Post Apartheid

I endorse the Manifesto for the Abolition of International Apartheid and Open Borders.

Great Crimes, Again and Again

Friday, April 24th, 2015

Title refers to Medz Yeghern (Armenian: Մեծ Եղեռն, “Great Crime”), a name for the Armenian Genocide (April 24 is remembrance day), and the empty slogan never again.

I recommend the English Wikipedia article on the Armenian Genocide. It’s a good long read; I learned a fair bit from it that should stick with me. I did not realize that the vast majority of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire lived a helot existence (I only knew that there were prominent Armenian elites in the Empire; indeed the remembrance day is the anniversary of rounding up of 250 Armenian intellectuals in Constantinople), that there was a mass expulsion of Muslims from the Balkans in the years prior to the genocide, that the genocide was widely reported in the West as it was in progress, and that it was witnessed directly by many (Central Power allies) Germans, possibly creating a direct line to some elements of the Holocaust.

I’ve only done naive searches for and skimming of genocide prevention material but my general impression is that it all takes an international perspective. That’s necessary and fine, but given how abysmal and nationalistic international governance is (including with regard to remembering genocides), I’d love to read more about how potential perpetrator and victim groups within jurisdictions have attempted to prevent genocide or its direct preconditions. I know when they have failed (documented genocides), but am almost completely ignorant of what attempts have been made, including any that have been successful, and how such attempts might inform the actions of people under threat today. I’m not talking about simplistic hypotheticals (e.g., what if someone killed Hitler before the war), nor heroic actions to save some people during a genocide. I’m wondering for example the extent of Turk liberal and Armenian elite efforts toward equal rights for all, Armenian elite efforts to protect Armenian helots, Armenian helot efforts to organize, and how such efforts could have been made more effective.

Previously regarding the Armenian-Assyrian-Greek genocide.

“Within jurisdictions” implies “improve yours” (in my case, the U.S.), which indeed I take as highly effective and necessary. A few past posts: Stop Killing Them and Invasion Ethics (present), Robot Gang Memorial Day (future), and Independence′ Day (remembrance).

Addendum 20150501: The English Wikipedia Signpost’s traffic report for April 19-25:

And much more sobering, but also in the Report for the first time, is the Armenian Genocide (#10 added: 631,960 views), which commenced 100 years ago this week. Farther down the list on the Top 25, it is worth noting that Adolf Hitler (#23), who famously asked who remembered the Armenian Genocide, also appears in the Top 25 for the first time. While World War II related topics often make the charts, for some reason Hitler himself has not since the Top 25’s debut in January 2013.

Dear Libby Schaaf,

Sunday, January 4th, 2015
Downtown Oakland viewed from my neighborhood.
Congratulations on your election and Monday’s inauguration as Oakland mayor.

Following is largely an update of my letter to Jean Quan four years ago. Big differences: I voted for you, and both my and general expectations for your term are high.

Crime and policing are still where Oakland does worst relative to other cities, and where it can improve the most through action by city government. (It’s easy to make the case other problems are bigger, e.g., poverty, infrastructure, housing, finances, education, corruption…but many cities are worse off than Oakland on multiple of these, there’s less any city government can do on its own to turn these around, and few if any cities have staged big turnarounds in these areas…but many cities have on crime and policing.)

In order to avoid a strong challenge from the left during your term and in the next election, you must prioritize policing quality (both in terms of solving crimes and zero tolerance for cops who commit crimes and their supervisors) above quantity of cops. In order to avoid a strong challenge from the right, crime must go down. I suspect these two necessities are compatible, and suspect you might think so too (or I wouldn’t have voted for you). But now you have to act.

A sure signal of failure to me will be if you blame criminals, drugs, federal oversight, guns, or protesters — these elements are not under your control — and the best way to address them is — fix the OPD. Nearby and substantially poorer Richmond seems to be setting a fine example. If chief Sean Whent isn’t up to the job of fixing the OPD (I hope he is), how about hiring Richmond police chief Chris Magnus? On addressing protesters, Oakland could even take a lesson from Nashville, which as far as I know has vastly less experience with large protests.

I suspect that short-term city finances do not look as bad as they did four years ago due to the regional economy, but long-term (or even next recession) they are dire. I have very low expectation of any substantial improvement in long-term outlook, but good decisions on development and transportation would help. In general the Strong Towns approach favoring narrow streets and incremental, financially sustainable development over big roads and heavily subsidized big begs seems applicable to infill development, even though that site’s main target seems to be jurisdictions still doing green field development. Don’t bet on retail or sports teams. Do eliminate gratis parking, remove 980, and otherwise prepare Oakland to exploit rather than be exploited by the great urban reconfiguration of the 21st century — self-driving vehicles (LA’s mayor is at least talking about this).

On the city council you’ve been the internal champion for transparency and open government. Please continue on that path, rather than pivoting away from real open government, as some do when they move to the executive. Even better would be to make Oakland city government a leader in open source software procurement. Cities are terribly ill-coordinated on software procurement and development, which presently makes them subject to vendor lock-in and high costs, but as more infrastructure is mediated by software, will make their citizens less free.

Finally, do everything in your power and more to welcome, protect, and empower non-U.S. citizen residents, visitors, and workers in Oakland, and to frustrate the institutions of international apartheid and inflame their apologists, from the purely practical such as running the city well (as Jane Jacobs pointed out long ago, working cities are where strangers add to rather than threaten each other’s lives) to the largely expressive such as encouraging non-citizens to vote.

Here’s to great outcomes for Oakland, and your incredible success as mayor!

Mike Linksvayer
Golden Gate District, Oakland

Non-citizens should decide elections

Monday, October 27th, 2014

Do non-citizens vote in U.S. elections? (tax funded but $19.95 to read; how can that be good for democratic discourse?) and Washington Post post by two of the paper’s authors Could non-citizens decide the November election? Yes and yes — assuming pertinent elections are very close and we take citizen votes as a given. Most interesting:

Unlike other populations, including naturalized citizens, education is not associated with higher participation among non-citizens. In 2008, non-citizens with less than a college degree were significantly more likely to cast a validated vote, and no non-citizens with a college degree or higher cast a validated vote. This hints at a link between non-citizen voting and lack of awareness about legal barriers.

The authors suggest raising awareness of legal barriers might further reduce non-citizen voting. But non-citizen voting is not the problem that ought be addressed. Instead the problem is non-voting by educated non-citizens, whose input is lost. If we can begin to disentangle nationalism and democracy, clearly the former ought be discarded (it is after all the modern distillation of the worst tendencies of humanity) and franchise further expanded — a win whether treating democracy as a collective intelligence system (more diverse, more disinterested input) or as a collective representation/legitimacy system (non-citizens are also taxed, regulated, and killed).

Further expanding franchise presents challenges (I went over some of them previously in a post on extra-jurisdictional voting), but so does enforcing the status quo. Anyone not in the grip of nationalism or with a commitment to democracy ought want to meet any challenges faced by expanded franchise, not help enforce the status quo, even by means of “soft” informational campaigns.

The jobs case for a police state

Saturday, September 13th, 2014

Partly to make up for not blogging on the issue in awhile (category), I recommend the Vox story/interview on the case for open borders. If a prediction can be sterile, sanguine, and desperate at one time, this is it:

My longer-run prediction is the world will have open borders once it doesn’t make much difference anymore. Once development has happened almost everywhere, and there are virtually no desperate backwaters left, that’s when countries will finally relent and say, “Fine. You can come here if you want,” and then they’ll open the borders, and then there will be very little migration. To me, a big point of open borders is just to fast forward to the world of the future where everyone can enjoy a First-World standard of living rather than making people wait 100 years.

I agree with the desperate part (waiting condemns billions to poverty and tyranny). But a big point of the international apartheid system to to ensure that there will always be desperate backwaters. Even if virtually everyone reaches a level of wealth at which migration declines, there will be disasters. Another big point of restrictions on movement, work, and living, particularly at borders but increasingly everywhere, is to impose on everyone (especially but not only migrants) police state controls/thug checkpoints.

My prediction (in US-centric terms, but applicable elsewhere) is that in 100 years ICE will be evaluated to have had far greater negative impact than the NSA, if they aren’t running things wholly that is. I predict this metastasizing apartheid enforcement apparatus will make justice impossible, even in the face of a massive shift in elite opinion (note mini-refutation) — like the drug war, not like marriage equality.

Regarding the title of this post: seriously, what could be politically better than creating jobs for citizens that protect jobs for citizens! It is surprising we don’t already have an ICE dictatorship. We don’t because the cost of regulation is too high. But it is coming down. Monitoring of all movement and required third party (ICE) approval of all economic arrangements are both getting cheaper every day.

Empowered Mozilla?

Friday, April 4th, 2014

I don’t feel glad about Brendan Eich’s resignation as CEO of Mozilla, but it is probably for the best that it happened quickly. Even the President of the United States has changed his tune on same sex marriage since 2008. Apparently Eich really wanted to not even pretend to change his opinion and make up for it.

There is irony and danger in excluding holders of non-inclusive political opinions in the name of inclusivity. But the particulars of this instance make sense. (1) The excluded opinion isn’t just any. It’s in a class of opinions which deny equal rights to some people based on attributes they did not choose. Once society gets around to expanding the circle of moral equality to another group, advocacy against the expansion or for retraction quickly becomes an abomination suppressed on the free market; and not soon enough. I don’t see any way to avoid this. I suspect that the general case for socially (as opposed to legally: there should be no legal intolerance for even abominable opinions) tolerating diverse opinions is harmed if anti-equality opinions are treated as any other political opinion. (2) The opinion holder isn’t just anyone, but the symbol of a very public organization. Whether the chief executive should be such a central figure — certainly not when it comes to criminally powerful heads of nearly all states — is another question. I look forward to publicly holding the opinion that jurisdiction of birth serves as a legitimate reason for denial of equal rights becoming verboten for leaders, and in any educated company, at which point international apartheid must quickly crumble.

I hope that this brief crisis somehow spurs Mozilla to get back to its roots, even if in other respects Eich would have been the best leader to do that. For anyone who cares about the Mozilla mission, the crisis reveals a lot more about governance and communications problems at the organization than about Eich’s views, which were already known last year. I don’t think the crisis was only due to the outrage of marriage equality advocates. People expect better from Mozilla than the corporate/political PR style which Mozilla seems to have adopted: non-specific hype and if that doesn’t go over well reassure without directly addressing concerns. That approach could hardly be more calculated to provoke outrage among people who feel a part of the Mozilla community.

About crowd outrage, including destructive measures (promotion of browsers that are ethically far worse than Firefox), and Mozilla’s initial response of reassuring without directly addressing concerns (which horribly undersold Mozilla’s excellent practices and values, seeming to be offered as pathetic reassurance rather than the bedrock that they are): the whole thing reminds me of mass protest stemming from some legitimate issues, government refusal to directly address issues, and a rapid escalation to regime change as a non-negotiable demand, with destruction and opportunity creation for trolls quickly following.

Though in every recent case I can think of, the outraged crowd has good reason to be outraged, there is something “illegitimate” about obtaining change through packing the streets (or net), and certainly much dangerous about it: the collateral damage and opportunities created for the worst actors are enormous. Is there any hope for crowds or institutions to become “smarter” and more constructive? That’s in part what I was hoping for in the Mozilla case in my previous post.

I can think of approximately three possibilities; hopefully many more exist. (1) Better predictions about outcomes, i.e., any at all beyond self-serving punditry. Prediction markets are one possible, but so far failed (in the sense of near zero use), mechanism. Some outraged crowd members might pay attention to risk, and perhaps even tip the crowd into more rational behavior. Within regimes (inclusive of those controlling non-state organizations) better predictions might strengthen the hands of those who advocate for responding in a way not seemingly calculated to tip the crowd into regime change as a non-negotiable demand. (2) New “legitimate” arrangements which somehow promote directly addressing concerns rapidly, without allowing any mass of angry people to demand regime change. I don’t have any concrete ideas, but might be related to (3) new “legitimate” arrangements designed to encourage change without crisis, thus reducing the “need” for crisis. In many ways (2) and (3) are the function of “the market” and “culture” with emphasis depending on topic. But organizations (state, firm, or other) play a tremendous role, so institutional design is highly pertinent. One version of such institutional design, or at least call for such, is Roberto Unger’s concept of empowered democracy (from Wikipedia, emphasis added):

Unger’s proposal for political democracy calls for a high energy system that diminishes the dependence of change upon crisis. This can be done, he claims, by breaking the constant threat of stasis and institutionalization of politics and parties through five institutional innovations. First, increase collective engagement through the public financing of campaigns and giving free access to media outlets. Second, hasten the pace of politics by breaking legislative deadlock through the enabling of the party in power to push through proposals and reforms, and for opposition parties to be able to dissolve the government and call for immediate elections. Third, the option of any segment of society to opt out of the political process and to propose alternative solutions for its own governance. Fourth, give the state the power to rescue oppressed groups that are unable to liberate themselves through collective action. Fifth, direct participatory democracy in which active engagement is not purely in terms of financial support and wealth distribution, but through which people are directly involved in their local and national affairs through proposal and action.

I don’t have any comments on Unger’s proposed innovations (apart from skeptical curiosity), but the goal increasing (implied positive) change while reducing crisis seems one worthy of exploration, by organizations of all sizes.

Brendan Eich’s going away post:

Networks breed first- and second-mover winners and others path-dependent powers, until the next disruption. Users or rather their data get captured.

Privacy is only one concern among several, including how to realize economic value for many-yet-individually-weak users, not just for data-store/service owners or third parties. Can we do better with client-side and private-cloud tiers, zero-knowledge proofs and protocols, or other ideas?

Can a browser/OS “unionize its users” to gain bargaining power vs. net super-powers?

This is basically why I think Mozilla is so great and important. Lots of free/libre/open projects and organizations have good values. They largely don’t matter because network effects dominate. Huge organizations with good values are necessary, and all the better if they explicitly are thinking about the challenges imposed by the network effects of incumbents which embody poor values.

There’s no analogy worthy of making, and cringe when others try. But I’m glad that marriage equality advocates and their predecessors in struggles for civil rights succeeded in gaining bargaining power vs. the social super-powers of the day.

Free Bassel & Open Borders Days

Saturday, March 15th, 2014

March 15, another year of Bassel Khartibil’s life as a political prisoner in Syria. Some friends put together a cookbook (pdf) with meals they’d like to share with him when he is free.

Macabre image for a macabre situation.

March 16 is Open Borders Day. Bassel apparently returned to Syria voluntarily. There are millions who have little chance of leaving dictatorships, war zones, and grinding poverty — not because they are imprisoned by the local regime, but because we allow the international apartheid system to stand.

Annual thematic doubt

Friday, January 10th, 2014

As promised, my first annual thematic doubt post, expressing doubts I have about themes I blogged about during 2013.

Intellectual Freedom

If this blog were to have a main purpose other than serving as a despository for my tangents, it’d be protecting and promoting intellectual freedom, in particular through the mechanisms of free/open/knowledge commons movements, and in reframing information and innovation policy with freedom and equality outcomes as top. Some representative posts: Economics and the Commons Conference [knowledge stream] report, Flow ∨ incentive 2013 anthology winner, z3R01P. I’m also fond of pointing out where these issues surface in unusual places and surfacing them where they are latent.

I’m fairly convinced on this theme: regimes infringing on intellectual freedom are individual and collective mind-rot, and “merely” accentuate the tendencies toward inequality and control of whatever systems they are embedded in. Mitigating, militating against, outcompeting, and abolishing such regimes are trivially for the good, low risk, and non-revolutionary. But sure, I have doubts:

  • Though I see their accentuation of inequality and control as increasingly important, and high leverage for determining future outcomes, copyright and patent could instead be froth. The cause of intellectual freedom might be better helped by fighting for traditional free speech issues, for tolerance, against mass incarceration, against the drug war, against war, against corruption, for whatever one’s favored economic system is…
  • The voluntarily constructed commons that I emphasize (e.g., free software, open access) could be a trap: everything seems to grow fast as population (and faster, internet population) grows, but this could cloud these commons being systematically outcompeted. Rather than being undersold, product competition from the commons will never outgrow their dwarfish forms, will never shift nor take the commanding heights (e.g., premium video, pharma) and hence are a burden to both policy and beating-of-the-bounds competition. Plus, copyright and the like are mind-rot: generations of commons activists minds have been rotted and co-opted by learning to work within protectionist regimes rather than fighting and ignoring them.
  • An intellectual freedom infringing regime which produced faster technical innovation than an intellectual freedom respecting regime could render the latter irrelevant, like industrial societies rendered agricultural societies irrelevant, and agricultural societies rendered hunter-gatherer societies irrelevant, whatever the effects of those transitions on freedom and other values were. I don’t believe the current regime is anywhere close to being such a thing, nor are the usual “IP maximalism” reforms taking it in that direction. But it is possible that innovation policy is all that matters. Neither freedom and equality nor the rents of incumbents matter, except as obstacles and diversions from discovering and implementing innovation policy optimized to produce the most technical innovation.

I’m not, but can easily imagine being won over by these doubts. Each merits engagement, which could result in much stronger arguments for intellectual freedom, especially knowledge commons.

Critical Cheering

Unplanned, unnoticed by me until late in the year, my most pervasive subtheme was criticism-embedded-in-praise of free/open/commons entities and actions. Representative posts, title replaced with main target: Creative Commons, crowdfunding, Defensive Patent License, Document Freedom Day, DRM-in-HTML5 outrage, EFF, federated social web, Internet Archive, Open Knowledge Foundation, SOPA/ACTA online protests, surveillance outrage, and the Wikimedia movement.

This is an old theme: examples from 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2011, and 2012. 2009 and 2010 are absent, but the reason for my light blogging here bears some relation to the theme: those are the years I was, in theory, most intensely trying to “walk my talk” at Creative Commons (and mostly failed, side-tracked by trying to get the organization to follow much more basic best practices, and by vast amounts of silliness).

Doubts about the cheering part are implied in the previous section. I’ll focus on the criticism here, but cheering is the larger component, and real: of entities criticized in the above links, in 2013 I donated money to at least EFF, FSF, and Internet Archive, and uncritically promoted all of them at various points. The criticism part amounts to:

  • Gains could be had from better coordination among entities and across domains, ranging from collaboration toward a short term goal (e.g., free format adoption) to diffuse mutual reinforcement that comes from shared knowledge, appreciation, and adoption of free/open/commons tools and materials across domains (e.g., open education people use open source software as inherent part of their practice of openness, and vice versa).
  • The commons are politically potent, in at least two ways: minimally, as existence proof for creativity and innovation in an intellectual freedom respecting regime (carved out); and vastly underappreciated, as destroyer of rents dependent on the intellectual freedom infringing regime, and of resources available for defending those rents and the regime. Commons are not merely to be protected from further bad policy, but are actors in creating a good policy environment, and should be promoted at every turn.

To be clear, my criticism is not usually a call for more “radical” or “extreme” steps or messages, rather more fulsome and coordinated ones. Admittedly, sometimes it may be hard to tell the difference — and this leads to my doubts:

  • Given that coordination is hard, gaining knowledge is expensive, and optimization path dependent, the entities and movements I criticize may not have room to improve, at least not in the direction I want them to improve in. The cost of making “more fulsome and coordinated” true might be greater than mutual reinforcement and other gains.
  • See the second doubt in the previous section — competition from the commons might be futile. Rather than promoting them at every turn, they should sometimes be held up as victims of bad policy, to be protected, and sometimes hidden from policy discourse.

The first doubt is surely merited, at least for many entities on many issues. For any criticism I have in this space, it makes sense to give the criticized the benefit of the doubt; they know their constraints pretty well, while I’m just making abstract speculations. Still, I think it’s worthwhile to call for more fulsome and coordinated strategy in the interstices of these movements, e.g., conversation and even this blog, in the hope of long-term learning, played out over years in existing entities and movements, and new ones. I will try henceforth to do so more often in a “big picture” way, or through example, and less often through criticism of specific choices made by specific entities — in retrospect the stream of the latter on this blog over the last year has been tedious.

International Apartheid

For example: Abolish Foreignness, Do we have any scrap of evidence that [the Chinese Exclusion Act] made us better off?, and Opposing “illegal” immigration is xenophobic, or more bluntly, advocating for apartheid “because it’s the law”. I hinted at a subtheme about the role of cities, to be filled out later.

The system is grossly unjust and ought be abolished, about that I have no doubt. Existing institutions and arrangements must adapt. But, two doubts about my approach:

  • Too little expression of empathy with those who assume the goodness of current policy. Fear of change, competition, “other” are all deep. Too little about how current unjust system can be unwound in a way the mitigates any reality behind these fears. Too little about how benefits attributed to current unjust system can be maintained under a freedom respecting regime. (This doubt also applies to the intellectual freedom theme.)
  • Figuring out development might be more feasible, and certainly would have more impact on human welfare, individual autonomy, than smashing the international apartheid system. Local improvements to education, business, governance, are what all ought focus on — though development economics has a dismal record, it at least has the right target. Migration is a sideshow.

As with the intellectual freedom theme, these doubts merit engagement, and such will strengthen the case for freedom. But even moreso than in the case of intellectual freedom infringing regimes, the unconscionable and murderous injustice of the international apartheid regime must be condemned from the rooftops. It is sickening and unproductive to allow discourse on this topic to proceed as if the regime is anything but an abomination, however unfeasible its destruction may seem in the short term.

Politics

Although much of what I write here can be deemed political, one political theme not subsumed by others is inadequate self-regulation of the government “market”, e.g., What to do about democratically elected terrorist regimes, Suppose they gave a war on terror and a few exposed it as terror, and Why does the U.S. federal government permit negative sum competition among U.S. states and localities?

The main problem with this theme is omission rather than doubt — no solutions proposed. Had I done so, I’d have plenty to doubt.

Refutation

I fell behind, doing refuting only posts from first and second quarters of 2005. My doubt about this enjoyable exercise is that it is too contrived. Many of the refutations are flippant and don’t reflect any real doubts or knowledge gained in the last 8 years. That doubt is what led me to the exercise of this post. How did I do?

Abolish Foreignness

Saturday, September 21st, 2013

Searching for background info for a forthcoming post on a boring topic that should be forgotten, I found the research of Michael Curtotti, and was tickled to find he also has papers on human rights and freedom of movement, and runs a website called abolishforeignness.org.

I’ve only read the oldest (2002) paper so far, Barriers to International Freedom of Movement: A Lacuna in International Human Rights Law?, and recommend it. The gap is real, and huge. A large proportion of humanity is excluded from escaping poverty and oppression. Curtotti quotes a book on my to-read list, Closed Borders: The Contemporary Assault on Freedom of Movement:

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries represent the closest approximation to an open world in modern times. … With immigration restrictions at a minimum, real freedom of international movement was a fact. The right of personal self-determination was reasonably secure for residents of Europe and the Americas, if not for other peoples ruled by them. Passports, which had fallen into disuse in much of the West, were required only in the Ottoman Empire, Russia, Romania, Bulgaria and Bosnia/Herzegovina.

Why were borders then closed? In part Curtotti writes:

The growing influence on public policy of racist ideologies seeking to promote racially segregated national communities – including by excluding all regarded as incompatible with the prevailing racially defined national character.

All the more ironic:

We may note also further explicit and implicit reservation of state freedom in regard of freedom of movement and citizenship. The International Covenant on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination provides that the Convention does not prohibit discrimination between citizens and non-citizens. Further matters of citizenship, nationalisation or naturalisation remain at the free discretion of the state (subject to the requirement of non-discrimination between non-citizens) (art 1.2, 1.3). This is of course an extraordinary provision in such a Convention. It suggests that a state has virtually no obligations of “non-discrimination” to persons outside the legal and geographical boundaries of the state – notwithstanding the correlation between race and nationality, the fact that historically many states have racially discriminated to influence their ethnic composition and that the very idea of the nation-state is strongly linked to the idea of race and ethnicity. The explicit inclusion of such exemptions of course merely serves to underline that the drafters were well aware of the correlation between race and citizenship. Discrimination against foreigners is given international legal sanction by this Convention.

Curtotti concludes noting the tension between state prerogative and the universality of human rights, and that discussion, then recognition of freedom of movement as a fundamental human right, rather than an glaring exception, can be the beginning of a very long process of rights implementation.

I hope to soon read and review the rest of Curtotti’s papers, and everything on abolishforeignness.org. As noted a few months ago, I also want to read and review all of openborders.info. It appears these two group sites come from different perspectives: Open Borders, libertarian/negative rights/economics; Abolish Foreignness, progressive/positive rights/humanitarian. That’s good: all sorts of arguments are needed to abolish the monster of international apartheid.

Speaking of which, I am mildly tickled to see that the authors of the Manifesto for the Abolition of International Apartheid use the CC0 public domain dedication.

Hypercity

Tuesday, August 13th, 2013

Comment by Max Read on one of many articles about the hyperloop idea promoted by Elon Musk (apparently [edit: somewhat] similar ideas have been around for awhile, including the descriptively named vactrain):

Why would we build a “hyperloop” instead of just moving everyone in America to one huge city?

We could fit basically the entire U.S. population into an area around 9,000 square miles (think New Hampshire) at the population density of Brooklyn (35,000 people per square mile), which is more than enough space for public parks and small (and even, for some, single-family) houses.

A good, comprehensive public rapid-transit system could get you from one end of the city to the other in a couple hours at most.

The rest of the country could be turned into national public wilderness and some large-scale industrialized agriculture. We could also eat bugs for protein and grow vegetable gardens.

I don’t know how serious Read is, but why not, and why only “America”? All ought have access to the opportunity and wonder of The City — the opportunity and wonder of all humans.

Though a serious part of me is serious about this, I know that only small progress is possible for now, perhaps until the em era.

Thanks to Max Read for the fun comment, however intended.

Via.

Do we have any scrap of evidence that [the Chinese Exclusion Act] made us better off?

Wednesday, July 17th, 2013

Michael Clemens, about 70 minutes into a podcast interview says no. I’d have liked to hear more, but this was just a passing mention in a somewhat abstract conversation about Clemens’ paper Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk? which I wrote about last year (and similarly used a pull quote headline). I recommend the podcast and paper.

A Skeleton in His Closet
Unhelpful hypocrisy, 1912 as now.

I suspect that most people, if they are aware of the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) at all, might consider it with some combination of shame, historical distance, and ignorance.

The Act’s precise method (explicitly race-based exclusion) may seem anachronistic (the distant view), its shameful rationale and effects are the same as the slightly less bald, but much more extensive contemporary international apartheid regime.

Neither the Act nor contemporary restrictions are only to be mourned for their shameful anti-humanitarian effects and their suppression of huge amounts of measured economic activity, but for their making of a qualitatively less interesting world. The U.S. Chinese population was essentially frozen between 1880 and 1940 and most Chinese neighborhoods in the western part of the country, of which there were many, disappeared. I speculate that the western US in particular would have had a much more rich history and contemporary institutions, and the US and China a much richer relationship, than we have now, had the interregnum created by the Act had not occurred.

I recently noticed a group blog called Open Borders. I’d like to read all their posts and write a summary review, but please beat me to it.