Apartheid – Mike Linksvayer

Archive for the ‘Apartheid’ Category

Race and international apartheid

Monday, January 22nd, 2007

I usually do not mention race when framing immigration controls as the international equivalent of (former) South African Apartheid — race lies on the South African side of the analogy. But the case of those opposing unfettered ability of all to move, live and work anywhere on earth without respect to nationality is not helped by the fact that race and racism is part and parcel of controls on movement, residency and work, as explained by The Guardian’s Gary Younge in The west persists in using race to decide who can cross its borders:

[W]hen translated into sterling, the mean income of a black Canadian is almost double that of a white South African. Yet a black Canadian is four times more likely to be stopped than a white South African.

Via Mark Brady.

Posted in Apartheid, Economics, Politics | No Comments »

Beneficial brain drain enhanced by weak intellectual protectionism

Friday, January 19th, 2007

Modern research on “brain drain” indicates it is mostly beneficial, which comports with my intuition, repeated here:

Over the long term I’d bet brains are not zero sum — a brain drain really just means increased returns to education. Mobility means more people in the developing world will pursue higher education. Add to that increased flow of knowledge and capital to the developing world from migrants and concern over “brain drain” sounds very much like yet another disingenuous excuse for keeping the current system of inter-jurisdiction apartheid in place.

The International Migration of Knowledge Workers: When Is Brain Drain Beneficial? highlights another way brain drain benefits all. Abstract (emphasis added):

We consider the welfare effects of the emigration of workers who produce a public good (knowledge). We distinguish between the knowledge diversion and knowledge creation effects of such emigration, and show that the remaining residents of a country can gain from emigration, even when tastes for knowledge goods exhibit a kind of ‘home bias’. In contrast to existing models of beneficial brain drain (BBD), our results do not require agglomeration economies, education-related externalities, remittances, return migration, or an emigration “lottery”. Instead, they are driven purely by the public nature of knowledge goods, combined with differences in market size that induce greater knowledge creation by emigrants abroad than at home. BBD is even more likely in the presence of weak sending-country intellectual property rights (IPRs), or when source country IPR policy is endogenized.

Very cool.

Via Katherine Mangu-Ward.

Posted in Apartheid, Economics, Intellectual Protectionism, Public Goods | 1 Comment »

Don’t let (potential) rioters set policy

Friday, January 19th, 2007

Via a comment from author Philippe Legrain, a positive Financial Times review (copy) of his book Immigratns: Your Country Needs Them. I want to comment on two short excerpts:

Workers raise their own – and the world’s – income levels by moving from a low-productivity job in a poor country to more productive employment in a rich one.

Which should be enough to win over any modern human (non-neanderthal) to open borders. The ethical argument for open borders is even better.

Policymakers must take account of the many voters who disagree with Legrain, even if this is based on ignorance and prejudice. It is surely better to admit 500,000 immigrants annually and have social peace than 1m and riots.

The reviewer would deny 500,000 people opportunity every year in order to maintain “social peace”. I say let the skinheads and fellow travellers riot — and bring them to justice for any crimes committed. Neanderthalic potential rioters must not be allowed to stall the elimination of apartheid.

Posted in Apartheid, Economics, Peeves, Politics | No Comments »

A border wall is not one-sided

Monday, January 15th, 2007

Roderick Long:

A wall that can be used to keep people out can also be used to keep people in.

Do we really want to trust the U.S. government – meaning not only the present regime but all future U.S. regimes – with a tool of that nature?

Similar arguments have been made many times regarding handing over power to the security state, but this is the first I’ve heard it specifically applied to building jurisdiction border walls.

Meanwhile the proposed U.S.-Mexico border fence could cost $49 billion, 25 times forecasts last year (zero surprise). Perhaps waiving environmental rules for the fence will save a pittance while continuing the security state’s best tradition of degradation.

Posted in Apartheid, Economics, Politics | 4 Comments »

Russian neanderthal vanguard

Monday, January 15th, 2007

Tom Palmer points out new laws cracking down on immigrant employment in Russia with a post title comment “Lou Dobbsian Economics Put into Practice in Russia”.

Palmer’s post is accompanied with a picture of marching Russian neo-nazis — neo-communists? — skinheads in any case, with armbands that would be unambiguously nazi if not for a hammer and sickle where a swastika would be expected.

It’s probable that Russian politicians are balder in their anti-immigrant pronouncements and Russian police more brutal in their enforcement, but the laws don’t sound all that foreign.

BBC:

President Vladimir Putin spoke of the need to defend the interests of the native population.

Markets – often a source of employment for Russia’s army of immigrant workers – were singled out.

“Markets” means open air retail, I gather, but delicious nonetheless. Longer BBC article here.

Reuters:

Russia introduced new laws on Monday that experts say are intended to plug a hole in the country’s labor market while discouraging foreigners from settling there permanently.

The laws, passed by parliament last year, are designed to streamline the red tape foreigners have to go through to live and work in Russia legally but will also reduce their numbers.

One change will implement a gradual ban on foreigners working as traders in outdoor markets where immigrants dominate, causing friction with ethnic Russians.

‘We want to get rid of illegal immigration,’ said Denis Soldatikov, a spokesman for the Federal Migration Service.
…
Television pictures on Monday showed rows of locked shops at a market in the Far Eastern city of Vladivostok heavily dependant on traders from neighbouring China.

‘The move was harmful because it will undermine trade,’ Vitkovskaya said. ‘I only hope no one is going to abide by it.’

But deputy Federal Migration Service head Vyacheslav Postavnin disagreed, saying the markets will adjust.

‘There are Russians to be hired,’ he told Rossiiskaya Gazeta daily. ‘Market owners will make sure that their business continues.’

Whenever you hear similar from those closer to home think of the skinheads and look in the mirror.

Posted in Apartheid, Economics, Politics | 1 Comment »

Your jurisdiction should open its borders

Saturday, January 13th, 2007

The January 13-19 Economist has a review of (and my first encounter with) Philippe Legrain‘s book Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them. The title and the review make the book sound a bit wishy-washy, but a review in the Guardian, reprinted on Legrain’s site makes it sound much better.

The central thrust is that immigration is economically beneficial. Fluid migration is as dynamic as every other form of free trade. “If you believe that the world is an unequal place and that the rich should do more to help the poor,” he writes, “then freer international migration should be the next front in the battle for global economic justice.”

Ironically, the book appears to not yet be available in the U.S. Amazon Canada will have it January 30.

Posted in Apartheid, Books, Economics, Peeves, Politics | 3 Comments »

Invasion ethics

Saturday, January 6th, 2007

If a jurisdiction invades another, the invading jurisdiction must:

Grant full invader citizenship to citizens of the invaded jurisdiction upon demand, with all rights of previous citizens the invader;
If a supermajority in the invaded jurisdiciton desires annexation to the invader, the indvaded becomes a subjurisdiciton of the invader and all citizens of the invaded become citizens of the invader, equal to previous subjurisdictions and citizens of the invader.

A high standard? Disruptive of the politics of the invader jurisdiction? Justly so, considering the invader’s disruption of lives in the invaded jurisdiction.

A particularly savvy would-be invader may decide to skip the invasion step. Regarding Iraq, the U.S. jurisdiction is neither savvy nor responsible.

Posted in Apartheid, Iraq, Peeves, Politics | 3 Comments »

Dangerous Optimism

Monday, January 1st, 2007

I never got around to commenting on responses to the 2006 Edge Annual Question — “What Is Your Dangerous Idea?” — as most were uninteresting, not dangerous, or simply lame.

It must’ve been the question, as this year’s responses — to “What Are You Optimistic About? Why?” — make for good reading. I’ll excerpt a few that resonate with themes I go on about.

Steven Pinker on The Decline of Violence:

Even the mass murders of the twentieth century in Europe, China, and the Soviet Union probably killed a smaller proportion of the population than a typical hunter-gatherer feud or biblical conquest. The world’s population has exploded, and wars and killings are scrutinized and documented, so we are more aware of violence, even when it may be statistically less extensive.
…
My optimism lies in the hope that the decline of force over the centuries is a real phenomenon, that is the product of systematic forces that will continue to operate, and that we can identify those forces and perhaps concentrate and bottle them.

James O’Donnell says Scientific Discoveries Are Surprisingly Durable:

But the study of the past and its follies and failures reveals one surprising ground for optimism. In the long run, the idiots are overthrown or at least they die. On the other hand, creativity and achievement are unique, exciting, liberating—and abiding. The discoveries of scientists, the inventions of engineers, the advances in the civility of human behavior are surprisingly durable.

Clay Shirky on Evidence:

We will see a gradual spread of things like evidence-based politics and law — what is the evidence that this expenditure, or that proposed bill, will have the predicted result? The expectation that evidence can answer questions about the structure of society will discomfit every form of government that relies on sacrosanct beliefs. Theocracy and communism are different in many ways, but they share the same central bug — they are based on some set of assertions that must remain beyond question.

Jamshed Bharucha on The Globalization of Higher Education:

We are all better off when talent is realized to its fullest—even if it crosses borders.

I didn’t count, but I think the subject mentioned most often was climate change, with solar power as the thing most were optimistic about. My favorite take on climate change was Gregory Benford on Save The Arctic:

So: despair? Not at all. Certainly we should accept the possibility that anthropogenic carbon emissions could trigger a climactic tripping point, such as interruption of the gulf stream in the Atlantic. But rather than urging only an all out effort to shrink the human atmospheric-carbon footprint, my collaborators and I propose relatively low tech and low expense experiments at changing the climate on purpose instead of by mistake.

If we understand climate well enough to predict that global warming will be a problem, then we understand it well enough to address the problem by direct means.

There are also several good entries on health, life extension, and also networks-will-change-publishing — but my, isn’t the last relatively boring?

One last favorite, on human enhancement, Andy Clark on The End Of The ‘Natural’:

Second, the biological brain is itself populated by a vast number of hidden ‘zombie processes’ that underpin the skills and capacities upon which successful behavior depends. There are, for example, a plethora of such unconscious processes involved in activities from grasping an object all the way to the flashes of insight that characterize much daily skilful problem-solving. Technology and drug based enhancements add, to that standard mix, still more processes whose basic operating principles are not available for conscious inspection and control. The patient using a brain-computer interface to control a wheelchair will not typically know just how it all works, or be able to reconfigure the interface or software at will. But in this respect too, the new equipment is simply on a par with much of the old.
…
In sum, I am optimistic that we will soon see the end of those over-used, and mostly ad hoc, appeals to the ‘natural’. May we all have a thoroughly unnatural New Year.

A highly agreeable toast.

…

Many of the responses contain very rough predictions, reminding me of prediction registries, an idea Robin Hanson has said would obtain 80% of the benefits of prediction markets (I doubt the number is that high) and also promoted by David Brin. I think prediction markets and registries are almost entirely complementary.

I like Brin’s point that “One advantage of registries is that they can be involuntary.” A pundit can only avoid inclusion by effectively not making predictions (which may include being wishy-washy and imprecise). I conjecture that DiscourseDB (I mentioned previously) is a model of what a prediction registry would look like — just imagine cataloging “will” rather than “should” opinions, and add evaluation.

…

I’m surprised that none of the responses (I could have missed one) took the (unintended?) bait offered by combining the 2006 and 2007 questions: Is optimisim dangerous?

That depends on the subject of optimism. I think people tend to be dangerously optimisic about the outcomes of authoritarian processes, including both obvious societywide authoritarianism and conscious decisions made by individuals, but dangerously pessimistic about decentralized processes, including listening to external advice at the individual level.

Via Boing Boing, Marginal Revolution, or EconLog, all of which appeared in one batch of feed updates.

Posted in Apartheid, Health, Peeves, Politics, Prediction Markets | 1 Comment »

The disgusting Mr. Linksvayer

Wednesday, November 1st, 2006

It’s been mildly amusing watching reactions in the blogosphere to yesterday’s NYT article on calorie restrction that used me as an example.

A “beauty editor” says:

He’s practically emaciated (6 feet tall and 135 lbs) but he looks like he’s 16!

Both wild overstatements, though this reminds me — is there an age guessing site on the web, a la Hot or Not?

A “fitness journalist” writes:

“Holy shit! That guy looks like he’s about to drop over dead!” You might guess that he has some kind of muscle-wasting disease. I know the angle of the photo isn’t flattering to a tall, long-limbed man, but perhaps the fact he’s sitting is appropriate. Honestly, he doesn’t look strong enough to stand.

And others like this. Yes, I can stand up, and so much more!

I did not realize how many bloggers copy and paste entire articles and call it a post. There are lots of them, not counting obvious spam blogs.

On the other side, CR blogger Mary Robinson has a reasonable critique:

I did not like Linksayer’s meals as an example. They are nice enough, but reinforce the stereotype that CR food is weird food. The text made it sound like he does not eat the same thing at all as the pictured food – he seems to eat a pretty normal regimen. So why show fermented soy for breakfast? My Fiber One and vegetable juice would have been less weird. Some yogurt and an orange would have been even better. I would like to have seen some fish in there for one meal. Maybe chicken at the other.

With a little more forethought I might have tried to prepare more mainstream meals. In my little bubble world, natto is normal. Regarding yogurt, fish, and chicken, I don’t eat them. I emphasized to the reporter many times that most people attempting CR are not vegan. If I had anything re-impressed on me from this article, it is that only a tiny bit of information can be squeezed into a news article.

The most satisfying blog commentary comes from Karen DeCoster:

Here is a photo of the disgusting Mr. Linksvayer:

He’s more frail than blown glass, has a very stooped posture, and his body parts are not in proportion. In fact, upon seeing him, you immediately notice that he has taken on the physical appearance of one who suffers from mental retardation – which is typical for malnourished adults.
…
2,100 calories? That average day does not even approach 2,100 calories – you can do the math. This man is eating between 500-900 calories per day, that is, on the days that he does not ~~starve himself~~ fast.

I can see where DeCoster might get those numbers from the pictures, but as I mentioned in an earlier post, they leave out dessert and multiple servings of lunch and dinner.

But more than enough about me. DeCoster’s main argument:

First, a restricted calorie diet eats up gobs of human muscle, reduces metabolism, kills energy, destroys hair and skin and nails, numbs brain function, and depletes necessary nutrition to dangerously low levels. Only these pro-starvation crackpots would possibly claim that people on these nutbag diets can still get adequate vitamins, minerals, and overall nutrition. They claim that breaking down your body is, in essence, really “building it up” for the long run. Then, of course, we come to the call for government intervention in the aging process:

There would be some truth to this if one were to sharply restrict calories on a standard amurrican diet, or worse. This is just malnutrition. There’s a reason “we” (people practicing CR) do CRAN (CR with Adequate Nutrition) and aim for CRON (with Optimal Nutrition). In fact CR people get far more vitamins and minerals than the average person. As for destruction of hair, nails, brain, etc., nothing could be further from the truth. Aging breaks down the body. CR doesn’t build anyting up, it slows down the destruction, not least by nearly eliminating risk for major killers and disabilities like cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and alzheimer’s.

My suggestion to DeCoster is to do a bit of research and to follow Fight Aging for awhile. She’ll even appreciate that blog’s general skepticism of the usefulness of government funding, for example:

While in general I’m all for raising public awareness of any plasticity of the human lifespan, we’ve all seen the objections to the Longevity Dividend; it is unambitious and slow, setting the bar so low that the target gains will probably happen anyway. It is the sort of lowest common denominator big tent approach that gets politicians to spend tax dollars on inefficient ways forward while ignoring the real possibilities of doing far better.

I am particularly amused that DeCoster wrote on LewRockwell.com. I used to have a love/hate relationship with this and its sister site, Mises.org. Trenchant and extreme anti-war and anti-government commentary, including against intellectual protectionism. But the occasional Christian apologia, pro-apartheid writers, and general nuts really put me off. Then there’s the despicable Hoppe. Fortunately I am able to no longer care. There are many substitutes on the topics those sites were good on, and I am mostly convinced by Bryan Caplan on Austrian economics that the school does not just appear to be an ignorable backwater, it is. Part of Caplan’s conclusion reminds me yet again of the perils of meta:

Neoclassical economists go too far by purging meta-economics almost entirely, but there is certainly a reason to be suspicious of scholars who talk about economics without ever doing it.

To bring this ramble to a close, doing CR is definitely not meta.

Update 20061102: Cool, Reason too, with attitude and not much information. Others, at least check out the wikipedia article on CR and learn how to use the NYT link generator before posting. You’ll look a bit less stupid.

Posted in Apartheid, Blogs, Economics, Health, Intellectual Protectionism, Peeves, Politics | 12 Comments »

Long tail of (electoral) politics

Saturday, September 23rd, 2006

Nick Gillespie interviews Chris Anderson:

Anderson laments that national politics has yet to become part of the Long Tail. “I wish the system would put forward politicians that I could vote for,” he says.

I wouldn’t expect it to. At a minimum you need something like approval voting or at the extreme delegable proxy voting. I’ve always found such reforms curious but distracting, as I don’t know what their impact on policy outcomes would be, and I suspect they’d be small. However given that voters are not outcome oriented I wonder if being able to make a closer to their ideal expression when oting would make voters happier, at least for time they are in the voting booth.

But the real long tail of politics isn’t about elections at all. Even if I can vote for my ideal candidate, or vote directly on every issue, at the end of the day I will still get policies approximating those of George W. Bush and John Kerry. That’s like being able to order any of millions of books at Amazon but always getting the current #1 best seller delivered regardless of your order.

The real long tail of politics is decentralization and arbitrage. Lots of people say “Bush isn’t my president.” Why can’t that be true? Declare yourself Venezuelan, Hugo Chavez is your president. It should be (almost) that easy. If that seems extreme and disruptive, at least executive power should be curtailed, for surely it is the antithesis of long tail politics. And being able to live and work in any jurisdiction should be a given.

Via Boing Boing.

Posted in Apartheid, Economics, Politics, Prediction Markets | No Comments »