Tag: China

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The Immigration Opportunity

Competing with China

I recently read the Now It can be Told by General Leslie Grove. It is the story of the Manhattan Project, the US/UK project to build the atomic bomb during WWII. It was written by the man who was in overall charge of the project. The book is full of interesting details about the project and the attempts to understand where Japan and Germany were on the development of their own atomic capability. In the book Groves dismisses Japan as a contender, primarily because they didn’t have the population to support such a massive effort. With a population of only one quarter of the size of the USA they wouldn’t be able produce enough physicists and engineers to be able to create an atomic bomb. Which bring us to Immigration.

Right now the USA has about one quarter of the population of China. If in the long run we want to compete with China we need to grow our population and the best way to do that is through immigration. If we were to start allowing about one percent growth per year of our population through immigration it would only be a few decades before we had a competitive sized population. I call this the one percent solution and have written extensively about it on the Beyond Borders website. Of course this was many years ago.

There are millions of people who would really like to come and enjoy the freedom and opportunity of being Americans. We would in the long run gain the value of those peoples contributions and the moral high ground of welcoming the stranger. Of course there will be losers and we need to mitigate that as much as possible. But in the long run if we open the door a little bit to new people we will benefit and the world will benefit.

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Empires

“Empires have no interest in operating within an international system; they aspire to be the international system.”

Henry Kissinger

This applies to Russia, China and probably the USA.

Another Inukshuk from the Merced River in Yosemite.

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Paradox Two

China has 1.2 billion people. The USA has about 330 million. We have about one quarter the population of China. For many reasons that I think are obvious, but which I will explain below the fold, size matters for nations.

If we want to stay one of the leading nations of the world we need to grow a lot. Controlled, organized and rapid immigration is the only available means to accomplish this.

So Paradox Two is that we profess to want to complete with China. The only way to do that is to grow our population through immigration and yet we limit legal immigration to less than one third of one percent of our population each year. Millions of people from around the world would move here and help us complete with China and we won’t let them.

We are being stupid, short-sighted and paranoid.

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A Pandemic of Panic

A rainbow ends over the Papago Peaks

In December 2019 in China a new flu showed up in Wuhan. At first the government downplayed its dangers finally under pressure they admitted it was an epidemic and started shutting things down as fast as possible.
In Italy, the USA and the UK the story was the same. I’m seeing a pattern. Perhaps the people who govern knew that to attempt to mitigate the spread of the disease was a fools errand so they thought it was more important to try to stop the spread of panic and the subsequent economic collapse.
What the goverment didn’t account for, and they should have, was the combination of the public’s fear reflex, the Media’s need to sensationalize everything and Social Media’s ability to spread anything sensational . The simple example of how this happens is: If on an airplane flying through turbulence one person screams probably nothing happens. If ten people scream it can quickly become a screaming contagion.

I predicted three weeks ago on March 4 that “The Corona Virus is not going to be a terrible world-wide epidemic. The Corona Virus is not going to cause a world-wide depression. Keep Calm and Wash Your Hands.”

I’m going to double down on that prediction. The Dow won’t go below 14,500 and less than three million people worldwide will die from the Corona Virus. Roughly one in three thousand.

Always certain, often wrong.

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WWIT Episode 3, Trade

What Was I Thinking

I am an optimist. I think it is realistic to strive to eliminate extreme poverty in the world and over time provide all of humanity with the opportunity for a prosperous life. So when I look at proposed actions the metrics I apply are simple: “does this policy help or hurt poor working people?” and “does this policy increase prosperity in the world in a sustainable way.” President Trump’s trade policy doesn’t pass either of my tests. It is bad for poor people in the short run and is bad economic policy in the long run. Continue reading “WWIT Episode 3, Trade”

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Trade War Update

Who will win the trade war between the US and China. I explored data from the markets and it looks like Chinese markets are a lot more concerned than US markets.

The orange line is the S&P 500 and the blue line is the Shanghai Exchange Index. the period is a year. In the last few weeks the Shanghai index has dropped much more than the S&P. At the same time that the US President is imposing new tariffs. Apparently he has got their market scared. Which gives the US additional leverage in the negotiations. Continue reading “Trade War Update”