Immigration, Spanish revolution and the petty outrage of the well-to-do

A loose movement of protesters asking for political reform in Spain suddenly and unexpectedly gave rise to spectacular street demonstrations around May 15, 2011. The movement was named 15-M and its participants and sympathizers are called "the outraged" (los indignados). They, like perhaps most Spaniards, blame politicians, bankers and capitalism for the economic crisis Spain is suffering since 2008. They think that politicians should provide for jobs, health care, education and housing, and are outraged about 20% unemployment, long waiting lists in the state health care system, low-quality of education and hundreds of thousands of empty homes - many of them owned by state banks - that are too expensive for anyone to buy. They complain that politicians don't fix these problems.

Politicians cannot and will not fix these problems. Instead, following the instructions of voters, they implement policies that create social problems. Most of the specific proposals los indignados are making consist of the same kind of populist policies that created or exacerbated the problems they complain about. Los indignados will remain indignados.

Not only is all this outrage misdirected regarding blame - with politicians and bankers as favorite scapegoats for the failures of the whole of society. It is also misdirected regarding the severity of problems. Unemployment or inefficient health care in a wealthy country are petty troubles compared to those of the average person. Research indicates that eliminating political barriers to immigration would double world GDP. But only 1% of Spaniards think that Spanish laws against immigration, which are among the toughest and most inhumane in the world, are too tough. As Bryan Caplan puts it:

[I]f outrage were proportional to harm, virtually every protest on earth would be in favor of open borders.

Atheist and libertarian

"I don't know" is not an apology. There's no shame. It's a simple statement of fact. When Richard Feynman didn't know, he often worked harder than anyone else to find out, but while he didn't know, he said, "I don't know." [...] 

What makes me libertarian is what makes me an atheist -- I don't know. If I don't know, I don't believe.

This is Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller in CNN.com.

Food security and stakeholder empowerment

As the human population approaches 10 billion in a planet with finite resources, food security will remain a major social-ecological challenge. Decision-making regarding food security requires a dialog between different actors, stakeholders and communities at multiple spatial scales, and must be underpinned by the empowerment of local and indigenous peoples as well as displaced individuals and environmental refugees, the strengthening of participatory governance, and the development of cross-cultural ecologies and trans-disciplinary capacity building. Narratives, data, values and assessments must all be incorporated into a collaborative process of scenario-building. In the end the process must provide specific recommendations for policy-makers.

Following this blueprint, relevant stakeholders yesterday created a World-Wide lnterethnic Platform on Food Security and Ecosystem Cultural Services with the goal of establishing a short-term agenda for food security and birthday celebration. This mandate was completed after a lively deliberative process in which an indigenous individual contributed local expertise and traditional knowledge and a young environmental refugee built creative scenarios and provided nonlinear criticism. The final policy recommendation was to go to the Italian buffet, leaving the grill restaurant or Burger King for another occasion. After dinner we both felt very empowered.

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I thank Mike Hulme and collaborators for stylistic inspiration (Science-policy interface: beyond assessments, also available here).

Human population: collectivism is alive and well

I have finished browsing the Science special issue on human population. I have even read whole some of its twenty articles. It's been an appalling experience.

First, it seems that many women in poor countries have more children than they prefer. Some argue that it is due to a lack of access to, or ignorance about, contraception. There are obvious ways to avoid unwanted pregnancies that are universally available, so I suspect the real reason for truly unwanted pregnancies is coercion. Coercion comes in several ways. In its subtler forms, it may come as a seemingly friendly encouragement by relatives and neighbors. At its most brutal, it may come as aggression by men wanting to have more children or simply sex - a behavior that is often socially condoned. Women are not means to the wants of men, relatives or neighbors. The collectivization of women is appalling. In some cases, outsiders making contraception more socially appealing, or at least less socially visible, help these women's case. As long as these outsiders do not use coercion themselves, they are doing good.

Second, every article in this issue agrees that reproduction is a matter of public policy. Starting from the dubious assumptions that both population growth in poor countries and population decrease in richer countries are bad things, they advocate without further justification, or citing pamphlets by the United Nations, that governments must intervene to change course. Here we have again the collectivization of potential parents and children. People are considered means to a higher end - a supposedly optimal population trajectory for the country, humanity, "the planet" or "sustainability." 

Third, articles are unanimous that government policies must consist of discouraging or encouraging reproduction, depending on the case. None of them considers the possibility of abandoning repressive policies. Namely, none of them denounces collectively-set restrictions on migration. None of them denounces xenophobia and racism, as in Spain's policy of forbidding nationals of certain countries from entering Spain unless they are descendants of Spaniards (i.e., white). All those authors that happily endorse population control and natalist policies without discussing migration restrictions are looking the other way on xenophobia.

I don't like community oppression of women, migration restrictions, and population control and natalist policies. I don't like Science endorsing, either directly or by default, the latter three policies. I can feel the stink of xenophobia, racism and eugenics. But I can end this post with an optimistic outlook. Crass collectivism is alive and well, but so are individual people looking for independence and freedom. Most women now live in cities, and the proportion is growing faster than ever. Moving from a traditional community to a city is the surest way of both escaping the social pressure to reproduce and accessing modern contraceptive methods. And cities are the best places to raise children.

Population shrinkage, sustainability and the mother of all parties

This is from the Science news item The upside of downsizing:

“Humanity is already consuming resources at an unsustainable rate; population shrinkage is the cheapest and surest contribution to sustainability that we know of,” says Simon Ross, chief executive of Population Matters, a London-based group pushing to restrain population growth to reduce stresses on the environment.

Indeed. If we decided to have no more children, those alive could then set to enjoy consumption without worries about sustainability.

Individual people are not countries, and viceversa

Yes, surprise. Humanity is not just a collection of countries. There are individual people too. And a person is not a miniature country. It's something completely different. You should become aware of this fact when you meet a person, you meet a country and compare one to the other. You can shake hands with a person but not with a country.

Dennis Normile, Japan correspondent for Science, seems surprised about the existence of individual people, as opposed to countries, and is not yet fully aware of the conceptual consequences of this little-known fact. He writes in The upside of downsizing:

He [Akihiko Matsutani, a demographer] believes that per capita income [in Japan] could rise even as GDP shrinks, providing a more comfortable lifestyle for individuals despite diminished national economic clout.

He writes as if the fact that someone's income can rise independently of his country's GDP were a worth-mentioning, perhaps even controversial, hypothesis. The income of a person depends on her productivity. The GDP of a country depends on productivity and population. First lesson: countries have population, individual people don't.

He seems surprised by, or at least interested in, the fact that individuals can prosper "despite diminished national economic clout." He was probably surprised when, as China overtook Japan as the second largest economy, Toyota engineers remained well-paid Toyota engineers and did not suddenly become Third World peasants, as most Chinese still are.

Japan is not alone. Populations are shrinking in much of Eastern Europe and Germany [...]

Good for Japan. Loneliness is a bad thing. Bad for the Japanese. Fewer people means more loneliness. Second lesson: countries and people sometimes have opposite interests. As a person, not a country, I side with the latter.

Japan is leading this trend because it deliberately cut short its post–World War II baby boom.

Normile has yet to learn that countries don't do things deliberately. Individual people do. In the case of having children, this includes making compromises, reaching consensus and having fun with a person of the other sex. Countries can have baby country booms too - witness the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia - but they do so asexually.

Finally, leaving aside the question of whether individual people are worth a damn, Normile and/or Matsutani offer the following thought, which has the flavor of, to paraphrase Megan Evans, a "naive circular flow model of the economy" or of "perpetual motion machines":

He [Matsutani] thinks economic forces could push Japanese corporations to focus on making higher-value-added products less subject to competition from manufacturers in low wage countries. To attract employees from a shrinking labor pool, such companies will have to pay more and be more flexible, by accommodating working mothers, for example. Higher wages would also prop up domestic consumption.

If, because of a shrinking labor pool, companies have to pay more and be more flexible, they will be outcompeted by companies that do not suffer from such labor shortages. These would include, for example, Japanese companies moving to countries that allow immigration. And if there were labor shortages everywhere, higher wages would not prop up consumption because they would also drive prices up (or, to be more rigorous, companies could not pay higher wages because they could not charge higher prices).

Normile's article also offers a (final) solution to the problem of sustainability. But I will leave that for another day.

There is no fundamental conflict between economic growth and biodiversity

Here I argue that there is no fundamental conflict between economic growth and biodiversity (ungated here).