When looking up the plausibility of open borders, I was thinking “I hear how hard it is to get into the US all the time, surely statements like these area stretch” but even fairly neutral places like Pew Research Center project a near-doubling of immigrants in the next 50 years, increasing the percentage of immigrant population to heights never seen before
Seems like it could happen; who knows? I plan out being out of America before I’m thirty so I won’t be around to see it
Bullshit, skill based systems are even easier because they become gamed by employer. Compare Anglophone peers Canada (21%) and Australia (30%) who have a higher percentage of foreign born than the US(15%). Australia is the most skill based so has the most immigration and the immigration in Australia is directly tied to labor suppression. i.e. hairdressers, pharmacists, etc.
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These two pieces brought up in this short essay are very interesting, and they give us all something to think about.
It seems the key challenge for The Metropole in the Young World-immigration-fueled scenario will be maintaining (repairing) the culture that facilitated its rise in the first place. Central planning is quite adept at wrecking economies.
Van Buskirk brings up some of the challenges associated with this, including differences in human capital, cultural affinities, already-present population, and so on. It's an interesting essay.
The carbon footprint of the typical person in North America is over 10 times greater than that of the typical citizen of an African country. If Climate Change is the most important issue for the foreseeable future, this fact needs to be taken into account.
"Climate Change" is an important "issue"; i.e. it's a talking point, a political cudgel, a religion...
but "climate change" as an actual phenomena isn't real .. not on human time scales, certainly not because of human activities.
The importance of the "issue" of climate change is not the weather itself, but the authoritarianism and totalitarianism that gets imposed on all of us ....
A highly centralized dictatorship that wants to micromanage every aspect of your daily life, all of it to fix a nonexistent "problem".
Aug 24, 2022·edited Aug 24, 2022Liked by Niccolo Soldo
It is the core Hypocrisy of the environmental movement. Originally, reduce reuse and recycle was an admitted Band-Aid, a good thing, but only a partial solution, ultimately a glide slope, 70 years (?) to a sustainable human population (2b?) was central to the debate.
I'm not anti-capitalist or anything like this, but it seems self-evident that basing your economy and way of life on the idea of eternal expansion and growth is not only not sustainable, but insane.
It also breaks my heart to see people forgoing starting families to stay on the career hamster wheel. Nothing has made me happier than my children, I'm glad I was able to have them when I did.
Agree! I'd like to see a measure concerning small-cap manufacturing start-ups included as a *favorable* economic indicator. Nothing wrong with having a Dow Jones index, but when GE (the former General Electric) was booted for poor economic performance, it was replaced by .... Walgreen's?! A company almost as old?
Aug 23, 2022·edited Aug 23, 2022Liked by Niccolo Soldo
Yes, I do think companies will use WFH to offshore white collar jobs.We need to keep in mind that many of these jobs are total bullshit. Why pay $100,000+ to some Yale Economics grad to work as an ESG consultant when you can pay $10,000 to a University of Mumbai Economics grad and get the same bullshit work done?
What I find is fascinating is how little this is being discussed. I remember in the early days of the pandemic, some reddit post bringing up the same exact dangers of WFH and he was downvoted into oblivion. To connect to your earlier piece, is it because we don't like alarmists?
Aug 23, 2022·edited Aug 23, 2022Liked by Niccolo Soldo
Indeed, this is my fear but I generally tend to be more on the alarmist side of the spectrum.
Hot take, but the 20s and 30s will be to the Western white collar worker what 60s and 70s were to his blue collar grandfather. Silicon Valley will be his Detroit.
i feel like even whats left of blue collar work will be offshored with remotely controlled robots using VR+Haptics+Omnidirectional treadmill while the rest of the blue collar work is automated.
i dont see what kinds of jobs will even exist for non ultra high IQ people like me. if you are an AGI engineer or a hacker or something maybe you can continue to make a living, but if you aren't good at that kind of stuff, then I don't know how people will be able to eek out a living. maybe we will be data serfs, forced to do tasks to produce data for AI while gov gives us minimal bread and circus like in the Roman Empire.
Honestly man I don't know. My philosophy is to get the best possible white collar job and hold it for as long as possible. As I have said before, by nature, I am the alarmist type which doesn't bode well for my physical or mental health. So I have decided to keep the outsourcing problem in the back of my head but only worry about it when it happens. I don't if know if this philosophy is necessarily a smart one but at this point in time, I'll stick with it.
Since you mentioned "bullshit jobs," I wondered if you'd read David Graeber's treatise on this. Part of his takeaway is that a lot of corporate mid-level jobs are not totally rational or reducible to input<output. That much of the middle-management structure is more feudal, really, than capitalistic (in the sense that many salaries are calculated by how many "reports" a manager has). Now we might say that all these jobs could be off-loaded to Mumbai. But...if so, why hasn't that happened yet? So much of employment practices are social rather than economic.
Interesting, I have not heard about him. But what you say makes a lot of sense. I'll have to read about it further. Thanks for letting me know about it!
It is smart. You should not cultivate anxieties over what you cannot control.
There are plenty of jobs that cannot be outsourced. The main thing is to be prepared. If you possibly can, save a little. Focus on developing strong relationships. Enjoy what you can..."revel in your time".
According to Harari the useless eaters of the future will be placated with drugs and video games until they die lonely deaths from obesity, suicide, or overdoses...
Yeah I saw that video. I never did drugs and I don't play video games very much so.... Anyway he seems to be saying that universal basic income (bread and circus) will be the solution. Ancient Rome conquered and enslaved others and made them work in a variety of professions. Their slave-based economy would be kinda equivalent to our (future) automation-based economy. This caused a massive impoverishment of the people and urbanization and made them dependent on the government who would pacify the increasing poor masses with cheap entertainment and food in Rome while the Roman elites would keep getting unbelievably rich. Roman Empire's slavery-based economy began to crumble when they could no longer go and conquer any more slaves and so there was increasingly no one left to do the tough jobs. I wonder how our automation-based economy will crumble one day. I guess first we have to see how far genetic engineering and AI can be taken and if AGI can be created or if our species can be modified to be radically different. If not, it's just a matter of time then and things could collapse in a number of ways. If it's not like that, then it's anyone's guess as to what the future holds.
I'd probably just depopulate the useless eaters with some sort of untested mRNA cocktail. I'd even trick them into voluntarily injecting themselves. Multiple times a year!
I recommend Lincoln tech and learn to be a highly skilled Laborer. Learn to code - CNC.
You will eat, you will prosper.
CNC is machine lathe code (everything is a few coding commands now, even electrician. Yes you can learn it, its not JAVA hard).
Tell you about a man I met a year ago- he has HVAC business. He starts his apprenticeships at $50 an hour. Kindly show me which screwdriver is flathead and which is Philips. Have you ever changed a tire? Discuss.
Congratulations, $50 an hour as apprenticeship.
Then Journeyman.
Then Tradesman,
Then license.
Then you have the 2d or 3d house. Like him.
People don’t want to work and immigrants are limited.
Be prepared to go into the tow truck business. When Internal Combustion Engines and "Fossil" Fuels are eventually banned ("as goes California, goes the rest of the nation") with nowhere near the infrastructure & energy availability necessary -- hell, they already have rolling blackouts in California NOW -- there'll be a huge demand to tow dead EV vehicles littering the highways & roads.
But, oh, your EV tow truck will also be dying frequently and contributing to the litter -- so, never mind! [I'm picturing a tow truck towing a tow truck towing a ...]
Ain't the grand Commie Utopia and Final Solution gonna be grand!
"In the end, America might quite soon find itself in a situation where no broad socioeconomic group feels any loyalty or has any stake in the political system. Instead, anger at having their lives upended and their standards of living destroyed will be the order of the day, from Boise to Bushwick.
Gen. Mark Milley infamously testified before a congressional hearing that he wanted to understand “white rage.” But who right now is prepared for progressive, multiracial, demisexual rage, as the core social groups driving progressivism in America are hit the hardest by layoffs and the end of Silicon Valley subsidies? That rage is coming, and it may have no brakes."
I can agree with that. As a nonwhite my circle is other nonwhites(of various socioeconomic classes) and white liberals working in email jobs. The core constituency of the Democratic Party if you will.
Neither group feels any particular loyalty to the American nation. Let's not even talk about Colonial or Antebellum America, even America of the 1970s is as alien to them as Uzbekistan or Cambodia.
I once asked my cousin who is reasonably smart and goes to a public high school, if he had read any Mark Twain. And he looked at me with a blank face. He had never heard of Mark Twain before! How insane is that? Twain is America's writer and the kids who go to my cousin's high school(mostly of wealthy non-white and immigrant stock) had not only never read Mark Twain, they had never even heard of him. The newcomers who come by the millions are not taught this country's heritage yet they most definetely are taught all of its sins. How can you expect this class of people to have any loyalty to the American nation?
We can already see the anger of the white working class despite the fact that they are still the group, the most loyal to the American state. So then how much more will be the anger of the millions who never had any loyalty to the American state and will see their lives ruined in the coming decades?
Loyalty is always difficult to quantify, but it is all-important. The failure to properly integrate immigrants (or their children) is a great problem. It cheats the immigrants and their children of the benefits of acculturation and it has the potential to tear society apart. As for US workers, they need to wake up and realise that the state is not their friend, patron or protector. IMHO they owe it no loyalty.
These problems are not just economic. They are ethical and social too. There is something very chilling about the failure of the oligarchs and the professionals/managers to maintain any respect for the workers. This is a very long running feature of the US. The sociologist Richard Sennett once related an anecdote about a Greek janitor in the US who said that the difference between Greece and the US was that in Greece the people who worked in the office block he cleaned would greet him and sometime chat about the soccer; even the owner of the building would do this. In the US, by contrast, the office workers would avoid making eye contact with him. It will be hard, or impossible, for such a society to maintain its cohesion through an extended period of economic hardship.
I think a lot of what could be outsourced had been outsourced pre-COVID. That's the only reason I can imagine we haven't seen this happen yet.
It's harder than you'd think to work across time zones. People in their 20s can handle it, but most middle class workers (in India or the West) aren't interested in time shifting once they have kids.
in the not too distant future (10-15 yrs? 20 yrs? sooner?), you will be able to use remotely controlled robots using VR+Haptics+Omnidirectional treadmill imbued with sensors and realtime AI analysis to offshore that as well and possibly automate it. I don't know exactly what your job is (proctologist?) but i would not be super confident that this can't be outsourced/automated. but maybe you're old so it doesn't concern you anyway since you will be retired by that point... idk
- the technology has to be paid for and distributed (don't forget your plan requires India et al to have it, not us)
- it has to work better than seeing a patient in person
- patients will not want their information shared at such a distance: India and Nigeria are crammed with scammers
- there has already been a terrific outcry over phone appointments here in Britain. Many still remember ringing the surgery for an appointment that day and being seen in person by the same doctor who deals with the entire family
- the young generation will be almost entirely based online and will likely be clamped to their phones even more. I foresee a generation who are mentally unable to cope when their phones are either switched off or not immediately at hand. However I doubt even they will want to be examined by a robot
The greater threat is diagnostic technology that is so good you can just push people into a big glowing box and it gives you the answers without human intervention. This however seems radically unlikely as it would essentially be magical medicine, like a pill that fixes all ailments.
Fewer and fewer smoke and many cancers are picked up early. Instead we are obese, diabetic and demented. In medicine more than anywhere else there is no progress, just compromise.
Maybe it will be successfully developed maybe not. We will see. Fact is that most "technological developments" in the last 20 years are just the result of hype and media campaigns. You can look at the recent performance of the newly developed American weapons, utilized in Ukraine for an example of this.
I agree with this. My wife and I both WFH 4 days a week. We really like it since we have young children and WFH makes parenthood way easier in our experience. But I do agree that we’ve opened Pandora’s box in terms of offshoring white collar work that really can’t be stopped outside of protectionist policies. My company has had an office in India for ten years now. However, the amount of work that we’ve outsourced to India has exploded over the last two years and our India office is now the largest office in my company. I see no signs of this subsiding outside of state intervention. It especially disadvantages the Anglo countries since there is a huge labor pool that speaks English in India, Philippines, Africa, etc.
The quality of work has really moved up the value chain over the past few years. It’s no longer just the mundane tasks done overseas. The goal is certainly to continue shifting the higher level work to India. Upper management at my company has already directed this.
Aug 23, 2022·edited Aug 23, 2022Liked by Niccolo Soldo
Hey,
Not to be an ass kisser, but yours is really becoming my Numero Uno Substack spot, the hits keep coming, your game is tight!
Also, I don't know if you've grappled with the massive baggy monster that is Spengler's "Decline" but he has at least a chapter or 2 about the urban/rural divide, it is one of his main themes as far as elucidating the fissures that open in every society.
And as for Yglesias, Bryan Caplan, and the Open Borders crowd: I will give a provisional Yea to their grandiose fantasy on one condition: the first 1000 immigrants from wherever live on their block, the next 10,000 live in their neighborhood, and the first million live in whatever city they live in. And also, their kids all go to the same schools and colleges, they go to the same doctors and hospitals, they share all the same facilities.
Politics is war by other means. Constant mass immigration at either replacement or displacement level is about constraining the existing population. The welfare or future of the subject population simply is not a consideration for the regime or its supporters. The inevitable conflicts will provide an excuse for de-legitimising and silencing alleged xenophobes. It is anything but lunacy. It is simply class warfare in a society run by technocrats on behalf of oligarchs.
Caplan has written explicitly that he wants to destroy the social cohesion of every group via mass immigration, and then construct a "beautiful bubble" that shields him from any unpleasantness.
There really are some things that are so stupid only an academic can espouse them...so we are supposed to destroy our entire society so the economist whose lived his whole life on campus feels more "comfortable"?
Also, it just shows an outstanding, almost deliberately obtuse to the point of malevolence, ignorance of humans and human history. Since humans are tribal and have a tendency to try to dominate other groups we should turn the country over to 1001 dueling groups so we reach some sort of homeostasis of hatred? Sacrifice our communities and traditions and social comity for what, GDP?
I always suspected that guy was just a troll, and now you've confirmed it for me.
since you mentioned spengler, he also said that a lot of these academic types get obliterated by the emergence of a Caesar figure (e.g. Burning of Confuscian Scholars during Qin Dynasty) while the rest of these theorists end up writing victory speeches for the Caesar and increasingly hold less power. but spengler also said that this cosmopolitanism/multiculturalcism/multiracialism/etc. is typical of civilizations once they reach this phase of development. Caesarism is set to emerge by the end of this century and it will also mark the end of modernity. i dont know if this makes you feel better or worse.
any mention of Spengler makes me feel better...separate from his ideas, he was also an excellent writer and Decline has some beautiful passages that put to shame just about anyone writing today, fiction or nonfiction. his work will keep being read while every last word written by our modern academic class will die along with them...something to be grateful for!
i understand ya, i read basically everything by spengler with the only exception being the hour of decision which i only skimmed. one of my favorite writers.
"Regard the flowers at eventide as, one after the other, they close in the setting sun. Strange is the feeling that then presses in upon you - a feeling of enigmatic fear in the presence of this blind dreamlike earth-bound existence. The dumb forest, the silent meadows, this bush, that twig, do not stir themselves, it is the wind that plays with them. Only the little gnat is free—he dances still in the evening light, he moves whither he will. A herd that huddles together trembling in the presence of danger, a child that clings weeping to its mother, a man desperately striving to force a way into his God - all these are seeking to return out of the life of freedom into the vegetal servitude from which they were emancipated into individuality and loneliness."
I'll add Noah Smith to the list, who probably has some of the most absurd 10 trillion Americans fantasies. As to why they do it, someone on Twitter said that you can explain Smith's politics by the fact that he was called a loser in his Middle America high school. I think this applies to Yglesias and Caplan as well.
"the hits keep coming, your game is tight!" Fully agree.
I'll also add that the comment section is just as high quality as the content. One of the only Substacks where I don't only read every post religiously but all the comments as well.
Exactly right. When decision makers keep the profits for themselves while externalizing costs onto the masses, social and economic changes flow in the direction we're currently headed. Fucking useless elites imagine they won't be on the boat when it sinks, so they ignore the icebergs and keep steaming full speed ahead. This won't end well for anyone, unfortunately. I'm afraid our best hope is a Caesar figure who can clean house and get rid of the parasitic elites, but...when you open Pandora's box, you more often get a Hitler or Mao than a Caesar. I'm starting to hope the fundamentalist Christians are right and Jesus will come miracle us outta this mess.
Pity the poor blue/pink collar worker who must attend in person to the needs of their employer rather than reading FbF while working from home on a laptop.
I just read at the office! Although half way through the last AIDS article I decided whatever IT guy is watching my screen could probably write me up for some of the paragraphs...so back at home I read for now.
Beyond just projecting on current trends, Buskirk’s view seems to be missing the forest for the trees. The power of nations cannot be reduced to just population and median age
Though my bias is clouding my judgment. I don’t want this bleak capitalist hellscape centered around United States to be our future
The United State’s continuously falling share of the world’s GDP, China’s long term planning versus the United States’ focus on short term profit, Russia’s triumph so far in Ukraine, social instability (among the public) within the United States, the strong possibility of Turbo America backfiring… these point to a multipolar world and are entirely ignored
This does not answer any of the questions you posed, but this scenario seems unlikely. Answering the questions in another comment
I think you're exaggerating China's so called "long-term planning" and Russia's triumph in Ukraine. They have their own, increasingly more serious problems. But I think that if the US is the future, its not going to be like that out of a position of strength of innate superiority, but because everyone else would be weak, similar to how the New Kingdom of Ancient Egypt expanded rapidly not because it was some brutal advanced military/economic/social/political hyperpower but because everyone else just didn't really put up a fight and was basically weak. Read what Peter Zeihan has to say about this and especially China's and Russia's struggles with potential deindustrialization, food shortages, and lack of energy & natural resources.
Buskirk is fellating the most important fragment of the readership of PALLADIUM MAGAZINE....his prospective patrons who aim to carry on with globalisation in one form or another no matter what.
As the oases of prosperity/safety shrink, the Buskirks will do whatever they can to secure employment/inclusion in the fortified "Elysium" style cantonments. Sacrificing one's dignity or integrity is a small price to be paid for not ending up in the feral, deindustrialized, zones where the deplorables will do battle with the replacement population and their woke allies.
I completely agree. Things are way too unstable right now to say with certainty that the current things are going to continue, but that's the problem with people like Buskirk either they're complete shills or they just cant stop living in the 90s.
I must play the white pill to beat back the clouds of despair
"United State’s continuously falling share of the world’s GDP,"
As if we were going to have 50% forever with 4.25% of the worlds population.
That is an aberration from the world wars.
We have 4.25% of the world's population and 15.78% of world GDP. That's looking pretty stable for the next few years by the way.
We also have in all my readings of history the worst ruling class ever, of course they look much worse close up, but I think no matter what bias I acknowledge they must be in the running for history's worst.
Multipolar world: Why unless we define our very core existence as THE global Empire is this a problem? It was a multi-polar world for all of human history until the summer of 1945.
It began to be a multi-polar world again when China became a nuclear power as well as India and both began to rise.
How has Empire especially when we foolishly didn't end in 1991 been good for Americans?
The logic of Empire led our elites to crush our choices about it at home, the logic of Empire is you must have total control of your own lands, your own power base.
Very good points. The Golden Era of US glory was always about relativities (economic and military) and the only certainty is change.
Your argument (and the situation itself) hinges on how the imperial experience has changed America and its fundamental condition. Is it realistic to conceive of America at this point in time as a nation-state any more? Is it not, in truth, a territory governed by an imperial state in retreat? This territory may, or may not, have the capacity to reconstitute itself as a nation. If it does, all may be well, though this is not guaranteed. If it does not, America may remain a legacy project of the liberal/imperial era for a while or even split into several legacy projects of one sort or another.
IMO it is pointless to focus simply on the continuities (largely fake and ghey) that obsess self-described conservatives. We need to identify what is new, wat has been transformed (for good or otherwise) or we risk being taken by surprise.
Regardless of all else, there is no point in despair. There is plenty to hope for. Ordinary people are not fools. As David Hume pointed put, government rests on opinion alone. The regime has already lost. There is every reason to believe that one day Q Shaman's bison horn fur hat will become a symbol of popular sovereignty and national renewal.
1) Geography- whoever wins here can’t and won’t stop before Atlantic to Pacific.
2) The Unitary central government is an aberration caused by WW2 and the Cold War, its lost its purpose and justification.
3) Of course calling this Feudalistic Blob in DC “Unitary”, “Central”, or “Government” is false. Its a Feudal Blob of Committees. Ever shifting.
4) As it dies Power has been convulsing out of it in spasms: this is the rise of the Oligarchs (from their own necessities), the sanctuary cities for aliens and guns, the return of State Governments, Dobbs are all the return of our natural Federated governance- note the DC entity never eliminated them as the natural opponents they are BY EXPLICIT CONSTITUTIONAL DESIGN.
4). This monster blob has tossed all pretense of legitimacy and rests on bribery, blackmail, coercion, force.
5) If any successor regime wants any kind of stability they’ll bow to the necessity of Federation as the Founders did. Or it can have eternal war as Mexico does.
6) The resort to force and Troops openly as in Biden’s inauguration is always dangerous. To resort to troops when you factions are known cowards, shirkers, war profiteers, harassers and persecutors of the Troops and Police ( again the military and police are same people same families) isn’t just dangerous, its an act of insanity. Why its as crazy as Jews backing Nazis! That can never happen, right?
7) The current plan seems to be to steal as much as possible while doing maximum damage to the rest of the country, how much is calculation and how much is frenzied malice we cannot tell.
8) Its mistaken to write off 200~300 million Americans, tens of millions sworn to the Constitution, many the legitimate government sitting already at its desks, the Constitution still has the biggest team if presently no leadership, its all mistakes to write all them off simply because they are not fighting yet.
9) As history, Churchill, The King of Jordan and many fallen enemy nations can attest WHEN and IF the Americans are moved to fight their enemies regret underestimating the potential they should have left latent.
10) Finally there’s nothing new here in history, these things happen from time to time.
“What does this do to the idea of nation and of citizenship as well?”
Nations become more like corporations seeking to attract employees. Citizenship is a means of accessing jobs and their associated perks. This is already true of the elites and digital nomads, but it becomes normalized
“…what if WFH serves to make migration unnecessary?”
There will be a sharp difference between digital workers and physical workers. Under the assumptions made, outsourcing will continue. A worldwide labor pool will lead to a surplus of workers even with competition; pay and relative living standards will fall. Given the global competition for digital jobs, competition for local physical jobs will increase as well, worsening conditions for them as well
Mass immigration will lead to war, is leading to war. It, rampant immigration, is a treasonous betrayal of our countrymen and brethren, the less fortunate, not racist as claimed, rather, it is common sense and simple, laudable, self interest that animates national cohesion and measured immigration. The global elite are driving us to distraction and soon enough destruction. The temperature is rising worldwide.
NS Lyons, The upheaval substack captures this phenomenon. My Précis: they hate our guts.
If you mean climate change by temperature rising, yes, I see that leading to war far more than just immigration. Shrinking the global pie will do far more damage than the movement of people
I also think the US can handle most immigrants while Europe will not fair as well. The typical immigrant to the US assimilates far better than the typical immigrant in Europe, if you know what I mean
Until people realize that there is no 'political' solution, this shit will persist. You are poweless. Hopefully starvation will help sharpen people's focus and help improve their aim.
The hatred is incidental. The driving force is the collective self-aggrandisement (control and power). Reducing it to the level of emotion ("they hate our guts") is redolent of a playground-level analysis. Not that I want to offload on to you personally, Diamond Boy, but I have had it with internet commentators who project fantasies (involving the imagined motives of policy makers) onto national governments. The people who drive these policies are motivated by personal and collective empowerment. Regnant or influential ideologies form around opportunities for power and enrichment, not emotion. The psycho-effective stuff (which does exist) is a second-order phenomenon only, sometimes not even that.
Sorry for being forceful...but I just spent an hour reading commentary on geopolitics on another site that left me in despair/rage. If I was young and athletic enough, I'd go out and king-hit a mid-wit just to let off steam. Not you, Diamond Boy.
Cool, but second order is the icing on the cake, they do dismiss the dispossessed as deserving recipients of pain. I think you underestimate the motivation provided by schadenfreude: it is so very delicious.
The schadenfreude is mainly for the scum who are interested in politics and who identify closely with the regime and support its policies (provided that they are shielded from the ill-effects). These types do indeed get a very real thrill from witnessing the roll-out of Sado-Malthusian policies, as do some of the flunkies involved in implementing it. As the West declines, the value of psychic payoffs increases. It is all the regime can afford.
Good point! All self-aware people eschew self-congratulation and self-righteousness. I am almost pure scum myself...which makes political analysis pretty easy.
Remembered to reply after I received the latest drop notification!
I’m not sure if you are reading this piece as “Class A are liberals / leftists, Class B are conservatives / rightists” or “either side can see themselves as Class B and their enemies as Class A; the vagueness of this shows the true class A are the elites and the true class B are the masses”
If the former, I see liberals making the same complaints every day, leading me to support the latter interpretation. The elites have us at each other’s throats while they consolidate power
Strongly recommended, Read his peace about the truck or rebellion in Canada he creates a binary between Physicals and virtuals which is a perfect compendium to the piece you just read
"Nations become more like corporations seeking to attract employees. Citizenship is a means of accessing jobs and their associated perks. This is already true of the elites and digital nomads, but it becomes normalized"
Very smart.
"There will be a sharp difference between digital workers and physical workers. Under the assumptions made, outsourcing will continue. A worldwide labor pool will lead to a surplus of workers even with competition; pay and relative living standards will fall. Given the global competition for digital jobs, competition for local physical jobs will increase as well, worsening conditions for them as well"
Good point, didn't think far enough that this would also increase competition for local physical jobs.
I wish Substack had a feature where you could save people's comments to revisit later.
Regarding remote work, I don't think we've seen anything yet. There's way, way more runway there.
Because of the internet, tons of kids around the world will grow up with decent English skills after childhoods spent watching Netflix and YouTube. English will become a lingua franca to a substantially greater extent than it already is. This will increase the pool of potential employees both for Anglosphere countries and for other countries, in Europe and elsewhere, that will increasingly operate in English in the workplace.
Time zones are an issue but not everywhere. A US company I do business with has outsourced its entire back office to South America. It seems to work, as far as I can tell. I regularly have salespeople from South American outsourcing firms reach out to me. Their employees speak English, have college degrees from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, etc., and work on US hours.
I've played with the Oculus-style VR headsets a bit. They aren't quite ready for prime time yet, but they're already impressive and will no doubt improve steadily. Once that tech matures a little, it will be much more effective than Zoom for conference-style meetings and similar things.
SpaceX's Starlink system will give people in rural areas around the world high-speed internet access, increasing the pool of potential workers.
Yes, something very similar happened recently in the Bosnian industrial city where I spent my childhood in the 80s.
An American company bought an old cinema building in the city center more than a year ago, a beautiful piece of modernist architecture (yes, there was such a thing) and demolished it. Instead, they built a giant glass-aluminum cube staffed by young geeks in their twenties with computer skills, the generation that grew up with YouTube and social media and who speak surprisingly fluent English and work according to their American employer's time zone (from later afternoon to late at night?!)
Right across the street is the elementary school I attended back in the 80s - but today there are 3 times fewer children and a few years ago, according to its webpage "school entered into a partnership with the Canadian Embassy in Bosnia and Herzegovina with the aim of implementing an international project of youth gender awareness".
The Balkans outlasted the Hapsburgs and the Ottomans, Nazis and Communists, only to crumble under the stilleto of Uncle Samantha and her Canadian tranissaries. And to think that they talk about so-called progress.
- less immigration to the UK as the old excuse of needing "the best and brightest" has gone when we can just pay them and keep them out
- reversal of immigration: "we can have good jobs and be amongst our own back in India etc, why stay here"
- less traffic on roads: a quieter, calmer country
- less demand for public services
WFH to me could mean: a repopulated countryside with less pollution and traffic, more money spent in smaller towns and villages, cheaper goods as office costs drop
It could also mean: empty cities filled with yet more immigrants who, lacking menial jobs which have moved to the countryside or been automated, begin to move further afield and make an alien, crime-ridden hell-hole out of everywhere as opposed to just the large cities. Hence my desire for reversed migration. There is also the problem of tax as no doubt someone in Bangalore will object to paying UK tax for roads on which he will never drive. Not insurmountable: we can tax them at source as we do already just tax them as non-domiciled.
The 1st world is replacing unskilled laborers with tech at an extreme pace (robots in some fast food kitchens are in the news a lot recently). WFH is definitely a positive thing for rural areas, but I do believe businesses are catching on that not all of their staff bring much value.
The world's population will level out sooner than later, but "economists" always make it sound like a stagnant population is a negative thing. We need to make our economy more efficient and less just throwing bodies at the wall. What I am basically trying to say is, we are going to need a lot more mechanics in the future.
"I do believe businesses are catching on that not all of their staff bring much value". You and me both! You should have seen some of the people that I have worked with!
The 1st world is replacing skilled labour with tech and where this is not possible with immigrants or employees based in developing countries economies.
Funny how it never occurs to them that policies strongly incentivizing natural increase could achieve the same effect as mass immigration. Get the average birthrate up to 4/female and the US population will reach a billion by century's end.
Immigration is cheaper than pro-family policies such as allowances per child. Also, pro-natal policies risk strengthening existing families within the domestic population...and neither the government nor big business see any advantage for themselves in doing that. The attraction of immigration is a compound of economics and social engineering.
Additionally, low birth rates and immigration both lower wages. The former at least for the first generation, since it involves women working. However, that presumes that the immigrants actually work. To take the European example, the migrants that were supposed to pay the pensions have so far been a net cost.
It's certainly possible that the technocrats did not foresee this, as they believed their own propaganda about human fungibility.
The costs of welfare are paid by taxpayers, of course, and the advantage of female labour is not simply keeping wages low but the transformation of industrial relations and the replacement of traditional families with more unstable female-led ones.
The technocrats weren't tasked with forecasting anything but the most mechanistic assessments; though the ideological blinders certainly complemented the generational ones.
Immigration has transformed social relations and this was definitely predictable to anyone who knew much about the real world. Back in the early 80s the ultra-conservative Auberon Waugh had a column in THE SPECTATOR in which he once admitted that he welcomed South Asian immigration because it was guaranteed to make England less egalitarian.
2d reply; Asians most assuredly lessen egalitarianism.
But Hispanics are congenital fascists and they make fascism work, much better than the Italians.
Its hilarious how the schemers schemes blow up in their faces.
Yesterday I read polling data showing that College educated whites are now the actual core voting base for the Democratic Party. By double digits. I keep saying we’re back to 19th Century politics, the issue of what is truthfully Slavery has returned and the Dems answer to Lincoln is ALL SLAVES, unless you went to the correct schools.
Read A House Divided Speech and you’ll see slavery spreading was exactly the fear and motive of Republicans. It was spreading via Manipulating Procedural Outcome even then the Democratic Party’s core skill.
Well "fascism" is the future, by which I mean authoritarianism and the close co-operation of public and private power. The political, economic, social and cultural/aesthetic drivers are all converging. Any future regime that prioritises economic stability, social peace (assured by coercion) and the aesthetics of normality will do very well. The only alternative is a criminal oligarchy reliant on both a violent underclass to constrain rivals and a coalition of demanding, largely unproductive, constituencies that make social peace impossible. We can all do the math.
Given onshoring and the utility of high tech, a neo-Peronist regime (with a bit of Putin too) may emerge once the present gangsters are confined to old age homes and properly diapered. Peron was keenly interested in industrialisng Argentina, which pissed off both Washington and London (especially the former who wanted the engineers and scientists from the Reich for themselves).
Your insight re the spread of slavery touches a nerve. Lincoln was fully aware of the great unmentionable (the class dimension of slavery and the competition between free and enslaved labour). Downward social mobility, the consequences of deindustrialisation, de-skilling and wage arbitrage all blend with the ethnic issues of immigration and affirmative action and make the old New Deal coalitions unworkable.
The Democrat social engineering is about blackening the white working and middle classes...the fragmentation of the family structure, promoting weed and dumbing down education is basically the Democrats using Daniel Patrick Moynihan as a how-to-manual rather than as a warning. Malicious but predictable: all ideologies need to create the very conditions that they pretend are natural in the first place, so the Democrats instinctively level the white working and middle classes while creating a BIPOC crony capitalist elite with a militant cadre of woke NCOs to keep the masses in line (I call it Django's unchained political economy).
Does the average women want to have four children? No.
We are discussing political demographics but we cannot forget to look on an individual level.
Beyond economic factors (which certainly have an impact) many women are choosing not to partner with men because they see it as a raw deal. And THAT is going to be hard to fix; either men step up their game or pairings become forced. The former is unlikely and the latter is unpalatable.
So, we have immigration. Notably from countries with less emancipated women.
What people want and what they will settle for are separate things. The emerging national conservative agenda will go nowhere fast. Pro-natalist policies have a long history of failure.
The post patriarchal family structure now evolving in the US working and middle class is fragmented and unstable and involves mother and child as basic unit, with fathers mostly cohabiting for under a decade. Serial monogamy and co-habitation is the new norm. This family structure is ideal for Leviathan/Cthulhu because it relies on public institutions, is vulnerable to manipulation and interference by family courts, social workers and teachers and maximises female influence on young males.
Hungary seems to have made headway. I think the policies tend to fail because they're half measured bandaid solutions that don't address underlying problems.
The one Western (or semi-Western) society that has had success in this field is Israel. I expect that a distinct national identity/shared history, sense of collective purpose (even if generated by external hostility/threat) plus government policy and a bit of religion combine well. There is no doubt that the standard Western social model of family fragility/breakdown, anomie and class warfare is disastrous.
I doubt women are staying away from marriage because they think it's a raw deal. It's rather the opposite: men are staying away, because there's nothing in it for them. Women by contrast complain that they can't find partners.
Indeed. The question is why. Pretty clearly of marriage is a bad deal, the reason lies in the legal treatment of same. End no-fault divorce, remove the ability of women to destroy their husbands' lives on a whim, and marriage will no longer be a bad deal for men. Result should be a higher marriage rate. Of course, that should be combined with social condemnation of pre-marital sex and enabling technologies e.g. hookup apps, the pill, etc.
The law is responsible for a very great deal of mischief and clearly works to undermine and fracture existing family structures. Correcting that will be horrifically difficult, given the interest groups that would mobilise to block reform.
Fundamentally, IMO there are underlying economic factors. Women aim to marry up and the integration of women into the workforce complicates mating/assortation. So long as the post-patriarchal family structure retains economic viability it will be a problem.
Finally, I think that culture/example plays a huge role. Young people who have never witnessed a stable family life of the sort that was once traditional are left to rely on Netflix for ideas about relationships. It is amazing how rare it is to see a realistic depiction of married adult males on the screen. Older male roles are either demonic/menacing/authoritarian or inept/useless/contemptible. The infotainment industry must be having a disruptive effect, one compounded by the effect of a female teaching profession.
Economic viability is a big component. Since that's artificially maintained through entitlement programs, there's reason to expect the situation could be rapidly changed by withdrawing the entitlements.
Urbanization seems to be a factor as well, what you might call the rat utopia effect. People in high density environments seem to subconsciously recoil from having children. It follows that a reversal of the trend towards population concentration in metropoles should lead to a higher birth rate all on its own. If the WFH trend can be continued, without its being subverted via offshoring, that could end up revitalizing villages and indirectly boosting the birth rate.
When looking up the plausibility of open borders, I was thinking “I hear how hard it is to get into the US all the time, surely statements like these area stretch” but even fairly neutral places like Pew Research Center project a near-doubling of immigrants in the next 50 years, increasing the percentage of immigrant population to heights never seen before
Seems like it could happen; who knows? I plan out being out of America before I’m thirty so I won’t be around to see it
Bullshit, skill based systems are even easier because they become gamed by employer. Compare Anglophone peers Canada (21%) and Australia (30%) who have a higher percentage of foreign born than the US(15%). Australia is the most skill based so has the most immigration and the immigration in Australia is directly tied to labor suppression. i.e. hairdressers, pharmacists, etc.
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These two pieces brought up in this short essay are very interesting, and they give us all something to think about.
It seems the key challenge for The Metropole in the Young World-immigration-fueled scenario will be maintaining (repairing) the culture that facilitated its rise in the first place. Central planning is quite adept at wrecking economies.
Van Buskirk brings up some of the challenges associated with this, including differences in human capital, cultural affinities, already-present population, and so on. It's an interesting essay.
The Hell with the MetroPole.
Good types live in GoatScrew Arkansas.
That's where you want to be
Unless yer the goat
The most powerful driver for worsening Global Warming is overpopulation by Homo sapiens
Discuss.
The carbon footprint of the typical person in North America is over 10 times greater than that of the typical citizen of an African country. If Climate Change is the most important issue for the foreseeable future, this fact needs to be taken into account.
Agree emphatically
So, the answer is to grow the US population -> 1 billion?
Turn the crank.
Climate change is not the most important ecological issue.
IF
"Climate Change" is an important "issue"; i.e. it's a talking point, a political cudgel, a religion...
but "climate change" as an actual phenomena isn't real .. not on human time scales, certainly not because of human activities.
The importance of the "issue" of climate change is not the weather itself, but the authoritarianism and totalitarianism that gets imposed on all of us ....
A highly centralized dictatorship that wants to micromanage every aspect of your daily life, all of it to fix a nonexistent "problem".
It is the core Hypocrisy of the environmental movement. Originally, reduce reuse and recycle was an admitted Band-Aid, a good thing, but only a partial solution, ultimately a glide slope, 70 years (?) to a sustainable human population (2b?) was central to the debate.
Overpopulation according to which technology level?
I'm not anti-capitalist or anything like this, but it seems self-evident that basing your economy and way of life on the idea of eternal expansion and growth is not only not sustainable, but insane.
It also breaks my heart to see people forgoing starting families to stay on the career hamster wheel. Nothing has made me happier than my children, I'm glad I was able to have them when I did.
I’m glad I didn’t have kids: hum.
I mean...in zero-sum terms, you might be an anti-capitalist. Insofar as the model relies on expansion; we can debate semantics.
Agree! I'd like to see a measure concerning small-cap manufacturing start-ups included as a *favorable* economic indicator. Nothing wrong with having a Dow Jones index, but when GE (the former General Electric) was booted for poor economic performance, it was replaced by .... Walgreen's?! A company almost as old?
If it is based on that -
Its only part of it.
And once you decide to cull your own herd - and they have- growth isn’t a requirement.
Growth was for the common good. Well. That’s out.
So we don’t have to worry about that Capitalism part.
Yes, I do think companies will use WFH to offshore white collar jobs.We need to keep in mind that many of these jobs are total bullshit. Why pay $100,000+ to some Yale Economics grad to work as an ESG consultant when you can pay $10,000 to a University of Mumbai Economics grad and get the same bullshit work done?
What I find is fascinating is how little this is being discussed. I remember in the early days of the pandemic, some reddit post bringing up the same exact dangers of WFH and he was downvoted into oblivion. To connect to your earlier piece, is it because we don't like alarmists?
....or is it a valid fear and no one wants to think about it? Out of sight, out of mind.
Indeed, this is my fear but I generally tend to be more on the alarmist side of the spectrum.
Hot take, but the 20s and 30s will be to the Western white collar worker what 60s and 70s were to his blue collar grandfather. Silicon Valley will be his Detroit.
so should i learn a trade or something?
i feel like even whats left of blue collar work will be offshored with remotely controlled robots using VR+Haptics+Omnidirectional treadmill while the rest of the blue collar work is automated.
i dont see what kinds of jobs will even exist for non ultra high IQ people like me. if you are an AGI engineer or a hacker or something maybe you can continue to make a living, but if you aren't good at that kind of stuff, then I don't know how people will be able to eek out a living. maybe we will be data serfs, forced to do tasks to produce data for AI while gov gives us minimal bread and circus like in the Roman Empire.
what do you think??
Honestly man I don't know. My philosophy is to get the best possible white collar job and hold it for as long as possible. As I have said before, by nature, I am the alarmist type which doesn't bode well for my physical or mental health. So I have decided to keep the outsourcing problem in the back of my head but only worry about it when it happens. I don't if know if this philosophy is necessarily a smart one but at this point in time, I'll stick with it.
Since you mentioned "bullshit jobs," I wondered if you'd read David Graeber's treatise on this. Part of his takeaway is that a lot of corporate mid-level jobs are not totally rational or reducible to input<output. That much of the middle-management structure is more feudal, really, than capitalistic (in the sense that many salaries are calculated by how many "reports" a manager has). Now we might say that all these jobs could be off-loaded to Mumbai. But...if so, why hasn't that happened yet? So much of employment practices are social rather than economic.
Interesting, I have not heard about him. But what you say makes a lot of sense. I'll have to read about it further. Thanks for letting me know about it!
It is smart. You should not cultivate anxieties over what you cannot control.
There are plenty of jobs that cannot be outsourced. The main thing is to be prepared. If you possibly can, save a little. Focus on developing strong relationships. Enjoy what you can..."revel in your time".
According to Harari the useless eaters of the future will be placated with drugs and video games until they die lonely deaths from obesity, suicide, or overdoses...
Yeah I saw that video. I never did drugs and I don't play video games very much so.... Anyway he seems to be saying that universal basic income (bread and circus) will be the solution. Ancient Rome conquered and enslaved others and made them work in a variety of professions. Their slave-based economy would be kinda equivalent to our (future) automation-based economy. This caused a massive impoverishment of the people and urbanization and made them dependent on the government who would pacify the increasing poor masses with cheap entertainment and food in Rome while the Roman elites would keep getting unbelievably rich. Roman Empire's slavery-based economy began to crumble when they could no longer go and conquer any more slaves and so there was increasingly no one left to do the tough jobs. I wonder how our automation-based economy will crumble one day. I guess first we have to see how far genetic engineering and AI can be taken and if AGI can be created or if our species can be modified to be radically different. If not, it's just a matter of time then and things could collapse in a number of ways. If it's not like that, then it's anyone's guess as to what the future holds.
I'd probably just depopulate the useless eaters with some sort of untested mRNA cocktail. I'd even trick them into voluntarily injecting themselves. Multiple times a year!
Yes, learn a skilled machine trade. We’re reshoring, and yes manufacturing.
https://www.reshorenow.org/companies-reshoring/
Covid decided the matter.
That and the Ukrainian war.
I recommend Lincoln tech and learn to be a highly skilled Laborer. Learn to code - CNC.
You will eat, you will prosper.
CNC is machine lathe code (everything is a few coding commands now, even electrician. Yes you can learn it, its not JAVA hard).
Tell you about a man I met a year ago- he has HVAC business. He starts his apprenticeships at $50 an hour. Kindly show me which screwdriver is flathead and which is Philips. Have you ever changed a tire? Discuss.
Congratulations, $50 an hour as apprenticeship.
Then Journeyman.
Then Tradesman,
Then license.
Then you have the 2d or 3d house. Like him.
People don’t want to work and immigrants are limited.
Yes, you can.
Be prepared to go into the tow truck business. When Internal Combustion Engines and "Fossil" Fuels are eventually banned ("as goes California, goes the rest of the nation") with nowhere near the infrastructure & energy availability necessary -- hell, they already have rolling blackouts in California NOW -- there'll be a huge demand to tow dead EV vehicles littering the highways & roads.
But, oh, your EV tow truck will also be dying frequently and contributing to the litter -- so, never mind! [I'm picturing a tow truck towing a tow truck towing a ...]
Ain't the grand Commie Utopia and Final Solution gonna be grand!
Malcolm Kyeyune recently wrote that:
"In the end, America might quite soon find itself in a situation where no broad socioeconomic group feels any loyalty or has any stake in the political system. Instead, anger at having their lives upended and their standards of living destroyed will be the order of the day, from Boise to Bushwick.
Gen. Mark Milley infamously testified before a congressional hearing that he wanted to understand “white rage.” But who right now is prepared for progressive, multiracial, demisexual rage, as the core social groups driving progressivism in America are hit the hardest by layoffs and the end of Silicon Valley subsidies? That rage is coming, and it may have no brakes."
https://compactmag.com/article/say-goodbye-to-your-email-job
I can agree with that. As a nonwhite my circle is other nonwhites(of various socioeconomic classes) and white liberals working in email jobs. The core constituency of the Democratic Party if you will.
Neither group feels any particular loyalty to the American nation. Let's not even talk about Colonial or Antebellum America, even America of the 1970s is as alien to them as Uzbekistan or Cambodia.
I once asked my cousin who is reasonably smart and goes to a public high school, if he had read any Mark Twain. And he looked at me with a blank face. He had never heard of Mark Twain before! How insane is that? Twain is America's writer and the kids who go to my cousin's high school(mostly of wealthy non-white and immigrant stock) had not only never read Mark Twain, they had never even heard of him. The newcomers who come by the millions are not taught this country's heritage yet they most definetely are taught all of its sins. How can you expect this class of people to have any loyalty to the American nation?
We can already see the anger of the white working class despite the fact that they are still the group, the most loyal to the American state. So then how much more will be the anger of the millions who never had any loyalty to the American state and will see their lives ruined in the coming decades?
Loyalty is always difficult to quantify, but it is all-important. The failure to properly integrate immigrants (or their children) is a great problem. It cheats the immigrants and their children of the benefits of acculturation and it has the potential to tear society apart. As for US workers, they need to wake up and realise that the state is not their friend, patron or protector. IMHO they owe it no loyalty.
These problems are not just economic. They are ethical and social too. There is something very chilling about the failure of the oligarchs and the professionals/managers to maintain any respect for the workers. This is a very long running feature of the US. The sociologist Richard Sennett once related an anecdote about a Greek janitor in the US who said that the difference between Greece and the US was that in Greece the people who worked in the office block he cleaned would greet him and sometime chat about the soccer; even the owner of the building would do this. In the US, by contrast, the office workers would avoid making eye contact with him. It will be hard, or impossible, for such a society to maintain its cohesion through an extended period of economic hardship.
Philip- that’s office world America and yes its Doomed.
And justly.
The rest of us and that’s most of us will make it.
I think a lot of what could be outsourced had been outsourced pre-COVID. That's the only reason I can imagine we haven't seen this happen yet.
It's harder than you'd think to work across time zones. People in their 20s can handle it, but most middle class workers (in India or the West) aren't interested in time shifting once they have kids.
I have a medical job. As I like to remind people (smugly of course) you can't stick your finger up someone's arse from Bangalore.
in the not too distant future (10-15 yrs? 20 yrs? sooner?), you will be able to use remotely controlled robots using VR+Haptics+Omnidirectional treadmill imbued with sensors and realtime AI analysis to offshore that as well and possibly automate it. I don't know exactly what your job is (proctologist?) but i would not be super confident that this can't be outsourced/automated. but maybe you're old so it doesn't concern you anyway since you will be retired by that point... idk
I've considered this however:
- the technology has yet to be invented
- the technology has to be paid for and distributed (don't forget your plan requires India et al to have it, not us)
- it has to work better than seeing a patient in person
- patients will not want their information shared at such a distance: India and Nigeria are crammed with scammers
- there has already been a terrific outcry over phone appointments here in Britain. Many still remember ringing the surgery for an appointment that day and being seen in person by the same doctor who deals with the entire family
- the young generation will be almost entirely based online and will likely be clamped to their phones even more. I foresee a generation who are mentally unable to cope when their phones are either switched off or not immediately at hand. However I doubt even they will want to be examined by a robot
The greater threat is diagnostic technology that is so good you can just push people into a big glowing box and it gives you the answers without human intervention. This however seems radically unlikely as it would essentially be magical medicine, like a pill that fixes all ailments.
Fewer and fewer smoke and many cancers are picked up early. Instead we are obese, diabetic and demented. In medicine more than anywhere else there is no progress, just compromise.
That technology will not exist. Were reaching a point were we cant even maintain what we have.
That technology is literally being developed right now while I'm typing this.
Can you link to this tech developers page please?
I have some doubts.
Maybe it will be successfully developed maybe not. We will see. Fact is that most "technological developments" in the last 20 years are just the result of hype and media campaigns. You can look at the recent performance of the newly developed American weapons, utilized in Ukraine for an example of this.
Plus we already bring over lots of the best talent. Maybe WFH will change visa dynamics?
I agree with this. My wife and I both WFH 4 days a week. We really like it since we have young children and WFH makes parenthood way easier in our experience. But I do agree that we’ve opened Pandora’s box in terms of offshoring white collar work that really can’t be stopped outside of protectionist policies. My company has had an office in India for ten years now. However, the amount of work that we’ve outsourced to India has exploded over the last two years and our India office is now the largest office in my company. I see no signs of this subsiding outside of state intervention. It especially disadvantages the Anglo countries since there is a huge labor pool that speaks English in India, Philippines, Africa, etc.
How does the quality of the work undertaken in India compare to the domestic alternative?
The quality of work has really moved up the value chain over the past few years. It’s no longer just the mundane tasks done overseas. The goal is certainly to continue shifting the higher level work to India. Upper management at my company has already directed this.
"Upper management at my company has already directed this."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOZKLtIIUZE
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
Quality of what?
It depends on the quality of “the process “ a great deal Philip.
Because most of them have no idea WTF they’re doing.
I could you know google too.
If what I am googling makes no sense how do I know?
😂😂😂😂😂
When the Last White Man makes the last Stackflow entry ...
“They speak English....”
I really need to try my hand at Hindi or Tagalog on the phone sometime...I’m sure google can help.
Hey,
Not to be an ass kisser, but yours is really becoming my Numero Uno Substack spot, the hits keep coming, your game is tight!
Also, I don't know if you've grappled with the massive baggy monster that is Spengler's "Decline" but he has at least a chapter or 2 about the urban/rural divide, it is one of his main themes as far as elucidating the fissures that open in every society.
And as for Yglesias, Bryan Caplan, and the Open Borders crowd: I will give a provisional Yea to their grandiose fantasy on one condition: the first 1000 immigrants from wherever live on their block, the next 10,000 live in their neighborhood, and the first million live in whatever city they live in. And also, their kids all go to the same schools and colleges, they go to the same doctors and hospitals, they share all the same facilities.
Gotta have skin in the game!
Ya these open boarders people will cause a war: it is lunacy.
Politics is war by other means. Constant mass immigration at either replacement or displacement level is about constraining the existing population. The welfare or future of the subject population simply is not a consideration for the regime or its supporters. The inevitable conflicts will provide an excuse for de-legitimising and silencing alleged xenophobes. It is anything but lunacy. It is simply class warfare in a society run by technocrats on behalf of oligarchs.
Caplan has written explicitly that he wants to destroy the social cohesion of every group via mass immigration, and then construct a "beautiful bubble" that shields him from any unpleasantness.
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/10/they_scare_me.html
Hey, thanks for pissing me off!
There really are some things that are so stupid only an academic can espouse them...so we are supposed to destroy our entire society so the economist whose lived his whole life on campus feels more "comfortable"?
Also, it just shows an outstanding, almost deliberately obtuse to the point of malevolence, ignorance of humans and human history. Since humans are tribal and have a tendency to try to dominate other groups we should turn the country over to 1001 dueling groups so we reach some sort of homeostasis of hatred? Sacrifice our communities and traditions and social comity for what, GDP?
I always suspected that guy was just a troll, and now you've confirmed it for me.
since you mentioned spengler, he also said that a lot of these academic types get obliterated by the emergence of a Caesar figure (e.g. Burning of Confuscian Scholars during Qin Dynasty) while the rest of these theorists end up writing victory speeches for the Caesar and increasingly hold less power. but spengler also said that this cosmopolitanism/multiculturalcism/multiracialism/etc. is typical of civilizations once they reach this phase of development. Caesarism is set to emerge by the end of this century and it will also mark the end of modernity. i dont know if this makes you feel better or worse.
any mention of Spengler makes me feel better...separate from his ideas, he was also an excellent writer and Decline has some beautiful passages that put to shame just about anyone writing today, fiction or nonfiction. his work will keep being read while every last word written by our modern academic class will die along with them...something to be grateful for!
i understand ya, i read basically everything by spengler with the only exception being the hour of decision which i only skimmed. one of my favorite writers.
This is from Decline, Book II, Chapter 1:
"Regard the flowers at eventide as, one after the other, they close in the setting sun. Strange is the feeling that then presses in upon you - a feeling of enigmatic fear in the presence of this blind dreamlike earth-bound existence. The dumb forest, the silent meadows, this bush, that twig, do not stir themselves, it is the wind that plays with them. Only the little gnat is free—he dances still in the evening light, he moves whither he will. A herd that huddles together trembling in the presence of danger, a child that clings weeping to its mother, a man desperately striving to force a way into his God - all these are seeking to return out of the life of freedom into the vegetal servitude from which they were emancipated into individuality and loneliness."
Hard to top that!
Homeostasis of hatred: that is a perfect formulation, may I use it?
feel free of course...thanks!
I'll add Noah Smith to the list, who probably has some of the most absurd 10 trillion Americans fantasies. As to why they do it, someone on Twitter said that you can explain Smith's politics by the fact that he was called a loser in his Middle America high school. I think this applies to Yglesias and Caplan as well.
"the hits keep coming, your game is tight!" Fully agree.
I'll also add that the comment section is just as high quality as the content. One of the only Substacks where I don't only read every post religiously but all the comments as well.
Thank you, Ioana.
"Gotta have skin in the game!"
Exactly right. When decision makers keep the profits for themselves while externalizing costs onto the masses, social and economic changes flow in the direction we're currently headed. Fucking useless elites imagine they won't be on the boat when it sinks, so they ignore the icebergs and keep steaming full speed ahead. This won't end well for anyone, unfortunately. I'm afraid our best hope is a Caesar figure who can clean house and get rid of the parasitic elites, but...when you open Pandora's box, you more often get a Hitler or Mao than a Caesar. I'm starting to hope the fundamentalist Christians are right and Jesus will come miracle us outta this mess.
Pity the poor blue/pink collar worker who must attend in person to the needs of their employer rather than reading FbF while working from home on a laptop.
I just read at the office! Although half way through the last AIDS article I decided whatever IT guy is watching my screen could probably write me up for some of the paragraphs...so back at home I read for now.
Beyond just projecting on current trends, Buskirk’s view seems to be missing the forest for the trees. The power of nations cannot be reduced to just population and median age
Though my bias is clouding my judgment. I don’t want this bleak capitalist hellscape centered around United States to be our future
The United State’s continuously falling share of the world’s GDP, China’s long term planning versus the United States’ focus on short term profit, Russia’s triumph so far in Ukraine, social instability (among the public) within the United States, the strong possibility of Turbo America backfiring… these point to a multipolar world and are entirely ignored
This does not answer any of the questions you posed, but this scenario seems unlikely. Answering the questions in another comment
I think you're exaggerating China's so called "long-term planning" and Russia's triumph in Ukraine. They have their own, increasingly more serious problems. But I think that if the US is the future, its not going to be like that out of a position of strength of innate superiority, but because everyone else would be weak, similar to how the New Kingdom of Ancient Egypt expanded rapidly not because it was some brutal advanced military/economic/social/political hyperpower but because everyone else just didn't really put up a fight and was basically weak. Read what Peter Zeihan has to say about this and especially China's and Russia's struggles with potential deindustrialization, food shortages, and lack of energy & natural resources.
Zeihan is a complete clown with a long track record of failed predictions. He is not a serious person.
He got some things right like the Ukraine-Russia war..
Well not really but for how much shit he throws at the wall he is bound up to get some things correct.
Wdym not really, he wrote it in his book lol
Regardless, I think that he's definitely worth keeping in mind and listening to what he says and taking into consideration his data and research
Buskirk is fellating the most important fragment of the readership of PALLADIUM MAGAZINE....his prospective patrons who aim to carry on with globalisation in one form or another no matter what.
As the oases of prosperity/safety shrink, the Buskirks will do whatever they can to secure employment/inclusion in the fortified "Elysium" style cantonments. Sacrificing one's dignity or integrity is a small price to be paid for not ending up in the feral, deindustrialized, zones where the deplorables will do battle with the replacement population and their woke allies.
I completely agree. Things are way too unstable right now to say with certainty that the current things are going to continue, but that's the problem with people like Buskirk either they're complete shills or they just cant stop living in the 90s.
I must play the white pill to beat back the clouds of despair
"United State’s continuously falling share of the world’s GDP,"
As if we were going to have 50% forever with 4.25% of the worlds population.
That is an aberration from the world wars.
We have 4.25% of the world's population and 15.78% of world GDP. That's looking pretty stable for the next few years by the way.
We also have in all my readings of history the worst ruling class ever, of course they look much worse close up, but I think no matter what bias I acknowledge they must be in the running for history's worst.
Multipolar world: Why unless we define our very core existence as THE global Empire is this a problem? It was a multi-polar world for all of human history until the summer of 1945.
It began to be a multi-polar world again when China became a nuclear power as well as India and both began to rise.
How has Empire especially when we foolishly didn't end in 1991 been good for Americans?
The logic of Empire led our elites to crush our choices about it at home, the logic of Empire is you must have total control of your own lands, your own power base.
Very good points. The Golden Era of US glory was always about relativities (economic and military) and the only certainty is change.
Your argument (and the situation itself) hinges on how the imperial experience has changed America and its fundamental condition. Is it realistic to conceive of America at this point in time as a nation-state any more? Is it not, in truth, a territory governed by an imperial state in retreat? This territory may, or may not, have the capacity to reconstitute itself as a nation. If it does, all may be well, though this is not guaranteed. If it does not, America may remain a legacy project of the liberal/imperial era for a while or even split into several legacy projects of one sort or another.
IMO it is pointless to focus simply on the continuities (largely fake and ghey) that obsess self-described conservatives. We need to identify what is new, wat has been transformed (for good or otherwise) or we risk being taken by surprise.
Regardless of all else, there is no point in despair. There is plenty to hope for. Ordinary people are not fools. As David Hume pointed put, government rests on opinion alone. The regime has already lost. There is every reason to believe that one day Q Shaman's bison horn fur hat will become a symbol of popular sovereignty and national renewal.
Philip back to basics.
1) Geography- whoever wins here can’t and won’t stop before Atlantic to Pacific.
2) The Unitary central government is an aberration caused by WW2 and the Cold War, its lost its purpose and justification.
3) Of course calling this Feudalistic Blob in DC “Unitary”, “Central”, or “Government” is false. Its a Feudal Blob of Committees. Ever shifting.
4) As it dies Power has been convulsing out of it in spasms: this is the rise of the Oligarchs (from their own necessities), the sanctuary cities for aliens and guns, the return of State Governments, Dobbs are all the return of our natural Federated governance- note the DC entity never eliminated them as the natural opponents they are BY EXPLICIT CONSTITUTIONAL DESIGN.
4). This monster blob has tossed all pretense of legitimacy and rests on bribery, blackmail, coercion, force.
5) If any successor regime wants any kind of stability they’ll bow to the necessity of Federation as the Founders did. Or it can have eternal war as Mexico does.
6) The resort to force and Troops openly as in Biden’s inauguration is always dangerous. To resort to troops when you factions are known cowards, shirkers, war profiteers, harassers and persecutors of the Troops and Police ( again the military and police are same people same families) isn’t just dangerous, its an act of insanity. Why its as crazy as Jews backing Nazis! That can never happen, right?
7) The current plan seems to be to steal as much as possible while doing maximum damage to the rest of the country, how much is calculation and how much is frenzied malice we cannot tell.
8) Its mistaken to write off 200~300 million Americans, tens of millions sworn to the Constitution, many the legitimate government sitting already at its desks, the Constitution still has the biggest team if presently no leadership, its all mistakes to write all them off simply because they are not fighting yet.
9) As history, Churchill, The King of Jordan and many fallen enemy nations can attest WHEN and IF the Americans are moved to fight their enemies regret underestimating the potential they should have left latent.
10) Finally there’s nothing new here in history, these things happen from time to time.
Cheers
TLDR Back to Basics America.
*Geography.
*Federation to be stable.
*People aren’t gone from being wished away.
*Power is being wrenched from weak hands.
*Constitutional government sitting with legitimacy at its desk.
*Madness for cowards to use force.
*No legitimacy or justification for the Feudal Entities in DC
*Its a mistake to write off half or more the country.
*The History of Americans in strife is slow to anger then lay waste the rest.
“But what if these trends do persist?”
I doubt they will
“What does this do to the idea of nation and of citizenship as well?”
Nations become more like corporations seeking to attract employees. Citizenship is a means of accessing jobs and their associated perks. This is already true of the elites and digital nomads, but it becomes normalized
“…what if WFH serves to make migration unnecessary?”
There will be a sharp difference between digital workers and physical workers. Under the assumptions made, outsourcing will continue. A worldwide labor pool will lead to a surplus of workers even with competition; pay and relative living standards will fall. Given the global competition for digital jobs, competition for local physical jobs will increase as well, worsening conditions for them as well
The globalist elites become even more wealthy
...this future seems incredibly bleak and dull
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/its-not-hypocrisy-youre-just-powerless?r=j0s6f&s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=direct
Mass immigration will lead to war, is leading to war. It, rampant immigration, is a treasonous betrayal of our countrymen and brethren, the less fortunate, not racist as claimed, rather, it is common sense and simple, laudable, self interest that animates national cohesion and measured immigration. The global elite are driving us to distraction and soon enough destruction. The temperature is rising worldwide.
NS Lyons, The upheaval substack captures this phenomenon. My Précis: they hate our guts.
I’ll read the article tomorrow!
If you mean climate change by temperature rising, yes, I see that leading to war far more than just immigration. Shrinking the global pie will do far more damage than the movement of people
I also think the US can handle most immigrants while Europe will not fair as well. The typical immigrant to the US assimilates far better than the typical immigrant in Europe, if you know what I mean
NS Lyons is fabulous
Until people realize that there is no 'political' solution, this shit will persist. You are poweless. Hopefully starvation will help sharpen people's focus and help improve their aim.
The hatred is incidental. The driving force is the collective self-aggrandisement (control and power). Reducing it to the level of emotion ("they hate our guts") is redolent of a playground-level analysis. Not that I want to offload on to you personally, Diamond Boy, but I have had it with internet commentators who project fantasies (involving the imagined motives of policy makers) onto national governments. The people who drive these policies are motivated by personal and collective empowerment. Regnant or influential ideologies form around opportunities for power and enrichment, not emotion. The psycho-effective stuff (which does exist) is a second-order phenomenon only, sometimes not even that.
Sorry for being forceful...but I just spent an hour reading commentary on geopolitics on another site that left me in despair/rage. If I was young and athletic enough, I'd go out and king-hit a mid-wit just to let off steam. Not you, Diamond Boy.
Cool, but second order is the icing on the cake, they do dismiss the dispossessed as deserving recipients of pain. I think you underestimate the motivation provided by schadenfreude: it is so very delicious.
The schadenfreude is mainly for the scum who are interested in politics and who identify closely with the regime and support its policies (provided that they are shielded from the ill-effects). These types do indeed get a very real thrill from witnessing the roll-out of Sado-Malthusian policies, as do some of the flunkies involved in implementing it. As the West declines, the value of psychic payoffs increases. It is all the regime can afford.
Well said but there is scum in all of us. Power is the goal as you rightly say but the righteous cruelty is universal
Good point! All self-aware people eschew self-congratulation and self-righteousness. I am almost pure scum myself...which makes political analysis pretty easy.
Remembered to reply after I received the latest drop notification!
I’m not sure if you are reading this piece as “Class A are liberals / leftists, Class B are conservatives / rightists” or “either side can see themselves as Class B and their enemies as Class A; the vagueness of this shows the true class A are the elites and the true class B are the masses”
If the former, I see liberals making the same complaints every day, leading me to support the latter interpretation. The elites have us at each other’s throats while they consolidate power
If recommended, I can read more NS Lyons
Strongly recommended, Read his peace about the truck or rebellion in Canada he creates a binary between Physicals and virtuals which is a perfect compendium to the piece you just read
"Nations become more like corporations seeking to attract employees. Citizenship is a means of accessing jobs and their associated perks. This is already true of the elites and digital nomads, but it becomes normalized"
Very smart.
"There will be a sharp difference between digital workers and physical workers. Under the assumptions made, outsourcing will continue. A worldwide labor pool will lead to a surplus of workers even with competition; pay and relative living standards will fall. Given the global competition for digital jobs, competition for local physical jobs will increase as well, worsening conditions for them as well"
Good point, didn't think far enough that this would also increase competition for local physical jobs.
I wish Substack had a feature where you could save people's comments to revisit later.
Maybe Yglesias isn't willing to walk the walk: https://washingtoncitypaper.com/article/454815/matt-yglesias-sweet-condo-provokes-outrage/
This type of "populism" is quite common.
Regarding remote work, I don't think we've seen anything yet. There's way, way more runway there.
Because of the internet, tons of kids around the world will grow up with decent English skills after childhoods spent watching Netflix and YouTube. English will become a lingua franca to a substantially greater extent than it already is. This will increase the pool of potential employees both for Anglosphere countries and for other countries, in Europe and elsewhere, that will increasingly operate in English in the workplace.
Time zones are an issue but not everywhere. A US company I do business with has outsourced its entire back office to South America. It seems to work, as far as I can tell. I regularly have salespeople from South American outsourcing firms reach out to me. Their employees speak English, have college degrees from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, etc., and work on US hours.
I've played with the Oculus-style VR headsets a bit. They aren't quite ready for prime time yet, but they're already impressive and will no doubt improve steadily. Once that tech matures a little, it will be much more effective than Zoom for conference-style meetings and similar things.
SpaceX's Starlink system will give people in rural areas around the world high-speed internet access, increasing the pool of potential workers.
Could probably continue this list indefinitely...
I think everything that you have said is correct, as I've seen much of this myself with my own eyes.
Yes, something very similar happened recently in the Bosnian industrial city where I spent my childhood in the 80s.
An American company bought an old cinema building in the city center more than a year ago, a beautiful piece of modernist architecture (yes, there was such a thing) and demolished it. Instead, they built a giant glass-aluminum cube staffed by young geeks in their twenties with computer skills, the generation that grew up with YouTube and social media and who speak surprisingly fluent English and work according to their American employer's time zone (from later afternoon to late at night?!)
Right across the street is the elementary school I attended back in the 80s - but today there are 3 times fewer children and a few years ago, according to its webpage "school entered into a partnership with the Canadian Embassy in Bosnia and Herzegovina with the aim of implementing an international project of youth gender awareness".
The Balkans outlasted the Hapsburgs and the Ottomans, Nazis and Communists, only to crumble under the stilleto of Uncle Samantha and her Canadian tranissaries. And to think that they talk about so-called progress.
I would be content with much of this if it meant:
- less immigration to the UK as the old excuse of needing "the best and brightest" has gone when we can just pay them and keep them out
- reversal of immigration: "we can have good jobs and be amongst our own back in India etc, why stay here"
- less traffic on roads: a quieter, calmer country
- less demand for public services
WFH to me could mean: a repopulated countryside with less pollution and traffic, more money spent in smaller towns and villages, cheaper goods as office costs drop
It could also mean: empty cities filled with yet more immigrants who, lacking menial jobs which have moved to the countryside or been automated, begin to move further afield and make an alien, crime-ridden hell-hole out of everywhere as opposed to just the large cities. Hence my desire for reversed migration. There is also the problem of tax as no doubt someone in Bangalore will object to paying UK tax for roads on which he will never drive. Not insurmountable: we can tax them at source as we do already just tax them as non-domiciled.
The 1st world is replacing unskilled laborers with tech at an extreme pace (robots in some fast food kitchens are in the news a lot recently). WFH is definitely a positive thing for rural areas, but I do believe businesses are catching on that not all of their staff bring much value.
The world's population will level out sooner than later, but "economists" always make it sound like a stagnant population is a negative thing. We need to make our economy more efficient and less just throwing bodies at the wall. What I am basically trying to say is, we are going to need a lot more mechanics in the future.
"I do believe businesses are catching on that not all of their staff bring much value". You and me both! You should have seen some of the people that I have worked with!
The 1st world is replacing skilled labour with tech and where this is not possible with immigrants or employees based in developing countries economies.
Great examples and links to an interesting thesis
Funny how it never occurs to them that policies strongly incentivizing natural increase could achieve the same effect as mass immigration. Get the average birthrate up to 4/female and the US population will reach a billion by century's end.
I'm sure they just haven't thought of that.
Immigration is cheaper than pro-family policies such as allowances per child. Also, pro-natal policies risk strengthening existing families within the domestic population...and neither the government nor big business see any advantage for themselves in doing that. The attraction of immigration is a compound of economics and social engineering.
Additionally, low birth rates and immigration both lower wages. The former at least for the first generation, since it involves women working. However, that presumes that the immigrants actually work. To take the European example, the migrants that were supposed to pay the pensions have so far been a net cost.
It's certainly possible that the technocrats did not foresee this, as they believed their own propaganda about human fungibility.
The costs of welfare are paid by taxpayers, of course, and the advantage of female labour is not simply keeping wages low but the transformation of industrial relations and the replacement of traditional families with more unstable female-led ones.
The technocrats weren't tasked with forecasting anything but the most mechanistic assessments; though the ideological blinders certainly complemented the generational ones.
Immigration has transformed social relations and this was definitely predictable to anyone who knew much about the real world. Back in the early 80s the ultra-conservative Auberon Waugh had a column in THE SPECTATOR in which he once admitted that he welcomed South Asian immigration because it was guaranteed to make England less egalitarian.
They mean harm.
We know because they do harm over time.
We also know because they tell us they hate us and want us gone.
2d reply; Asians most assuredly lessen egalitarianism.
But Hispanics are congenital fascists and they make fascism work, much better than the Italians.
Its hilarious how the schemers schemes blow up in their faces.
Yesterday I read polling data showing that College educated whites are now the actual core voting base for the Democratic Party. By double digits. I keep saying we’re back to 19th Century politics, the issue of what is truthfully Slavery has returned and the Dems answer to Lincoln is ALL SLAVES, unless you went to the correct schools.
Read A House Divided Speech and you’ll see slavery spreading was exactly the fear and motive of Republicans. It was spreading via Manipulating Procedural Outcome even then the Democratic Party’s core skill.
Well "fascism" is the future, by which I mean authoritarianism and the close co-operation of public and private power. The political, economic, social and cultural/aesthetic drivers are all converging. Any future regime that prioritises economic stability, social peace (assured by coercion) and the aesthetics of normality will do very well. The only alternative is a criminal oligarchy reliant on both a violent underclass to constrain rivals and a coalition of demanding, largely unproductive, constituencies that make social peace impossible. We can all do the math.
Given onshoring and the utility of high tech, a neo-Peronist regime (with a bit of Putin too) may emerge once the present gangsters are confined to old age homes and properly diapered. Peron was keenly interested in industrialisng Argentina, which pissed off both Washington and London (especially the former who wanted the engineers and scientists from the Reich for themselves).
Your insight re the spread of slavery touches a nerve. Lincoln was fully aware of the great unmentionable (the class dimension of slavery and the competition between free and enslaved labour). Downward social mobility, the consequences of deindustrialisation, de-skilling and wage arbitrage all blend with the ethnic issues of immigration and affirmative action and make the old New Deal coalitions unworkable.
The Democrat social engineering is about blackening the white working and middle classes...the fragmentation of the family structure, promoting weed and dumbing down education is basically the Democrats using Daniel Patrick Moynihan as a how-to-manual rather than as a warning. Malicious but predictable: all ideologies need to create the very conditions that they pretend are natural in the first place, so the Democrats instinctively level the white working and middle classes while creating a BIPOC crony capitalist elite with a militant cadre of woke NCOs to keep the masses in line (I call it Django's unchained political economy).
18 year delay, until an adult.
Does the average women want to have four children? No.
We are discussing political demographics but we cannot forget to look on an individual level.
Beyond economic factors (which certainly have an impact) many women are choosing not to partner with men because they see it as a raw deal. And THAT is going to be hard to fix; either men step up their game or pairings become forced. The former is unlikely and the latter is unpalatable.
So, we have immigration. Notably from countries with less emancipated women.
What people want and what they will settle for are separate things. The emerging national conservative agenda will go nowhere fast. Pro-natalist policies have a long history of failure.
The post patriarchal family structure now evolving in the US working and middle class is fragmented and unstable and involves mother and child as basic unit, with fathers mostly cohabiting for under a decade. Serial monogamy and co-habitation is the new norm. This family structure is ideal for Leviathan/Cthulhu because it relies on public institutions, is vulnerable to manipulation and interference by family courts, social workers and teachers and maximises female influence on young males.
Hungary seems to have made headway. I think the policies tend to fail because they're half measured bandaid solutions that don't address underlying problems.
The one Western (or semi-Western) society that has had success in this field is Israel. I expect that a distinct national identity/shared history, sense of collective purpose (even if generated by external hostility/threat) plus government policy and a bit of religion combine well. There is no doubt that the standard Western social model of family fragility/breakdown, anomie and class warfare is disastrous.
I doubt women are staying away from marriage because they think it's a raw deal. It's rather the opposite: men are staying away, because there's nothing in it for them. Women by contrast complain that they can't find partners.
We run in different circles. Either way, less people are choosing to date or marry, leading to what Phillip has described
Indeed. The question is why. Pretty clearly of marriage is a bad deal, the reason lies in the legal treatment of same. End no-fault divorce, remove the ability of women to destroy their husbands' lives on a whim, and marriage will no longer be a bad deal for men. Result should be a higher marriage rate. Of course, that should be combined with social condemnation of pre-marital sex and enabling technologies e.g. hookup apps, the pill, etc.
The law is responsible for a very great deal of mischief and clearly works to undermine and fracture existing family structures. Correcting that will be horrifically difficult, given the interest groups that would mobilise to block reform.
Fundamentally, IMO there are underlying economic factors. Women aim to marry up and the integration of women into the workforce complicates mating/assortation. So long as the post-patriarchal family structure retains economic viability it will be a problem.
Finally, I think that culture/example plays a huge role. Young people who have never witnessed a stable family life of the sort that was once traditional are left to rely on Netflix for ideas about relationships. It is amazing how rare it is to see a realistic depiction of married adult males on the screen. Older male roles are either demonic/menacing/authoritarian or inept/useless/contemptible. The infotainment industry must be having a disruptive effect, one compounded by the effect of a female teaching profession.
Economic viability is a big component. Since that's artificially maintained through entitlement programs, there's reason to expect the situation could be rapidly changed by withdrawing the entitlements.
Urbanization seems to be a factor as well, what you might call the rat utopia effect. People in high density environments seem to subconsciously recoil from having children. It follows that a reversal of the trend towards population concentration in metropoles should lead to a higher birth rate all on its own. If the WFH trend can be continued, without its being subverted via offshoring, that could end up revitalizing villages and indirectly boosting the birth rate.
Its a much rawer deal for men to get married than women .
Good riddance.