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April 15 - May 15, 2022
The better agriculture has become, the less we’re willing to pay for it.
an increasing number of people can earn money without contributing anything of tangible value to society.
Call it the paradox of progress: Here in the Land of Plenty, the richer and the smarter we get, the more expendable we become.
In other words, the fact that something is difficult does not automatically make it valuable.
addiction to consumption is enabled mostly by robots and Third World wage slaves.
“Personally, I’d prefer to do something that’s genuinely useful,” responded one stockbroker, “but I couldn’t handle the pay cut.”
The modern marketplace is equally uninterested in usefulness, quality, and innovation. All that really matters is profit.
American stocks were still held for an average of five years; forty years later, it’s a mere five days.
In fact, if current trends hold, there is really just one other alternative: structural unemployment and growing inequality.
wage growth has been stagnating in most occupations for years even as productivity continues to grow.
We may be living in the age of individualism, but our societies have never been more dependent on one another.
In the U.S., the gap between rich and poor is already wider than it was in ancient Rome–an economy founded on slave labor.
Scholars at Oxford University estimate that no less than 47% of all American jobs and 54% of all those in Europe are at a high risk of being usurped by machines.
“On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.”
All the low-hanging fruit has already been plucked.
the inability to imagine a world in which things are different is evidence only of a poor imagination, not of the impossibility of change.
it is not technology itself that determines the course of history. In the end, it is we humans who decide how we want to shape our destiny.
Measures against tax havens, for example, could potentially do far more good than well-meaning aid programs ever could.
John Kenneth Galbraith once quipped that the only purpose of economic forecasts is to give astrology a better image),
Effectively, open borders would make the whole world twice as rich.
An economist at the University of Wisconsin has calculated that open borders would boost the income of an average Angolan by about $10,000 a year, and of a Nigerian by $22,000 annually.19
“Passports are only good for annoying honest folks,” the detective in Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in 80 Days (1874) remarks to the British consul in Suez.
On the eve of World War I, borders existed mostly as lines on paper. Passports were rare and the countries that did issue them (like Russia and the Ottoman Empire) were seen as uncivilized.
the world is wide open for everything but people.
Opening borders to labor would boost wealth by much more–one thousand times more.
Billions of people are forced to sell their labor at a fraction of the price that they would get for it in the Land of Plenty, all because of borders.
Borders are the single biggest cause of discrimination in all of world history.
And just eight people–the richest people on Earth–own the same as the poorest half of the whole world.
That’s right, a mere eight people are richer than 3.5 billion put together.
T]he U.S. border effect on the wages of equal intrinsic productivity workers is greater than any form of wage discrimination (gender, race, or ethnicity) that has ever been measured,”
In a world of insane inequality, migration is the most powerful tool for fighting poverty.
Three-quarters of all border walls and fences were erected after the year 2000.
However disruptive, migration has time and again proven to be one of the most powerful drivers of progress.
Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says everyone has the right to leave their country, but guarantees no one the right to move to the Land of Plenty.
If all the developed countries would let in just 3% more immigrants, the world’s poor would have $305 billion more to spend, say scientists at the World Bank.
“Cognitive dissonance,” he termed it. When reality clashes with our deepest convictions, we’d rather recalibrate reality than amend our worldview. Not only that, we become even more rigid in our beliefs than before.1
We tend to dig in our heels when someone challenges our opinions about criminal punishment, premarital sex, or global warming. These are ideas to which people tend to get attached, and that makes it difficult to let them go. Doing so affects our sense of identity and position in social groups–in our churches or families or circles of friends.
Intelligent people are highly practiced in finding arguments, experts, and studies that underpin their preexisting beliefs,
Smart people, concludes the American journalist Ezra Klein, don’t use their intellect to obtain the correct answer; they use it to obtain what they want to be the answer.
Yesterday’s avant-garde is today’s common sense.
The question is not can new ideas defeat old ones; the question is how.
American psychologist Solomon Asch demonstrated that group pressure can even cause us to ignore what we can plainly see with our own eyes.
“Progress is the realisation of Utopias,” Oscar Wilde wrote
Ideas, however outrageous, have changed the world, and they will again. “Indeed,” wrote Keynes, “the world is ruled by little else.”
Everyone who reckons themselves progressive should be a beacon of not just energy but ideas, not only indignation but hope, and equal parts ethics and hard sell.
Remember: those who called for the abolition of slavery, for suffrage for women, and for same-sex marriage were also once branded lunatics. Until history proved them right.
