into a position to spend money on education and health related issues, and at the same time the greater the non-working the population will be, all of which means more people to spend more money not economy-building related that can't even pay for it themselves.

As population increase is capped (birthrate lowered), it single-handedly allows the gov't to divert money to infrastructure and economic reform, wooing foreign investment, building big projects, and most importantly training young people to get to work doing higher-skilled jobs (and also not burdening them with huge families at a young age that tempt them to settle with low-skill jobs and suck their disposable income away), and since the population is lower there's money per capita to concentrate on getting them to work (not getting their kids through school), and all the while a greater % of the benefitting population is working to pay for it.

The point is: it becomes a much tighter loop between revenue (income taxes) and economy-building expenditure (as opposed to non-economy-building expenditure: education, health), leading to an upward cycle of economy-growth ... whereas as population increases, the loop gets looser and looser and there's more non-directly-economy-related "fluff", like education and health, to take care of with less money, which can lead to a vicious circle that doesn't allow an economy to grow.

This kind of story is the traditional explanation for why places like Singapore, Japan and Brazil and a few other places were really able to rapidly and dramatically expand economically in the post-war era, and places like Africa were left far behind and remain as impovrished now as 50 years ago.

To what extent this story also works for developed States, I haven't studied it as much and would need to think about it, but there's no doubt that it's like the first basic step a poor State needs to reckon with if it has any hopes of ever getting out of a cycle of poverty.

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As for what's so great about sovereignty, for democracies the answer is pretty straightforward: democratic accountability. If we don't like the decision of a politician, we can put political pressure on him to change his mind or push him out of office if we need to. For all our knee-jerk cycnism we like to have about the system, you have to admit at times it's a great thing. But of course, there is no similar mechanism to hold accountable international decision-makers that make bad decisions that affect your life. So the traditional way to get around this problem is through the idea of "sovereignty". No decision-maker outside the State is allowed to make a decision that affects that State unless the State consents to it through its political process, e.g., making a treaty where our rights and obligations are crystal clear and not subject to change. This is to make sure that democratic accountability still has a place.

The problem of economic globalization is that decision-making power is seeping out to non-State actors in all sorts of ways faster than domestic governments can channel it through the political process, through expansive international organizations like the EU or WTO, through multinational corporations, etc. Or it's a truly international issue so it's just impossible to channel it through one State's political system, like protecting the ozone layer, or climate change. Or it's unacceptable. I mean, if the US were really serious about democratic accountability, then Iraqis should have the right to vote for the US President, since he's the one person making the decisions that have the absolute greatest effect on their lives, more than any other person. (And, after all, we got to choose *its* president.) But of course, that's never going to happen.

Deep Qantas on 2/7/2006 at 22:44

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You're comparing cost to growth. That's like comparing location to speed.

If the growth is constant (or accelerating) it will always outweigh the expenditure eventually.