read Bryan Caplan on how amazing UAE is for the welfare of immigrants. www.betonit.ai/p/reflection... what do you think? circumstances can be better than the circumstances people come from, but still be far from admirable. 1/

if the US had evolved into a contemporary UAE, with us non-Mayflower descendants segmented into low remuneration services and construction, would that be fine? 2/

“the whole era was miserable” is caricature. people live, smile, suffer in every era and circumstance. but we do judge. the Gilded Age was… not good, even if it was better than how things were where our ancestors came from. 3/

what makes the American story we grew up with so appealing is it had a happy (we thought) ending, a middle-class society into which substantially everyone (except descendants of slaves) could assimilate and prosper. 4/

if we had never had that triumphalist moment, that doesn’t mean every era of America would have been the World’s Worst Hellhole. we had a lot of land and resources per capita! lots of people did well! 5/

but there really was a whole lot of immiseration, and absent the New Deal and GI Bill etc, a risk of pretty permanently entrenched classes. (we now face this risk again.) 6/

the contemporary UAE is not the worst hellhole in the world even for its guest workers. they voluntarily go. but i don’t think we’d judge a permanent UAE a success by the standards to which we hold America (unless you are my friend Bryan Caplan!) /fin