by Chris Bertram on June 10, 2016
At the moment, I’m reading my way through David Miller’s new *Strangers in our Midst* and also getting very exercised about the UK’s Brexit referendum (to the point where I’m waking at night and worrying about it). My siblings and I have all benefited from the EU’s free movement rights, my children both have non-British EU partners, we think of ourselves as Europeans. So for me, the threat of Brexit is a threat of lost identity, of something that has been there all my adult life just disappearing overnight. And so I’m feeling pretty resentful towards my fellow citizens who might vote to cut that tie and thereby endanger the security and family life of millions of EU citizens in the UK and UK citizens elsewhere in the EU.
One of Miller’s arguments is a familiar one about social trust, about how welfare states depend for their stability on such trust and that the increasing diversity that immigration brings tends to undermine support for redistributive programmes. This lack of trust gets expressed in anger about stories that immigrants are ahead in the queue for social housing, that they are a drain on health and education services, that they are getting “something for nothing”, and so forth. Needless to say, most of such stories are false. Nevertheless, there may be elements in the design of the UK’s welfare state and its relatively non-contributory character that fuel such anxieties.
Here’s the thing. Those voting for Brexit out of resentment against immigration are disproportionately the elderly poor whites who don’t pay much in but who benefit from those public services. A predictable consequence of them getting what they want is that the fiscal base for those services will be eroded and that either they will have to be cut or taxes will have to be increased. This is because those EU immigrants are, in fact, paying more in taxes than they are taking in services. (Actually, the UK is free-riding in a big way, as it never paid for the cost of educating and training those workers.)
When I take those political affiliation surveys, I always say I’m willing to pay higher taxes. But now the devil on my shoulder is saying “why should you pay higher taxes to replace the taxes that were paid by EU migrants? Those idiots have brought it on themselves, let them now suffer the consequences”. An ugly thought, but I’m guessing that if I’m having it then I’m not alone. The UK’s EU referendum has eroded social trust more than immigration per se ever did. It poses the question of what citizens owe to one another in pretty stark terms. If people could mitigate the need for higher taxes by accepting immigrants and they choose not to do so, why should their wealthier fellow citizens bear the cost of their choices?
by Chris Bertram on April 21, 2016
In an op-ed in the Financial Times, the economist Branko Milanovic [advocates that](https://next.ft.com/content/2e3c93fa-06d2-11e6-9b51-0fb5e65703ce) in order to fight global poverty, we should introduce explicit systems of differentiated citizenship in wealthy countries under which immigrants (and their children? and their children’s children?) would be entitled only to a reduced package of rights. He argues that we should
> redefine citizenship in such a way that migrants are not allowed to lay claim to the entire premium falling to citizens straight away, if at all. Restricting the citizenship rights of migrants in this way would assuage the concerns of the native population, while still ensuring the migrants are better off than they would be had they stayed in their own countries. As happens currently in the Gulf states, migrants could be allowed to work for a limited number of years, or to work only for a given employer, or else be obliged to return to their country of origin every four or five years. They could also be made to pay higher taxes since they are the largest net beneficiaries of migration. Despite such discriminatory treatment, the welfare of migrants and their families would increase, while native populations would not be made to share their entire premium with incomers.
*Gastarbeiter* with second- or third-class status, perhaps forever. Now, I’ll say one thing for this proposal, which is that it would formalize something that currently exists, since in all wealthy countries there exists a layer of poor people (including many migrants) who enjoy only semi-citizen status (as [Elizabeth Cohen has documented](http://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/politics-international-relations/political-theory/semi-citizenship-democratic-politics) ). And this layer, though many individuals pass through it and come out the other side, looks like a permanent feature of our societies. Up to now, however, few people have thought of this, and the consequent denial of rights to individuals and their vulnerability to domination and exploitation, as a good thing. Milanovic wants us explicitly to abandon the liberal and democratic principles of legitimacy that those who are subject to the laws of a society should (in time in the case of migrants) get to have the right to make those laws. In doing so, he goes far beyond similar proposals (for example [from Martin Ruhs](http://www.priceofrights.com/) that have been explicitly temporary in nature and have largely focused on labour-market rights. Milanovic’s lack of commitment to the norms of liberal democracy also comes across in the fact that he holds up illegitimate and tyrannical states, such as the Gulf kleptocracies, as models for his proposed policy. Part of what’s going on here is the economist’s perspective on policy, which just focuses on net improvements in well-being or utility, with income serving as a proxy, and which doesn’t, therefore, see human beings as possessed of basic rights which it is impermissible to violate. Rather, all and any rights can be sacrificed on the altar of income improvement, just in case someone is poor and desperate enough to make a deal (who are we, paternalistically, to stop them?). The road to hell is paved with Pareto improvements.
by Chris Bertram on April 19, 2016
I’ve been teaching brain-drain related issues this week. Some of the big questions there are empirical ones, and the facts are contested. But some of the normative issues are interesting, and some of them don’t just apply to poor countries. One of these issues is the apparent clash between our duties to compatriots (if we have any) and our rights of exit and expatriation. If I have a duty as a member of an institutional scheme to contribute to the well-being of the least advantaged members of my society, can I just divest myself of that duty (in one bound, as it were) by leaving the country, or, to go one step further, by renouncing my nationality? It was a puzzle that Henry Sigdwick was defeated by back in 1907 [or somewhat earlier in fact, as he died in 1900!]:
> `In 1868 it was affirmed, in an Act passed by the Congress of the United States, that ‘the right of expatriation is a natural and inherent right of all people.’ I do not know how far this would be taken to imply that a man has a moral right to leave his country whenever he finds it convenient—provided no claims except those of Patriotism retain him there. But if it was intended to imply this, I think the statement would not be accepted in Europe without important limitations: though I cannot
state any generally accepted principle from which such limitations could be clearly deduced.” Henry Sidgwick, *The Methods of Ethics*, 7th ed (1907)
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by John Holbo on April 15, 2016
by John Holbo on April 14, 2016
For where desire, celestial, pure desire,
Hath taken root, and grows, and doth not tire,
There God a commerce states, and sheds
His secret on their heads.
Henry Vaughan, “The Star”
“And how does your commerce go, you strange guardian of the past?”
G.K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill
My partisanship post has blossomed into an extensive discussion of original intent, interpretation and the commerce clause. Maybe we could use a little more scholarship to go with that. (Who knows?)
Randy Barnett and Jack Balkin are big in this area, and their major papers are freely available on the web. (Here’s Balkin’s major statement, outside of his book. Here’s an old one by Barnett that makes his general framework clear. And here’s a recent response by him to Balkin on commerce.) But let me start with “Rethinking the Commerce Clause”, by Nelson and Pushaw. It’s not free online, but I want just to quote the opening: [click to continue…]
by Henry Farrell on March 10, 2016
I’ve a piece in today’s Financial Times about the political fights racking the Bitcoin community.
Bitcoin, the decentralised, mainly digital currency that is neither issued nor guaranteed by central banks, has always seemed like a magic trick. … Radical libertarians have desperately wanted to believe in it … Politics disappears and a combination of technology and cryptographic proofs is conjured up in its place. Unfortunately, the magic is wearing off. Some of the technological innovations associated with bitcoin will stick around. The political project will not. … As more people have started to use bitcoin, the system has grown more unreliable.The problem is that coming up with a fix requires political agreement. Because there is no centralised authority within bitcoin, there is no one who can impose a mandate. … This free-for-all demonstrates the main problem of technological libertarianism. It does not escape politics but temporarily displaces and conceals it. … The apparent value of bitcoin depends on a suspension of disbelief. It is hard to see how the illusion can work when the magicians are punching each other out on stage.
NB one error which crept in (completely my fault) during the editing process: “protocols to make the blocks bigger so that more bitcoin are released at one time, speeding up transactions” should just read “protocols to make the blocks bigger, speeding up transactions.” NB also, more interestingly, this piece by Ben Thompson at Stratechery, which I wish I’d seen before writing my own, especially since it has a couple of lovely and apposite quotes. [click to continue…]
by Henry Farrell on January 28, 2016
Tyler Cowen has a piece today responding to Kevin Drum, and arguing that one can’t easily disassociate progressivism from eugenics:
Most of all Drum is saying that the earlier history is not very illustrative of anything for today. I view it this way. Go back to Millian liberalism of the mid-19th century. Had American or for that matter British Progressivism been infused with more of this philosophy, the eugenics debacle never would have happened. … The claim is not that current Progressives are evil or racist, but rather they still don’t have nearly enough Mill in their thought, and not nearly enough emphasis on individual liberty. Their continuing choice of label seems to indicate they are not much bothered by that, or maybe not even fully aware of that. … they don’t seem to relate to the broader philosophy of individual liberty as it surfaced in the philosophy of Mill and others. That’s a big, big drawback and the longer history of Progressivism and eugenics is perhaps the simplest and most vivid way to illuminate the point. This is one reason why the commitment of the current Left to free speech just isn’t very strong. … Do we really want to identify with a general philosophy which embraced eugenics for so many decades, when so many pro-liberty and also social democratic thinkers were in opposition? I think Mill himself would say no.
It’s hard for me to read a defense of “Millian liberalism in the mid-nineteenth century” and not think about the response of Millian liberalism and associated forms of thought in political economy to the Irish famine in which a million or so people died, and a million emigrated. [click to continue…]
by Chris Bertram on December 9, 2015
Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century tells us a great deal about the evolution of inequality in wealth and income over a long period and how that distribution is likely to evolve unless we intervene. What Piketty does not do is to tell us why inequality is bad or why people care about inequality, although we can glean some knowledge of his personal beliefs here and there. In what follows I draw on some aspects of Rousseauvian moral psychology to suggest that the reasons people care about inequality matter enormously and that because some people value inequality for its own sake, it will be harder (even harder than Piketty thinks) to steer our societies away from the whirlpool of inequality.
In the book, Piketty argues that, without significant political intervention, it is likely that wealth inequality will increase dramatically in the coming century and that a class of rentiers will come to dominate over those who earn their incomes from labour, just as previous classes of rentiers did before the twentieth century. His book tells of a U-shaped pattern in the evolution of inequality in the past hundred years, with high levels of inequality being reduced but then bouncing back. Striking levels of economic growth coupled with the destruction by war and revolution of the wealth that formed the background to previous inequality, led to societies that were an unprecedented combination of egalitarianism and meritocracy, where those who worked hard could do well for themselves and where the domination over the living by wealth inherited from ancestors had become greatly diminished.
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by John Holbo on October 19, 2015
The real challenge is getting employers to take a more assertive and, though we dare not say so aloud, paternalistic role when it comes to non-elite employees.
Williamson is advocating that we transmute the public safety net (some portion of it) into a federally-subsidized archipelago of regimes of private power, a web of patronage relations, bonding employees to employers. Company towns are proposed as a model, but this time around their creation would be back-stopped by the central government. [click to continue…]
by Chris Bertram on September 15, 2015
Over at the Monkey Cage, our very own Henry Farrell [sets out how Peter Mair’s brilliant *Ruling the Void*](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2015/09/14/this-book-explains-why-jeremy-corbyn-now-leads-labour-its-author-died-in-2011/) helps explain Corbyn’s recent triumph. A shout-out too for my friend [Martin O’Neill’s treatment of Corbyn’s victory at Al Jazeera](http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/9/the-unexpected-rise-of-jeremy-corbyn.html).
by Henry Farrell on July 31, 2015
The New York Times:
Brian Canlis, a co-owner of his family-named restaurant, is also a client. He said he was fond of Mr. Price, but was more discomfited by his actions. Mr. Canlis is already worried about how to deal with Seattle’s new minimum wage, which rose to $11 an hour in April and is scheduled to reach $15 an hour for small businesses within five years. The pay raise at Gravity, Mr. Canlis told Mr. Price, “makes it harder for the rest of us.” Mr. Price winced. “It pains me to hear Brian Canlis say that,” he said later. “The last thing I would ever want to do is make a client feel uncomfortable.” But any plan that has the potential, as Mr. Price has put it, to “set the world on fire,” is bound to make some people squirm. Leah Brajcich, who oversees sales at Gravity, fielded complaints from several customers who accused her boss of communist or socialist sympathies that would drive up their own employees’ wages and others who felt it was a public relations stunt.
The Wealth of Nations
We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. To violate this combination is everywhere a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals.
by Henry Farrell on July 24, 2015
There’s been a lot of back and forth about economic reasoning and the EU. This article by Kevin O’Rourke, takes a different perspective, one that is well worth reading, exploring the consequences of economists’ handwaving over utility for the technocratic politics that we face today. I’ve seen other efforts to make this kind of case, but they haven’t been nearly as clear or accessible.
by Susan Sell on June 12, 2015
On June 10th the Washington Post’s editorial page chastised Congress for “making free trade difficult”. Champions of Trade Promotion Authority and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) continue to label all skeptics as “opponents of free trade.” Many skeptics actually favor free trade, but the Trans-Pacific Partnership appears to be less about “free trade” and more about domestic regulatory harmonization. The post-WWII trade regime has been very successful in its aims of reducing tariffs and barriers to trade, expanding global market access, and integrating new players into the global trade regime. The spectacular economic rise of countries such as China, India, and Brazil is testament to the value of the trade route to lift millions out of poverty.
The House may vote on Trade Promotion (“Fast Track”) Authority (TPA) as early as Friday, June 12th. The Senate has already voted in favor of TPA and Obama has been working hard to get skeptical House Democrats on board to support it. If the House grants Obama TPA, it ties its hands to an “up or down” vote on TPP with no possibility for amendment. There is much at stake and citizens and representatives need to know who is drafting it, what it means for US democracy and sovereignty, and the effects it will have on public health. [click to continue…]
by Chris Bertram on April 10, 2015
I’ve been looking again at a [two-year-old discussion on immigration policy between Jonathan Portes and Martin Wolf](http://www.niesr.ac.uk/blog/economic-objectives-immigration-policy-dialogue-martin-wolf#.VSeNLhcu2Lt), and particularly on Wolf’s take on the reasons that ought to inform policy. As far as I can tell, Wolf’s position is a kind of national-weighted consequentialism. Immigration policy is to be viewed as an aspect of economic policy, and the relevant considerations are simply whether a policy is beneficial to existing members of society, with no weight to be given to the interests of immigrants. Portes raises the interesting objection that, once we factor time into our national felicific calculus, then the well-being of future members who have yet to be naturalized ought to count, but this is a mere wrinkle in the argument. Wolf’s view is that
> countries are like clubs. They can decide who members are. Once you are a member, you matter to the club. If you are not a member, you don’t.
I hope that Wolf doesn’t mean what he says. The disanology between clubs and countries is pretty stark, since countries are compulsory associations which most people don’t have a choice about, whereas clubs are not. Moreover, most people think that countries do not have an unlimited discretion to decide on who their members are, that Nazi laws to remove citizenship from Jews were unjust, that policies that are blatantly discriminatory on racial or gender lines have no moral standing, whatever the insider electors think. We also, I hope, think that laws that condemn generations of minority permanent residents to non-membership — until recently a feature of German citizenship law — are unjust. So at best Wolf must mean that countries have a discretion to admit as members outsiders with no other moral claim to admission or membership.
The interesting question, then, when we have got the discretionary membership issue out of the way is what could justify national-weighted consequentialism? Whilst there might be all kinds of deontological reasons for states to favour insiders over outsiders (the global justice literature is about little else), in my experience, economists don’t think in those terms. Rather, they think of themselves as being consequentialists all the way down, and of rights, powers, permissions etc as being ultimately justified by outcomes. If I’m right that this is the picture, then the claim would have to be that a global system of nationally-weighted consequentialisms, perhaps by assigning the promotion of individual interests to particular states, gives rise to the best consequences overall. That’s an empirical claim, but one that is very very unlikely to be true since it locks so many people away from opportunities they would otherwise have to be productive and makes the world a poorer place as a result. So I’m still puzzled. What do *economists* think justifies national-weighted consequentialism?
by John Holbo on February 19, 2015
I was rereading David Graeber’s Debt over the weekend. The intervening two years, since our book event, have not caused it to be the case that Graeber doesn’t owe Henry an apology, after all. But the life of the mind goes on. We do not freeze intellectual accounts due to outstanding personal debts. That is to say, the free market of ideas is baseline communist, in Graeber’s sense. If I have a bright idea, I do not expect to be paid back, by those who receive it, in the form of two half-insights – or 100 comments, each containing but a grote’s worth of thought; none of that. (I expect intellectual credit, of course.)
My bright idea for the day is that I have no idea what the difference is between reciprocity and baseline communism. [click to continue…]