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Right now, among all industrialized economies, there is a crisis happening as deindustrialization is taking place. This has fundamentally altered the assumption

Right now, among all industrialized economies, there is a crisis happening as deindustrialization is taking place. This has fundamentally altered the assumptions of steady and stable middle class economic growth that was an anomaly mostly between the 1940s-1970s. As a result, people are mad "at the system", what what we're seeing is political movements redirecting public anger at whatever target they wish. In the US, anger is being redirected at Mexicans, in the UK, apparently, it's Immigrants and Brussels. But realistically, how is tinkering with trade or immigration policy going to fix the underlying issues that say, a retired Mill worker cares about? He's being told that regaining sovereignty, or stemming the immigrant flow will "make Britain great again", but there's no logical connection between A and B. What's happening is, we seem to be coming apart at the seams. We are facing an economic transition period perhaps more important than the transition from agriculture to industrial economics, and it may leave vast numbers of people with no recourse, especially as more and more automation happens in the future. There are policy changes we could make, like figuring out ways to tax automation productivity and supply a basic income for those displaced. We can argue over specific remedies. But building a "wall", either a real one (Trump), or a virtual one (an isolationist Island), is not going to restore the former economic compact that the 65-and-over crowd grew up with. I really see whats happening as quite exploitative of people's anger and fears. Our politicians are preying on our worst tribalist instincts peddling non-solutions in order to punish people and institutions who are not at fault.

guard-of-terra 10y ago
Why can't a person be opposed to mass immigration even if it won't bring economic benefits? I'm not in UK frankly, but I'm definitely ready to sacrifice part of my income if that would curb mass immigration. Unfortunately, nobody ever proposed so.
- thebokehwokeh2 10y ago
  Ok. I'll bite on this one. Why are you opposed to mass immigration?
  - guard-of-terra 10y ago
    First of all, nobody asked me. I feel excluded from decisions on this policy and you can see how this amplifies my hostility to it. Because even if we have a debate on mass immigration and I lose every argument, I'm still entitled to have my vote weighted. Is it my country or whose it is? By default I don't owe people of other countries anything. It's our common right to let them in; but it's also our common right to kindly ask them to stay outside. That's the basic outline, and I'll try and explain my unique reservations in another comment. UPD to the sibling comment: It's not that I have any obligations to not be a racist. Maybe I am. Maybe I am not. Maybe I'm racist on even days and not racist on odd. I my country I have rights to be whatever pleases me. On other hand, if you want me to not be a racist, or at least not act as racist, you have to tell me what's in it for me.
  - lkrubner 10y ago
    I admire your willingness to be open minded and ask the question, but I've asked the question in the past, and I've never gotten a straight answer. Instead I get some pat pre-package talking points, and if I dig deeper I get a confusion of ideas. And that's because the people opposed to immigration tend to be motivated by racism, but they don't want to say that, so they every other imaginable thing. It's simply impossible to have an honest conversation with someone, if they aren't willing to be honest about why they favor a particular policy.
    - moultano 10y ago
      Isn't self-interest enough of an explanation? Mass-immigration is unlikely to be a short term benefit to the host country, particularly to low skill workers in that country. Why should they oppose their own self interest? (I'm personally a very pro-immigration American, so I'm talking about this to understand the debate not to advance any particular objective.)
      - thebokehwokeh2 10y ago
        Self-interest is a valid explanation. And the question you pose is a very valid statement. I am sure that immigration poses problems when it is at the scale of modern society. Not everyone shares the same values and beliefs but the optimist in me is the of the thinking that humanity is no longer the tribal, "us vs them", neanderthal who only sticks to persons who visually look like them. The United States of America was built on this idea and it thrives today. What I've noticed is that this issue of different-ness, seems only to surface when money or resources are scarce. The global rich are getting richer and richer, but counter-intuitively, this resource hoarding is not visible to the masses, who see a huge influx of new "different" people. These people will "potentially" take their jobs and their benefits, and then they "potentially" will bomb their buildings and rape their daughters and wives, because they are the boogeyman. What they don't see is that they are competing with those people not because those people are different, but because the people on top have figured out how to take everything and not share.
- rdtsc 10y ago
  It is interesting that you got downvoted without a reason. You asked a question and it didn't seem obscene or mean. It just didn't toe the line here, and well "down with you!" I saw someone below basically saying everyone who opposes immigration is a racist deep down. It seems people are pretty angry at the moment, so they jump straight to the "r" word. Can understand that. Anyway, I see the point. Yeah I am immigrant as well to US. It was a very hard process and very painful, more than it needs to be. But I understand that national identity, culture, borders, are there now and will stay there. Opposing immigration is something countries can decide and should be able to decide one, so yes, I can see immigration specifically being a reason many would vote based on (well, I don't just see, they clearly did vote already).
- AnonymousPlanet 10y ago
  You can be opposed to whatever you like. Voicing your sentiment will, however, shine a light upon your understanding of the world. Maybe you could ask "Why do people think that I'm a bad person if I'm against mass immigration?" Assuming this comes closer to your request, I will try to answer that. But I will have to digress a bit, so please bear with me. I have the feeling that how you see the world is very much characterised by whether you are (what I call) an inclusionist or an exclusionist. Let me explain what I mean by that. Since we're on HN, I will use an analogy that might be up your alley. In CS, there is something called local search [1] for optimisation problems. The basic idea is: let's say, we have a number of states and we want to find the best one. And let's say, we have a method of determining how "good" a state is. A simple approach would be to start at some state, look around at the neighbour states and pick the better one. Then we move to that state and look around again. And so on, until we're at a state that is surrounded by only less or equally "good" states. The problem with this method is that we might end up in a local maximum or on a plateau, but we're stuck there forever. To get past that, we can choose a random state now and then. This is what simulated annealing [2] does or the mutation in genetic algorithms [3]. Even though at times we might be distracted from the best state right in front of us by following serendipity, this strategy is overall superior to the myopic, greedy strategy. This is an interesting insight: by including something into our consideration that is most likely worse than what we already have, we achieve an overall better strategy. This is not very intuitive. Let's keep that in mind. This concept can be applied to (we're leaving the realm of science here, but being scientific wasn't the point in the first place) our world view in general. Let's call it the inclusionist view, while the opposite would be the exclusionist view. The exclusionist would prefer everyone to stick to the generally accepted way of life, while the inclusionist sees the need to allow deviation from the norm. Since the insight from above is not very intuitive, the inclusionist might think that whoever is for making an end to deviation and all for following the one true normative way must be a myopic exclusionist who is too single minded to grasp the bigger picture. If you're in the inclusionist camp, you will have had a lot of frustrating conversations with exclusionists who will insist that going with the most likely less "good" option is stupid and you're a beady eyed, gullible philanthropist. While you might come to the conclusion that the exclusionist is a myopic, uneducated, neanderthal. If you have witnessed many political discussions, a certain pattern emerges, and you get the impression that the racists, nazis, fascists, philistines are all the outcome of exclusionism. Now, let's go back to the original topic. Immigration is one of those topics where the views of inclusionists and exclusionists play a role. Everything is kind of fine as long as the numbers are small and the places of origin for immigrants are not too outlandish. But when someone calls for caps or selective admittance or anything else to quickly deal with "mass immigration", the inclusionist smells an exclusionist. Someone who did not grasp, the inclusionist assumes, the greater ramifications of applying broad selections, etc. The inclusionist will also be wary of not allowing the exclusionist to make too much ground, because he suspects the same shortsightedness that goes with racism. So, this is basically why you get a negative response if you use certain words or raise topics in a certain way. I have no idea, in which camp you are or if either camp actually exists, but maybe this might provide a glimpse into the slightly elitist mindset of oh so sophisticated people like me. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_search_(optimization) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_search_(optimization) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_algorithm
rwhitman 10y ago
I think this is a portion of what's going on. I'll prefix by saying I'm no expert in history or political science but I believe through the larger lens of history, the big picture is that the West is undergoing an acceleration of empire collapse in several places. Overall, the lessons of history teach that geographically large, wealthy, socially advanced empires don't actually survive all that long on average. They are complex systems with lots of moving parts, and various unexpected stressors can break essential components in unexpected ways. Major changes to the labor force, migration and productivity are very frequently the type of stressor that breaks empire systems. The EU is a form of empire, that had many flaws from it's inception. The British Empire we believed had already fallen and was on the mend after WWII, had maybe found it's place in the EU, but the reality is looking like it still had further left to go to hit rock bottom. (If we look at the map of the vote it resembles Britain circa 1700, before the rise of British colonialism.) Likewise, in the USA the American empire has hit the peak of it's capacity for expansion and economic dominance and is starting to get a taste of what the cracks in empire look like. This truly massive scale democratic republic is a real achievement but it's unclear what happens in a system like this at this scale. We may have simply exhausted the limits of a republic to project power, expand wealth and still maintain political harmony at home. The population's awakening to these changes, coupled with feeling the stress of labor shifts, is manifesting in political upheaval. Anyhow I'm no expert in history or government but I don't believe it's out of the question to assume this is what it feels like to be embarking into the darker bits of history. Personally, I'm accepting that Asia will become the dominant economic driver for the remainder of my life and plan on embracing that from here out
- white-flame 10y ago
  There's also the fact that a larger empire can be more easily corrupted, because nobody can pay attention to all the moving parts, and corruption once established is harder to flush out because of the size of the running systems at stake. The individual is far less connected to the government, the larger and more diverse it gets.
rdtsc 10y ago
> As a result, people are mad "at the system", what what we're seeing is political movements redirecting public anger at whatever target they wish. In the US, anger is being redirected at Mexicans, in the UK, apparently, it's Immigrants and Brussels. Agreed. This is a very strange time. I think the system went not how people hoped or thought about it. We thought we'd be living in a techno-utopia, with robots giving us massages and driving us to the beach. Instead we got a large wealth concentration at top and people at the bottom wondering what happened to their pensions. > He's being told that regaining sovereignty, or stemming the immigrant flow will "make Britain great again", but there's no logical connection between A and B Ok but when he is being told, who tells him and does the one telling him have a plan? That is do the sneaky politician have an ulterior motive, like they need Joe the Used-to-be-factory-worker to vote this way because they hope to $x ? (I don't know what goes there where $x is).

guard-of-terra 10y ago

Why can't a person be opposed to mass immigration even if it won't bring economic benefits? I'm not in UK frankly, but I'm definitely ready to sacrifice part of my income if that would curb mass immigration. Unfortunately, nobody ever proposed so.

thebokehwokeh2 10y ago
Ok. I'll bite on this one. Why are you opposed to mass immigration?
- guard-of-terra 10y ago
  First of all, nobody asked me. I feel excluded from decisions on this policy and you can see how this amplifies my hostility to it. Because even if we have a debate on mass immigration and I lose every argument, I'm still entitled to have my vote weighted. Is it my country or whose it is? By default I don't owe people of other countries anything. It's our common right to let them in; but it's also our common right to kindly ask them to stay outside. That's the basic outline, and I'll try and explain my unique reservations in another comment. UPD to the sibling comment: It's not that I have any obligations to not be a racist. Maybe I am. Maybe I am not. Maybe I'm racist on even days and not racist on odd. I my country I have rights to be whatever pleases me. On other hand, if you want me to not be a racist, or at least not act as racist, you have to tell me what's in it for me.
- lkrubner 10y ago
  I admire your willingness to be open minded and ask the question, but I've asked the question in the past, and I've never gotten a straight answer. Instead I get some pat pre-package talking points, and if I dig deeper I get a confusion of ideas. And that's because the people opposed to immigration tend to be motivated by racism, but they don't want to say that, so they every other imaginable thing. It's simply impossible to have an honest conversation with someone, if they aren't willing to be honest about why they favor a particular policy.
  - moultano 10y ago
    Isn't self-interest enough of an explanation? Mass-immigration is unlikely to be a short term benefit to the host country, particularly to low skill workers in that country. Why should they oppose their own self interest? (I'm personally a very pro-immigration American, so I'm talking about this to understand the debate not to advance any particular objective.)
    - thebokehwokeh2 10y ago
      Self-interest is a valid explanation. And the question you pose is a very valid statement. I am sure that immigration poses problems when it is at the scale of modern society. Not everyone shares the same values and beliefs but the optimist in me is the of the thinking that humanity is no longer the tribal, "us vs them", neanderthal who only sticks to persons who visually look like them. The United States of America was built on this idea and it thrives today. What I've noticed is that this issue of different-ness, seems only to surface when money or resources are scarce. The global rich are getting richer and richer, but counter-intuitively, this resource hoarding is not visible to the masses, who see a huge influx of new "different" people. These people will "potentially" take their jobs and their benefits, and then they "potentially" will bomb their buildings and rape their daughters and wives, because they are the boogeyman. What they don't see is that they are competing with those people not because those people are different, but because the people on top have figured out how to take everything and not share.
rdtsc 10y ago
It is interesting that you got downvoted without a reason. You asked a question and it didn't seem obscene or mean. It just didn't toe the line here, and well "down with you!" I saw someone below basically saying everyone who opposes immigration is a racist deep down. It seems people are pretty angry at the moment, so they jump straight to the "r" word. Can understand that. Anyway, I see the point. Yeah I am immigrant as well to US. It was a very hard process and very painful, more than it needs to be. But I understand that national identity, culture, borders, are there now and will stay there. Opposing immigration is something countries can decide and should be able to decide one, so yes, I can see immigration specifically being a reason many would vote based on (well, I don't just see, they clearly did vote already).
AnonymousPlanet 10y ago
You can be opposed to whatever you like. Voicing your sentiment will, however, shine a light upon your understanding of the world. Maybe you could ask "Why do people think that I'm a bad person if I'm against mass immigration?" Assuming this comes closer to your request, I will try to answer that. But I will have to digress a bit, so please bear with me. I have the feeling that how you see the world is very much characterised by whether you are (what I call) an inclusionist or an exclusionist. Let me explain what I mean by that. Since we're on HN, I will use an analogy that might be up your alley. In CS, there is something called local search [1] for optimisation problems. The basic idea is: let's say, we have a number of states and we want to find the best one. And let's say, we have a method of determining how "good" a state is. A simple approach would be to start at some state, look around at the neighbour states and pick the better one. Then we move to that state and look around again. And so on, until we're at a state that is surrounded by only less or equally "good" states. The problem with this method is that we might end up in a local maximum or on a plateau, but we're stuck there forever. To get past that, we can choose a random state now and then. This is what simulated annealing [2] does or the mutation in genetic algorithms [3]. Even though at times we might be distracted from the best state right in front of us by following serendipity, this strategy is overall superior to the myopic, greedy strategy. This is an interesting insight: by including something into our consideration that is most likely worse than what we already have, we achieve an overall better strategy. This is not very intuitive. Let's keep that in mind. This concept can be applied to (we're leaving the realm of science here, but being scientific wasn't the point in the first place) our world view in general. Let's call it the inclusionist view, while the opposite would be the exclusionist view. The exclusionist would prefer everyone to stick to the generally accepted way of life, while the inclusionist sees the need to allow deviation from the norm. Since the insight from above is not very intuitive, the inclusionist might think that whoever is for making an end to deviation and all for following the one true normative way must be a myopic exclusionist who is too single minded to grasp the bigger picture. If you're in the inclusionist camp, you will have had a lot of frustrating conversations with exclusionists who will insist that going with the most likely less "good" option is stupid and you're a beady eyed, gullible philanthropist. While you might come to the conclusion that the exclusionist is a myopic, uneducated, neanderthal. If you have witnessed many political discussions, a certain pattern emerges, and you get the impression that the racists, nazis, fascists, philistines are all the outcome of exclusionism. Now, let's go back to the original topic. Immigration is one of those topics where the views of inclusionists and exclusionists play a role. Everything is kind of fine as long as the numbers are small and the places of origin for immigrants are not too outlandish. But when someone calls for caps or selective admittance or anything else to quickly deal with "mass immigration", the inclusionist smells an exclusionist. Someone who did not grasp, the inclusionist assumes, the greater ramifications of applying broad selections, etc. The inclusionist will also be wary of not allowing the exclusionist to make too much ground, because he suspects the same shortsightedness that goes with racism. So, this is basically why you get a negative response if you use certain words or raise topics in a certain way. I have no idea, in which camp you are or if either camp actually exists, but maybe this might provide a glimpse into the slightly elitist mindset of oh so sophisticated people like me. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_search_(optimization) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_search_(optimization) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_algorithm

rwhitman 10y ago

I think this is a portion of what's going on. I'll prefix by saying I'm no expert in history or political science but I believe through the larger lens of history, the big picture is that the West is undergoing an acceleration of empire collapse in several places. Overall, the lessons of history teach that geographically large, wealthy, socially advanced empires don't actually survive all that long on average. They are complex systems with lots of moving parts, and various unexpected stressors can break essential components in unexpected ways. Major changes to the labor force, migration and productivity are very frequently the type of stressor that breaks empire systems. The EU is a form of empire, that had many flaws from it's inception. The British Empire we believed had already fallen and was on the mend after WWII, had maybe found it's place in the EU, but the reality is looking like it still had further left to go to hit rock bottom. (If we look at the map of the vote it resembles Britain circa 1700, before the rise of British colonialism.) Likewise, in the USA the American empire has hit the peak of it's capacity for expansion and economic dominance and is starting to get a taste of what the cracks in empire look like. This truly massive scale democratic republic is a real achievement but it's unclear what happens in a system like this at this scale. We may have simply exhausted the limits of a republic to project power, expand wealth and still maintain political harmony at home. The population's awakening to these changes, coupled with feeling the stress of labor shifts, is manifesting in political upheaval. Anyhow I'm no expert in history or government but I don't believe it's out of the question to assume this is what it feels like to be embarking into the darker bits of history. Personally, I'm accepting that Asia will become the dominant economic driver for the remainder of my life and plan on embracing that from here out

white-flame 10y ago
There's also the fact that a larger empire can be more easily corrupted, because nobody can pay attention to all the moving parts, and corruption once established is harder to flush out because of the size of the running systems at stake. The individual is far less connected to the government, the larger and more diverse it gets.

rdtsc 10y ago

> As a result, people are mad "at the system", what what we're seeing is political movements redirecting public anger at whatever target they wish. In the US, anger is being redirected at Mexicans, in the UK, apparently, it's Immigrants and Brussels. Agreed. This is a very strange time. I think the system went not how people hoped or thought about it. We thought we'd be living in a techno-utopia, with robots giving us massages and driving us to the beach. Instead we got a large wealth concentration at top and people at the bottom wondering what happened to their pensions. > He's being told that regaining sovereignty, or stemming the immigrant flow will "make Britain great again", but there's no logical connection between A and B Ok but when he is being told, who tells him and does the one telling him have a plan? That is do the sneaky politician have an ulterior motive, like they need Joe the Used-to-be-factory-worker to vote this way because they hope to $x ? (I don't know what goes there where $x is).