@Alon @DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @kentwillard Sure. There's not anything so surprising there I think. In growth terms there has been convergence towards in the East, the faster growth of still developing economies. But they are far from converged, and the social stresses of the way they are converging (or just the way the whole is arranged, as the west similarly suffers) is leading to political instability rather than the stability we imagine with convergence.
@DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @Alon @kentwillard I think probably the Gini has gone down but the top 1% share has gone up. As I've said, the EU is doing better at convergence than the globe as a whole, and better than in a counterfactual where the EU did not expand, sure. But it is hardly on a glide path towards cosmopolitan egalitarianism, in the same way that the even more geographically converged United States risks collapse to fascism. 1/
@DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @Alon @kentwillard Convergence to highly economically and geographically polarized norm will not constitute durable or sustainable success (unless we don't score authoritarianism as failure). You won't just get everybody to move to superstar cities, so you'd better find ways to include populations that don't in a shared prosperity and identity. /fin
@Alon @DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @kentwillard Some states have converged more, some states less. Overall I'd agree the EU is doing better on convergence than, say, the globe. (Less well than the United States, but that's not a fair comparison.) Nevertheless, assuming urban-centered growth policy will yield convergence to a broadly shared prosperity has been tried and failed, both across and within polities. That's not to say that urban-centered growth is bad, but more than that is needed.
@Alon @DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @kentwillard That depends on the form of the subsidy. My favorite place-based policy is just a UBI, which disintermediates local elites. https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6674.html
@Alon @DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @kentwillard Place-based bourgeoisie is reactionary. Urban plutocracy is socially liberal but economically predatory. I want to improve people's welfare + build an economically cohesive society in which shared fates mean we can agree on the big things and tolerate one another's idiosyncracies. I'm neither on team urban nor team rural. I like cities, freaks, and queers, but wish my rodeo-going co-citizens only the best and would love to share an afternoon with them.
@DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @Alon @kentwillard Income has not converged with the West in Eastern Europe. I spend a lot of time in Romania. Romanians earn substantially less than Western Europeans, which is why a very substantial fraction of the younger population has migrated West. Much of Romania's economic support is remittences from that migrant population. Even with those remittences and the relative scarcity of workers, there is no where near convergence of salary levels. 1/
@DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @Alon @kentwillard (There is instead, ironically, importation of South Asian labor that lacks the right to work elsewhere in the EU or family that does. Capital does not simply accommodate labor growing scarce and expensive.) /fin
@DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @Alon @kentwillard Like a lot of plans, you have an end state in mind where everything's hunkydory. If everyone's a migrant, there's no left-behind to trouble us. But how does the transition to that exalted stat work, when for now at least 30-40% will not for the foreseeable join the program? 1/
@DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @Alon @kentwillard You can tell a just-so story about migrants making life better for those who remain. The marginal product of workers decreases in quantity, so those who remain will have better, more productive jobs, so everyone will be better off! 2/
@DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @Alon @kentwillard At the same time, the migration destinations aren't underpopulated places, but huge cities. Here the just-so story is agglomeration effects mean that in fact the marginal product increases in the number of humans! 3/
@DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @Alon @kentwillard Empirically, just-so story 2 seems pretty definitively to win, under our current economic arrangements. Places that depopulate do poorly in aggregate, and the people who live there do poorly on average and at median. Place that populate, and the people who live there do well at least on income grounds, though high costs blunt the benefit. 4/
@DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @Alon @kentwillard That's not to say these things wouldn't work out differently with different economic and social arrangements. Place-based policy could make both just-so stories true in their respective places. Which is why I support it. /fin
@Alon @kentwillard Re the paper, diachronic is too nonspecific for me to really understand or comment about.
Re the spatial correlation, yes. But then progressive just become a geographically segregated faction in a zero-sum game to have its interests looked after. That's what we want to avoid. Rewarding migration without accommodating and somehow coopting into a forward-looking politics those who remain exacerbates zero-sum factionalism, rather than coparticipation in a shared, joint project.
i only just developed my affinity for affinity products, thought i might finally escape the adobe tax at its next renewal. now are they going to be enshittified?
@Alon @kentwillard Yes. I agree completely. The problem is time inconsistency. Over the long term, running economies hot yields more growth, more labor bargaining power, more equality, more optimism, less fash, everything better. But over the short term, running the economy hot risks inflation, and inflation is more dangerous over an electoral horizon than unemployment. That is the conundrum we have to figure a way out of.
@Alon @kentwillard I love the german work-sharing approach, on welfarist grounds. I hope it yields political stability dividends too, but I don't know. I think the correlations you point to are not fluctuations in employment, but regions with chronic unemployment which yes, does breed the fash. The tragedy, tho, is that near-term, austerity is safer than stimulus from an electoral perspective. Long-term, yes, absolutely, that risks the fash, if austerity becomes bakes-in as chronic depression.
@MisuseCase @Alon @kentwillard I'm in favor of free movement too, because freedom and movement are both good! but I think it's a mistake to imagine they foster egalitarianism. As you suggest, if we want "good" fee movement, we have to overcome economic barriers (e.g. poverty) and social not just legal that foreclose geographical choice. That is, equality is a prerequisite of good mobility, more than it is a result.
@Alon @kentwillard "divisions…way worse" is very subjective. I agree that unemployment divides the policy into people suffering horribly and people who ignore them and get on with their lives, and that's worse morally. But politically, it is just the case that a recession that cleaves workers into unemployment is less destructive of incumbent votes than an inflation than harms the median voter. 1/
@Alon @kentwillard Places that are long-term depressed, high-unemploymnt, low-growth, low-inflation are full of discontent and division for sure. Failure and poverty breed fascism. https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/08/14/fascism-as-triage/
But that's a very different question than the question that faces political actors, whether a near-term downturn is better met with austerity to stimulus over the next electoral window. A hopefully transient unemployment is more survivable than an inflation.
/fin
@MisuseCase @Alon @kentwillard I don't think that's true in general. It might be true if everyone were equally situated to be able to move, so everyone would optimize towards equally good situations. But in real life, some people simply cannot move for a variety of reason, so freedom to migrate often exacerbates inequalities. Those who were already relatively well-situated move to even better circumstance. Those who were poorly situated are left-behind in places and circumstances now much worse.
@Alon @kentwillard My friend, I think you are doing a great deal of wishcasting of your own preferences. I wish inflation were less popular than unemployment. From a welfarist perspective, inflation is less harmful. But at least as popularity is refracted through democratic politics, inflation is much, much less popular. Unemployment harms a small fraction of the public grievously, and holds the bulk relatively harmless. Inflation harms all the way through past the median voter.
@Alon @kentwillard Farmer riots and truck parades are certainly not broadly popular. Neither are labor strikes. All these things inconvenience normies and piss them off. But they are narrow actions that seek to advance the interests of large groups, groups which may not be majorities but which correctly enjoy political power in democracies, mechanically because coalitions require them, morally because they are big enough their welfare is an important component of the polity's.
@Alon @kentwillard The relationship between urbanization and inequality is complex, like the relationship between growth and inequality is complex. It is not defensible to say that urbanization creates equality. It is also not defensible to say urbanization always creates inequality, although that is usually its very short-term effect. 1/
@Alon @kentwillard But trying to impose a preference for urbanism and geographic dynamism on the coat tails of egalitarian values is definitely not defensible. There have been more equal and less equal agrarian and urban societies. We don't know what the shape of the future is. Perhaps you have a very particular urbanistic, dynamic, egalitarian development path in mind, but mere "urbanization" is not necessarily, not remotely necessarily, egalitarian. /fin
@Alon @kentwillard It's shocking that people with the perspective you are offering have a hard time winning votes from people who choose — perhaps, because by definition in your view their parents abused them — to live grounded in their natal communities. You may not like these people, but either we have a democracy that accommodates them, or we have an authoritarianism where either you prevail over them, or they prevail over you. I'm for the democracy that accommodates them.
@Alon @kentwillard No one is moralizing against migration. Migration is great, for those who will do it. What we are moralizing against, and should moralize against, is apologizing for bad outcomes for those who do not or will not. Sure, there can be economic incentive to "move to opportunity", but failing to do so should not mean life in an opioid-ridden hellhole. It is nothing other than democracy that is punishing us for tolerating that for so long.
@Alon @kentwillard Urbanization creates growth, not equality. On the contrary. cf China. We can quibble about surveys, but it remains true that there is a very, very large cohort of people who have and likely will always, absent very sharp changes in our circumstances, remain near family and childhood community, close to the place they were born. Trying to undo this is quite a radical project, utopian or dystopian. Ignoring this cohort is morally indefensible and politically catastrophic.