We used to be a high trust society, but we are becoming a low trust society. The problem with government regulation filling in the gaps is that the government is incompetent at doing this.
We are basically pissing away the cultural heritage that made us, the US and Western Europe, what we are. At the present rate of deterioration, that culture will be gone by the dawn of the next century.
It is an important insight that the inputs to cultural evolution are an ongoing amalgamation and adding culturally different people can potentially have profound costs and/or benefits. It is entirely plausible that the current best check against the heritage of Puritan original sin guilt has not only been the borderer culture, but its fusion with Hispanic Americans. This linearity of culture is very evident if one comes from a place with the institutional founder effect of an Albion Seed group, but is no longer populated by these groups, ie the Midwest. Minnesota and Massachusetts have the same Yankee institutions at base, but Minnesota is roughly 80 percent German and Scandinavian by descent and there are some norms and signaling aspects of the Upper Midwest that have a through line from these places. It can be easy to elide these differences when looking at the legacy of Albion's Seed. Also of some note was a podcast Tyler Cowen did with Niall Ferguson where Ferguson offhandedly referred to Scotland of the 16th and 17th century as the equivalent of Afghanistan in terms of its Clan structure and that the implementation of the institutions on this populace made Scotland what it is today in terms of wealth and productivity. I have the book on my to buy list and look forward to your review.
He follows the method of making society/culture about gov't vs market; and in this case, trying to figure out whether 'family' is on one side or the other as opposed to a third independent axis.
The question of 'how many axes are there' is both important and really difficult. 'Dichotomy' and its friend 'dimensional reduction' are common and intuitive models/tools. Ultimately my objection is his problematic assumption about linear systems. Just like Fourier transforms can connect everything to a polynomial (at arbitrary precision, with enough terms...) - locally all systems can be summarized as a set of linear relationships. That doesn't actually teach you much about the underlying relationship and gets misleading so very quickly... and in the extreme case of reductionism, every question becomes a choice between two axes and some apparently linear relationship between them.
I say focus our (US) immigration policy on attracting high potential immigrants including/especially from India and China. Imagine the incentive this will create among ambitious youngsters worldwide! We get a double selection effect.
Here is that people like Thomas below, and most Democrats in Congress and a few Republicans, are offering on an immigration deal: full amnesty for the "Dreamers", higher legal immigration, and more immigration courts to adjudicate the illegal entries. The last part of that deal is a joke, and isn't intended to secure the border, or deport people who enter illegally. There are never any additional measures to stop the flow of illegal immigrants, nor any additional measures to deport them either. The US border is essentially an open one, and no one is doing anything today to stop it, nor offering any policy additions that would.
I am tired of being lied to by people who aren't even good at lying to others.
We used to be a high trust society, but we are becoming a low trust society. The problem with government regulation filling in the gaps is that the government is incompetent at doing this.
We are basically pissing away the cultural heritage that made us, the US and Western Europe, what we are. At the present rate of deterioration, that culture will be gone by the dawn of the next century.
It is an important insight that the inputs to cultural evolution are an ongoing amalgamation and adding culturally different people can potentially have profound costs and/or benefits. It is entirely plausible that the current best check against the heritage of Puritan original sin guilt has not only been the borderer culture, but its fusion with Hispanic Americans. This linearity of culture is very evident if one comes from a place with the institutional founder effect of an Albion Seed group, but is no longer populated by these groups, ie the Midwest. Minnesota and Massachusetts have the same Yankee institutions at base, but Minnesota is roughly 80 percent German and Scandinavian by descent and there are some norms and signaling aspects of the Upper Midwest that have a through line from these places. It can be easy to elide these differences when looking at the legacy of Albion's Seed. Also of some note was a podcast Tyler Cowen did with Niall Ferguson where Ferguson offhandedly referred to Scotland of the 16th and 17th century as the equivalent of Afghanistan in terms of its Clan structure and that the implementation of the institutions on this populace made Scotland what it is today in terms of wealth and productivity. I have the book on my to buy list and look forward to your review.
He follows the method of making society/culture about gov't vs market; and in this case, trying to figure out whether 'family' is on one side or the other as opposed to a third independent axis.
The question of 'how many axes are there' is both important and really difficult. 'Dichotomy' and its friend 'dimensional reduction' are common and intuitive models/tools. Ultimately my objection is his problematic assumption about linear systems. Just like Fourier transforms can connect everything to a polynomial (at arbitrary precision, with enough terms...) - locally all systems can be summarized as a set of linear relationships. That doesn't actually teach you much about the underlying relationship and gets misleading so very quickly... and in the extreme case of reductionism, every question becomes a choice between two axes and some apparently linear relationship between them.
I say focus our (US) immigration policy on attracting high potential immigrants including/especially from India and China. Imagine the incentive this will create among ambitious youngsters worldwide! We get a double selection effect.
Here is that people like Thomas below, and most Democrats in Congress and a few Republicans, are offering on an immigration deal: full amnesty for the "Dreamers", higher legal immigration, and more immigration courts to adjudicate the illegal entries. The last part of that deal is a joke, and isn't intended to secure the border, or deport people who enter illegally. There are never any additional measures to stop the flow of illegal immigrants, nor any additional measures to deport them either. The US border is essentially an open one, and no one is doing anything today to stop it, nor offering any policy additions that would.
I am tired of being lied to by people who aren't even good at lying to others.
Overall, Jones argument seems quite plausible. It's odd that is is perceived as being anti -immigration.