The reason for this is that if one state has better social programs then another and higher taxes the poorest are going to move there, and the high earners are going to move away.
This doesn't seem to be a major problem for the EU, which has unrestricted internal migration but social programs are administered by the individual member states.
The idea that the poor will mass migrate to California and the rich will mass migrate to South Dakota is pretty unrealistic. The poor can't afford to live in California even with social assistance, and the rich don't want to live in South Dakota no matter how low the taxes are.
Because money buys stuff taxpayers want. Middle class people want good schools and functioning transit and to know they're going to have a secure retirement. The premise of having the government do these things is that they can do them at least as well as the market. If they succeed they'll have no trouble attracting people to come there and pay taxes in exchange for receiving those services. If they fail and are then out-competed by other states that do better, whether by leaving things to the market or otherwise, isn't that a good thing? It requires the underperforming states to improve or lose population.
> This doesn't seem to be a major problem for the EU, which has unrestricted internal migration but social programs are administered by the individual member states
I might be off the mark here, but from my understanding wasn't unrestricted migration one of the big drivers behind Brexit? Or at least the idea that the "poor countries" were "taking advantage" of the "rich countries"?
A lot of the drivers behind Brexit have a tenuous relationship to facts. There are some legitimate reasons to leave, but there are also self-interested parties telling people the lies they want to be told. And "mistaken people believe this" is no support for a position.
The thing about rich people moving to places with lower taxes and poor people moving to places with more services is that it's the sort of thing that seems intuitively obvious until you actually think about it, and you realize it's like arguing that lakes are impossible because water evaporates.
It's not that water doesn't evaporate. It's not that poor people don't prefer more services and rich people don't prefer lower taxes. It's that everything is not one dimensional and there are other factors that outweigh that one by enough that the lake is still full of water.
My understanding is that unrestricted immigration has the opposite effect: rich countries taking advantage of poor ones, via “brain drain”. That’s why the average age of medicine doctors in Poland seems to be around 50: all the younger ones went to Germany or Scandinavia.
It’s true for blue collar workers as well: try hiring a contractor to remodel your house and then watch them leave the job unfinished because they got a better paying gig in UK (that actually happened to a friend of mine)
Both is true. There is brain drain as well as welfare migration. My hometown in Germany with a population of ~300k now has ~11k migrants from Romania und Bulgaria. Aside from various social problems this is also a big strain on the social systems. 85%+ of households are dependent on child support checks.
There's also the fact that Western European countries desperately need immigration for covering future pensions. Countries like Germany and Finland are the next to follow Japan's crippling issues with aging population and poor dependency ratio.
The studies I have seen referenced suggest that EU migrants to the UK are generally net contributors as they pay their taxes like everyone else but tend to travel here without dependents, be younger and eventually go home before they are too old. Migrants from outside of the UK on the other hand tend to be older and come with families so tend to be a net drain on services.
Leaving the EU will mean more migrants from outside of the EU - so will actually cause the situation a lot of Leavers were worrying about to get a lot worse.
That's taking about external migration (refugees and illegal immigrants), not internal migration under the EU's freedom of movement. Of course, the latter was a major factor in the Brexit referendum, so I wouldn't say it's not a major problem for the EU...
What's even the point of the distinction if the EU is not adequately restricting immigration from those other countries? The point remains the same: people from poor countries are mass migrating to rich countries with the most social programs. This is a major problem for the EU.
The point of distinction is that EU internal immigration and the refugee situation are entirely different things. Refugees leave there home countries because of war and terror. Members of the UN are obligated [1] to give shelter to those people.
Inside the EU there is indeed some welfare migration. This is however not only driven by social systems but also by available jobs.
Those high earners will screw up the economy of their destination state accidentally gutting the lower middle class, institute social programs to deal with the all the problems this creates, realized they just created the same dystopia they fled and move again.
It's like a perverse form of rolling upgrades.
You can see this process in action in places like CO and the PNW states which are starting to flip from "rich people move here" to "poor people move here". TX will probably start flipping soon.
Major urban areas with lots of job opportunity seem vacuum up the wealthy regardless of the state wide trend (no matter how bad NY state gets upper middle class people in search of a lucrative career will be moving to NYC). I'm not sure how that plays into things.
An honest article would say that a humanity degree signals that you're conformist and happy to tolerate boredem just as well as a STEM degree, and a STEM degree doesn't teach anything relevant either. This article says that with a humanity degree you can be just as smug as people with STEM degrees are.
I honestly feel sorry for people who have this opinion. I'm not implying that your analysis is wrong for the school you went to or even CS programs in general, but I feel that I learned a lot of relevant things in my undergraduate study and I'm sad that other people didn't have the same experience.
just a quick sampling of some stuff I did in my CS major:
* wrote a Pascal compiler from scratch
* implemented a variation of FAT32 in the linux kernel
* implemented a simple pipelined MIPS arch in vhdl
* benchmarked different versions of a parallel algorithm on a HPC cluster to see how it scaled on core count
* implemented lots of data structures in c++
some of that stuff applies directly to the work I do now. I landed a good c++ gig straight out of college, and I really appreciate all the tough c++ projects we had to do in school. amusingly the Pascal compiler also turned out to be relevant, as I now help maintain a compiler for a proprietary dialect of Pascal at work. the cpu arch, HPC, and linux stuff isn't directly applicable to my work, but the linux project was a good exposure to working in a large codebase.
not everything in a CS major is going to be directly applicable to your career, but a good program will give you strong foundations for any specialty you branch into later.
> As a rule, populists of the right (who are usually capitalists) don’t know how to divide the pie well, while populists of the left (who are usually socialists) don’t know how to grow the pie.
Right populists don't know how to grow the pie either.
There's a vast difference in the effect on a country depending on whether its competitive advantage comes from resources or people though.
If it comes from resources then the incentive to develop the people is lost and they're either bought off or ignored. Look at what happens in Russia or Venezuela or Saudi Arabia.
In the 17th century Bolivia was considered the richest country in the Americas because of the Potosi silver mine while the eastern seaboard of America was basically a poverty stricken nowhere.
Now Bolivia is the poorest country in the Americas and the US is the richest. This is basically why.
The answer is - it works fine until the resource price drops or you run out of it.
Kuwait may be fat and content now but it has a dark future ahead of it once they stop being able to live off foreign cash.
In the case of natural resource boons, where what is happening, in an economic sense, is the benefit of hundreds of millions to billions of years of natural capital appreciation extracted with no realised economic cost. This is a vast unbooked. cost, but still a real one. Separation taxes reimpose this in part.
Most other cases of competitive advantage lack this element, though network-based superiority resembles it in parts (comms, transport, trade, urbanisation, IT, banking, military & political power).
How much you pay in taxes does not depend on how much you use roads. So it doesn't incentivise people to use roads less. That's the point of road congestion pricing.
That's not a difference compared to straight buying policy, since you lose the purchase price unconditionally for that. The difference is that you have a chance of getting a refund of some size for buying the policy, depending on some aggregate welfare measure (but not actually particularly on the specific effect of the policy you bought.)
So you're saying futarchy is flawed because the metric measured will be gamed? How is it different from the present system, where legislative power has all the same incentives to only implement laws favouring the wealthy? IMO, futarchy is strictly not worse than the state of art. No one is claiming it's flawless.
> So you're saying futarchy is flawed because the metric measured will be gamed?
No. I'm saying that it is flawed because it introduced additional avenues for the influence of wealth to work (both “legitimately” and corruptly), makes the decisions for which decision-makers are accountable to the public less capable of being effectively overseen and evaluated by the electorate, because the kind of evaluation of policy it calls for is impossible (not merely impractical, though parts of it are that), that any revision to make it possible and practical adds a whole new set of problems (not least is likely to be a strong new incentives for ignoring long-term effects), and that it doesn't even begin to solve any actual, real problem.
> How is it different from the present system
That's kind of addressed above, but even if it wasn't, the idea of futarchy is it is better than the present system, not a layer of complication and indirection which retains the flaws of the present system.
