mass immigration

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The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam by Douglas Murray

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, centre right, cognitive dissonance, deindustrialization, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentrification, glass ceiling, high net worth, illegal immigration, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, open borders, post-industrial society, white flight

It is a habit Europe has got into, and one which becomes harder to kick with each passing year. DIVERSITY One of the most striking things about the arguments for ongoing mass migration into European countries is that they are so readily able to shift. Whenever the economic cases for mass immigration are briefly dislodged, along come moral or cultural arguments. Without making any concession they state a position along these lines: ‘Let us pretend that mass migration does not make us financially richer. It does not matter, because mass migration makes us rich in other ways. In fact even if it makes us financially poorer, what you lose in economic benefits you will pick up in cultural benefits.’

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Because such things are so obvious, it requires a concerted effort to pretend they are untrue. One example of just such an effort is the report that was a foundation document for the wave of mass migration during the Blair government. ‘Migration: An Economic and Social Analysis’ was completed in 2000, a joint production of the Home Office Economics and Resource Analysis Unit and the Cabinet Office Performance and Innovation Unit (even their names seeming designed to bore any opponents to inattention). Both entities were staffed with people already known to be in favour of mass immigration and therefore clearly intended to provide ‘intellectual ballast’ to support the existing views of ministers.1 Among the claims of this seminal report was that ‘overall, migrants have little aggregate effect on native wages or employment’.

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The cliché of the ‘average immigrant’ being an economic boon for the country only works when such exceptions are made to appear as though they are the rule. All efforts to make an economic case for mass immigration rely on this trick. Among those to have used it are EU Commissioner Cecilia Malmström and UN Representative Peter Sutherland. In a 2012 piece they suggested that unless Europe opens its borders to mass migration, ‘Entrepreneurs, migrants with Ph.Ds’ and others will all be ‘flocking to places like Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, Mexico, China, and India’, thus leaving Europe to be a more impoverished place.2 One of the few studies in this area is from the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration at University College London.

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success by Ross Douthat

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Because climate change and population imbalances and mass migration are not problems dropping like European microbes out of a clear blue Mesoamerican sky, nor are they accidental Y2K or nuclear-launch disasters that can be feared but not exactly predicted. Instead, they are challenges that follow from long-term technological and economic trends, long-term patterns of human behavior—which in turn means that they’re the kinds of trends that a vigorous, nondecadent, advanced civilization should have been able to cope with and head off before they led to some dégringolade. If mass migration ultimately overthrows the Western political order, there will be a cautionary story told by reactionaries ever after, in which the foolish elites of America and Europe couldn’t see that their relaxed attitude toward immigration and their indifference to the most basic aspect of human flourishing imaginable, the birthrate, were both species of decadence, which richly merited the destruction that followed.

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And the consequence would be what Bill McKibben, one of the most eloquent climate alarmists, calls the “shrinking” of the planet: “Until now, human beings have been spreading, from our beginnings in Africa, out across the globe—slowly at first, and then much faster. But a period of contraction is setting in as we lose parts of the habitable earth.” At a sufficient scale, that contraction would accelerate mass migration to a point where it ceases to be politically manageable. In the Syrian refugee crisis, in which drought played a supporting role, you had a preview of how migration can upend political normalcy in the developed world. If that one crisis helped give us Brexit and Trump and various populist victories across the European continent, it’s not hard to see how a rolling, decades-long pattern of climate-driven migrations could put stresses on the developed world that our sclerotic institutions and political coalitions simply aren’t prepared to bear.

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The Neo-Medieval Future If something like this happens, we will look back on Trump-era disturbances and recognize them not as the playacting that they often seem to be but as a kind of dress rehearsal for a looming tragedy—Karl Marx’s dictum about history repeating as tragedy followed by farce, but in reverse. And more even than in the first scenario, the scenario of economic crisis, in the climate crisis/mass migration scenario, impulses that today belong (at least officially) to the disreputable extremes will become near universal. In a landscape of rolling calamity and constant migration, the concepts of reform, renewal, and renaissance will lose their salience entirely, and what will be sought, quite understandably, is a kind of Augustus or Diocletian option for the West: a figure or figures capable of imposing order, guaranteeing public safety, and ensuring continuity of government when all else seems to be melting into swiftly warming air.

Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World by Gaia Vince

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It’s easier for people whose lives are relatively comfortable to appreciate the benefits of migration; poorer people in ‘left-behind’ towns can be fearful of the impact of immigrants. Given the mass immigration that is coming as people are displaced everywhere, it is the job of political leaders to reassure them – not stoke these fears – with policies that reduce poverty and create housing, services and jobs for everyone. This coming mass migration has been clearly signposted for at least a decade, as we have accelerated towards global climate change. There is no excuse for lack of preparedness from our leaders. The way migration is ‘managed’ today is a moral, social and economic failure – lives are being needlessly wasted daily.

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In the coming decades, many will be receiving applications in at least the hundreds of thousands. Consider that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine created 10 million refugees in just the first three weeks. It’s to be expected that people will have concerns about mass migration, particularly in places with small, fairly homogeneous populations. These fears are a significant issue, and must be tackled if climate migration at scale is to be peaceful and successful for migrants and host communities. Managed well, mass migration will be part of life and cosmopolitan societies will be considered unremarkable by the generation who do not remember more homogeneous times. Younger, urban people are already comfortable with a far greater diversity of people than their grandparents are, and this is partly a reflection of demographic change: in the US, just 18 per cent of the post-war baby boomer generation is non-white; whereas almost half of Gen Z, those born 1997 to 2012, are of Black, Latino or Asian heritage.

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Globally, for every 0.1°C rise in temperature, the number of sinkholes increases by 1–3 per cent.15 Heat even causes flights to be grounded, as planes struggle to take off in temperatures above 43°C.16 There will be manifold problems societies face as we move suddenly into a very different world. The date when scientists expect extreme heat to make parts of the world uninhabitable is also shifting closer because newer models now realize it will happen at lower global temperatures. Researchers initially put this threshold for mass migrations within a 5°C scenario; it’s now between 3°C and 4°C, although even at a global temperature rise of below 2°C, at least a billion people would have to move.17 At 4°C, models show that exposure to extreme heat globally increases more than thirty-fold, compared to today, while in Africa it increases by at least a hundred times.18 And it is not only the tropics; mid-latitude and even sub-polar regions will experience months of heatwave temperatures every year.

Where We Are: The State of Britain Now by Roger Scruton

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The Scots and the Protestant Irish accepted to be included in the revised conception of the country, and the Act of Union with Ireland of 1800, followed by the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, invited the Irish fully to share in the deal. The years that followed were not harmonious: the Highland clearances continued, as did the oppression of the Irish smallholders, exacerbating the disastrous famine of 1845–52. So too did the mass migration to the industrial towns, the exploitation of child labour, and the dehumanizing factory regimes. However, as I noted above, the British do not, as a rule, confront problems with an attitude of resignation and laissez-faire. Their instinct is to combine in order to solve them. The Factory Acts, the Friendly Societies, Building Societies, church schools and people’s dispensaries, the Chartist movement, the second Reform Bill extending the franchise to large sections of working-class men, the growth of the Labour movement – these and many other social and political initiatives overcame the worst of the problems in England, and ensured that the pre-political ‘we’ of Britain was strong enough to reconcile the many resentments.

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Fair-mindedness, acceptance of eccentricity and a reluctance to take offence, combined with an aversion towards abuse and slander – all these were attributes of the British, and belonged to them by virtue of public institutions in which they placed their trust and which they were tutored to defend both in thought and deed against those who might otherwise destroy them. Such citizens fought for the freedom of their country, and for their own freedom as part of it. And that, in a nutshell, was the British character. Nothing in history stays still, however. Years of peace and prosperity, the decline of the Christian faith, mass migration and the spread of global trade and communications – these and other vast changes have produced a generation of young people more attuned to networks that connect them to their peers than to the liberties that their grandparents fought for. They have not been confronted in their lives with the emergency to which patriotism is the only cogent response, although the jihadists are trying hard to rectify this.

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Without the countryside and all that it means there would be no Coleridge or Wordsworth, no Jane Austen, no Brontë sisters, no Walter Scott, no George Eliot or Thomas Hardy, no Elgar, Vaughan Williams or Ivor Gurney, no Constable, Crome or Turner. When, in the nineteenth century, people began to confront the questions posed by the mass migration to the cities and the rise of the factories, therefore, it was in part with a view to protecting the countryside from further spoliation at the hands of the industrialists. This feeling for the countryside has profoundly influenced urbanization in both England and Scotland. From the eighteenth century onwards developers have provided potted versions of the rural environment – green squares, small parks, tree-lined streets, sometimes gardens front and rear – with scant respect for the kind of economy of land use that we witness in Italy or France.

Exodus: How Migration Is Changing Our World by Paul Collier

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But in this instance the argument smacks of a sleight of hand. To see the limitations of an argument, it sometimes helps to guy it to an extreme. Suppose, entirely hypothetically, that mass immigration led to the exodus of most of the indigenous population, but that the remainder intermarried with immigrants and their joint descendants ended up better off. Knowing this ex ante, the indigenous population might reasonably determine that mass immigration was not in its interest. Whether it would then be legitimate for this perceived self-interest to translate into restrictions on entry would depend upon whether freedom of movement is a global right.

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Currently, the most high-profile settlers are Jewish Israelis: while the rights of Jewish settlement of the Occupied Territories are hotly disputed—and entirely outside the scope of this book—no one attempts to justify Jewish settlement on the grounds that it is beneficial for indigenous Palestinians. In the post-Napoleonic period, when mass migration to North America took off, the group with the greatest appetite to become settlers was the Protestant community in the north of Ireland (emigration by Catholics from southern Ireland did not take off until after the potato famine of the 1840s). The most likely explanation for this propensity is that the Protestants in the north of Ireland were already settlers, brought in from Scotland and England by successive British governments to establish a loyalist population in the unruly colony.

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Extreme libertarianism denies the right of governments to restrict individual freedom, in this instance the freedom of movement. Universalist utilitarianism wants to maximize world utility by whatever means. The best possible outcome would be if the entire world population moved to the country in which people were most productive, leaving the rest of the earth empty. A useful supplement to such mass migration would be if Robin Hood could rob all the rich people and transfer the money to all the poor people, although economists would caution Robin to temper robbery with concern for incentives. Evidently, neither of these philosophies provides an ethical framework by which a democratic society would wish to navigate migration policy.

The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World by Paul Morland

active measures, agricultural Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, clean water, Corn Laws, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Donald Trump, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, open immigration, Ponzi scheme, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, sceptred isle, stakhanovite, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce, working-age population

Attitudes to immigration correlate more closely to an ‘out’ vote than to any other factors, other than to the EU itself. Moreover, support for Germany’s far-right AfD surged after the highly publicised mass migrations of Syrians in the summer of 2015. Without its early lead in the demographic transformation, Britain could not have exported its people to run an empire on which the sun never set. Without the sharp drop in fertility rates that followed–and the simultaneous rapid expansion of populations in lands where Britain had once ruled–mass immigration and the arrival of a more multicultural society would almost certainly not have happened. If one wishes to understand why Californians speak English or why there are five times more Muslims than Methodists in the UK, consider the great forces of population change in recent times.

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Estimates vary–the record keeping was not very good–and of course many people came back, complicating the picture, but one estimate is that in the 1850s alone, more than 1 million people left the country.7 By contrast, in the peak year for immigration in the century before the First World War, barely 12,000 from outside the UK came to stay.8 Given that there was a mass migration out of England, and yet its population nearly quadrupled in the course of the century, the cause of the population growth must have been a vastly greater number of births than deaths, sufficient not only to generate this large domestic population growth but also to fuel the emigration. The poor, narrow streets of London’s East End, into which Jews were packed by the end of the century, representing the bulk of immigration into the country, counted as nothing when compared to the vast spaces into which emigrants poured out from Britain, in Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and beyond.

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When the musical West Side Story received its premiere in 1957, featuring the line ‘Puerto Rica–you lovely island… always the hurricanes blowing, always the population growing’, the women of this US dependency in the Caribbean were bearing nearly five children each; today they are having one and a half. (In fact, even in the late 1950s the population was not growing, despite the high fertility rate, thanks to mass migration to the US mainland.) The rise in life expectancy and fall of infant mortality are objectives which all societies will achieve if they can. It is a biological imperative and part of human nature to want to preserve one’s own life, to put off the moment of death and to do what one can to preserve the lives of one’s nearest and dearest, particularly one’s children.

Divided: Why We're Living in an Age of Walls by Tim Marshall

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Donald Trump, end world poverty, facts on the ground, gentrification, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, it's over 9,000, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, openstreetmap, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, the built environment, trade route, unpaid internship, urban planning

It is not just about immigration; it is also about economies, trade, sovereignty and liberalism in general. But, as we cope with the new realities of mass immigration and the moral necessity to take in refugees, we must not lose sight of core values. If we do, we may condemn all future Europeans, from whatever background, to live in a more repressive society than at present. It’s worth remembering that most of those coming to Europe are trying to get away from despotic regimes that have failed them. We need to deal with radical Islamism, manage mass migration and care for refugees, but in a manner that does not undermine our liberal values and rule-of-law-based systems.

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Berlin, Germany and then Europe were united once more. They were heady times in which some intellectuals predicted an end of history. However, history does not end. In recent years, the cry ‘Tear down this wall’ is losing the argument against ‘fortress mentality’. It is struggling to be heard, unable to compete with the frightening heights of mass migration, the backlash against globalization, the resurgence of nationalism, the collapse of Communism and the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath. These are the fault lines that will shape our world for years to come. We are seeing walls being built along borders everywhere. Despite globalization and advances in technology, we seem to be feeling more divided than ever.

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To achieve this involves a mass uprooting of people, along with the destruction of villages and the building of cities, megacities, roads and high-speed railways. The majority of the movement continues to be from west to east, the west still tending to be more rural, with higher illiteracy rates; the east, especially towards the seaboard, is increasingly urban and oriented towards technology, industry and business. However, the mass migration to the cities reveals and exacerbates another gap within the urban population, again between rich and poor. It has been created by the hukou system, a form of registration that is rooted in the social structure of the country. It is one of the things that have helped to entrench the perception of the rural population as second-class citizens.

The Next Great Migration by Sonia Shah

Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, British Empire, climate change refugee, colonial rule, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Donald Trump, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fellow of the Royal Society, Garrett Hardin, GPS: selective availability, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, index card, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Ken Thompson, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, open borders, out of africa, Scientific racism, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, TED Talk, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl

Conservationists warn of the “invasive” appetites of alien species moving into habitats already populated by native ones. Biomedical experts warn of migrant species carrying foreign microbes into new places, sparking epidemics that will threaten the public health. Foreign policy experts predict instability and violence as the necessary result of mass migrations forced by climate change. Antimigrant politicians speak of economic calamity and worse. The idea of migration as a disruptive force has fueled my own work as a journalist. For years I reported and wrote about the damage caused by biota on the move. I investigated how mosquitoes flitting across landscapes and nations infected societies with malaria parasites, shaping the rise and fall of empires, and how cholera bacteria traveling across continents in the bodies of traders and travelers triggered pandemics that reshaped the global economy.

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Meanwhile, in the cavernous halls of the UN Security Council,10 where officials debated the use of armed forces to secure the international order from threats such as drug trafficking, terrorism, and weapons of mass destruction, attention turned instead to the dangers posed by climate-driven migrants. By 2011 officials at the council had held two open debates on the subject. At the time, the specter of mass migration had been an abstraction, like the hordes of zombies featured on hit television programs. Then political and geographical circumstances conspired to create a spectacle, one in which migrants materialized in conspicuous masses, just as Kaplan and the others had warned, on Europe’s southern shores.

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In fact, countries such as Greece and Hungary had plenty17 of accommodations and jobs to offer newcomers. In Athens, three hundred thousand residential properties stood vacant. In Hungary, a critical labor shortage meant employers couldn’t find sufficient workers to fill vacant posts. But for many observers, the newly conspicuous spectacle of mass migration appeared ominous. They saw an army of robotic migrants, full of disruptive and destructive potential. By 2015 over a million people from Syria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere had found their way into Europe, primarily Germany but also Sweden and elsewhere.18 In their wake, a wave of politicians promising harsh new measures against migrants swept into power across Europe and the United States.

Them and Us: How Immigrants and Locals Can Thrive Together by Philippe Legrain

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean tech, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, digital divide, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, job automation, Jony Ive, labour market flexibility, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, moral hazard, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, open immigration, postnationalism / post nation state, purchasing power parity, remote working, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, WeWork, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working-age population

While arrivals at Ellis Island were vetted to weed out those ‘liable to become a public charge’, only one in fifty was denied entry. The exodus from Europe was unprecedented. First Britons, then Irish and Germans moved. Soon they were joined by Scandinavians and others from north-western Europe. Later, Italians, Poles and other southern and eastern Europeans crossed the Atlantic too. At the peak of this mass migration in the first decade of the twentieth century, nearly 9 million Europeans moved to the US, nearly 2.5 million to Argentina and Brazil, more than 1.5 million to Australia and New Zealand and over 1 million to Canada.13 In 1907 alone 1.3 million Europeans moved to the US. Since the US population was only 76 million in 1900, the rate of new arrivals was far greater than today.

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Williamson, Globalization and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy, MIT, 1999. 18 Adam McKeown, ‘Global Migration, 1846–1940’, Journal of World History, 15:2, 2004, pp. 155–89. 19 Oriana Bandiera, Imran Rasul and Martina Viarengo, ‘The Making of Modern America: Migratory Flows in the Age of Mass Migration’, Journal of Development Economics, 102, 2013, pp. 23–47. 20 Quoted in John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State, Cambridge, 2000. 3 Post-1945 Migration 1 Richard Cavendish, ‘Arrival of SS Empire Windrush’, History Today, 48:6, June 1998. https://www.historytoday.com/archive/months-past/arrival-ss-empire-windrush 2 David Olusoga, ‘The Windrush story was not a rosy one even before the ship arrived’, Guardian, 22 April 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/22/windrush-story-not-a-rosy-one-even-before-ship-arrived 3 Marc Wadsworth, ‘Sam King obituary’, Guardian, 30 June 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jun/30/sam-king-obituary 4 Rachel Sylvester, ‘Both sides now: inside the rise of Sajid Javid’, Prospect, 27 January 2019. https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/both-sides-now-inside-the-rise-of-sajid-javid 5 Dave Hill, ‘Zac Versus Sadiq: The Fight to Become London Mayor’, Double Q, 2016. 6 Henry McDonald, ‘Leo Varadkar, gay son of Indian immigrant, to be next Irish PM’, Guardian, 2 June 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/02/leo-varadkar-becomes-irelands-prime-minister-elect 7 ONS, ‘Population of the UK by country of birth and nationality.

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Since low-skilled migration to Denmark from those countries is almost impossible, the migrants are almost all refugees. 34 Sarit Cohen Goldner and Chang-Tai Hsieh, ‘Macroeconomic and Labor Market Impact of Russian Immigration in Israel’, May 2000. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228885737_Macroeconomic_and_Labor_Market_Impact_of_Russian_Immigration_in_Israel 35 The finding that post-Soviet migrants did not harm Israelis’ labour-market outcomes is confirmed by Rachel Friedberg, ‘The Impact of Mass Migration on the Israeli Labor Market’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, CXVI:4, 2001, pp. 1373–408. https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Economics/Faculty/Rachel_Friedberg/Links/Friedberg%20QJE.pdf 36 Olivier Blanchard, Florence Jaumotte and Prakash Loungani, ‘Labor Market Policies and IMF Advice in Advanced Economies during the Great Recession’, IMF Staff Discussion Note 13/02, 2013. https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2013/sdn1302.pdf 12 Demographic Dividend 1 Japan’s elderly accounted for 28.4 percent of its population in 2018, a proportion that is expected to reach 30 percent by 2025.

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin

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Some of the Taiping program would later be adopted by Sun Yat-sen, who would overthrow the imperial regime, and then by Mao Tse-tung and the Communists.15 The Revolt against Mass Migration The contemporary versions of peasant rebellions, particularly in Europe and the United States, are in large part a reaction against globalization and the mass influx of migrants from poor countries with very different cultures. The numbers of international migrants worldwide swelled from 173 million in 2000 to 258 million in 2017; of these, 78 million were living in Europe and 50 million in the United States.16 Mass migration from poorer to wealthier countries seems all but unstoppable, given the great disparities between them.

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Today a majority of the world’s people live in countries with fertility rates well below replacement level.20 This number will grow to 75 percent by 2050, according to the United Nations; many societies, including some in the developing world, can expect a rapidly aging population and a precipitous decline in workforce numbers.21 Overall world population growth could all but end by 2040, says Wolfgang Lutz, and be in decline by 2060.22 Shrinking populations in advanced countries will threaten economic growth by limiting the size of the labor force, and will undermine the fiscal viability of the welfare state.23 This is one reason for the receptiveness of Western governments to high levels of immigration from poorer countries, which continue to produce offspring more prodigiously than wealthier countries. Between now and 2050, half of all global population growth is expected to take place in Africa.24 A widening demographic imbalance between the poorer and wealthier countries could cause more disruption in both spheres, and lead to a reprise of the mass migrations that did much to undermine the ancient empires of Europe and Asia.25 Social conflict resulting from high levels of immigration from poorer countries is already a prominent feature of Western politics and seems likely to fester in the coming decades.26 The Technology Gap Technological advances once fueled growing prosperity for the many.

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But as James Burnham noted, they generally share an ideology of “managerialism,” centered on efficiency in producing the results desired by managers themselves. As the managerial class grows in power, it becomes more self-referential. Its members are responsible not to the citizenry, but only to other managers and to those regarded as part of a qualified peer group.57 The complexity of problems facing our society—climate change, mass migration, or the effects of technology, for example—may often seem beyond the competency of elected representatives. If higher education made for better people with wiser judgment, it might be tolerable to hand great powers for controlling society to highly educated experts. But as Aldous Huxley observed, scientists and other experts do not own a monopoly on either virtue or political wisdom.58 There are clear dangers in ceding too much power to unelected and unaccountable elites who claim moral authority or expertise backed by higher education.

Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future by Ian Goldin, Geoffrey Cameron, Meera Balarajan

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, conceptual framework, creative destruction, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, endogenous growth, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, labour mobility, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, life extension, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, machine readable, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, open borders, out of africa, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, Richard Florida, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, spice trade, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce, working-age population

In 1889, the International Emigration Conference defended the freedom of movement as a natural right: “We affirm the right of the individual to the fundamental liberty accorded to him by every civilized nation to come and go and dispose of his person and his destinies as he pleases.”76 International migration may have been fiercely contested from some corners and for some people during the late nineteenth century—particularly the Chinese, and also southern Europeans and Slavs—but an ideology of economic openness and liberalism prevailed overall. Transatlantic Migration The period between 1840 and 1914 is commonly referred to as the “age of mass migration” because of the rapid increase in free mobility during this time.77 Mass migration raised the labor force of the United States and Australia by one-third, and reduced the labor force in Europe by about one-eighth. The average number of Europeans migrating to North America increased from about 300,000 per year in 1850 to around 600,000 per year in the 1870s, and then almost doubled again to over 1 million migrants annually at the beginning of the twentieth century.

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The prevailing rationales for free movement and open borders were ethical—that people had the right to move—and economic—that the movement of people responded to similar economic forces (namely, supply and demand) as the movement of goods and capital. At times of major economic or social upheaval—such as the Irish famine, the anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia, or rapid industrialization—the result of open borders was mass migration. Two significant aspects of the nineteenth-century migration to the New World are less recognized than the fact of mass migration itself. First, a large number of migrants returned to their home countries after several years—half of those leaving Spain and Italy, for example. Second, sending countries went through life cycles of emigration. The volume of migrants remained high during the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, but the sources of emigrants shifted over time.12 The flow of people rose to a peak as the demographic push factors and economic pull factors increased, and descended into a valley as they diminished.

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“Ritualization of Regulation: The Enforcement of Chinese Exclusion in the United States and China,” The American Historical Review 108(2): 377–403. 84. Hatton and Williamson, 1998. 85. Harzig, Hoerder, and Gabaccia, 2009: 37. 86. Winder, 2004: 196. 87. Ibid.: 229. 88. Hatton and Williamson, 1998. 89. Timothy Hatton and Jeffrey Williamson. 1998. The Age of Mass Migration: Causes and Economic Impact. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. 90. Carl Solberg. 1978. “Mass Migrations in Argentina, 1870–1970,” in William H. McNeill and Ruth Adams (eds.), Human Migration: Patterns and Policies. London: Indiana University Press, p. 148. 91. Solberg, 1978: 151. 92. Hatton and Williamson, 1998. 93. Herbert S. Klein. 1995.

Shadows of Empire: The Anglosphere in British Politics by Michael Kenny, Nick Pearce

battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, colonial rule, corporate governance, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global reserve currency, imperial preference, informal economy, invention of the telegraph, Khartoum Gordon, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Nixon shock, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Steve Bannon, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, Washington Consensus

As the British Empire declined in the twentieth century, this Anglo-world came to form the core of a new ‘Anglo-America’ – an economic, political, ideological and military constellation through which the USA first assumed, and then exercised, global hegemony (as we shall see, the ‘special relationship’ between the UK and the USA is a central axis upon which debate about the Anglosphere would come to turn). The nineteenth century witnessed explosive population growth in the Anglo-world. From 1790 to 1930, the number of English speakers grew sixteenfold, from 12 million to 200 million, far outstripping population growth anywhere else in the world.9 This demographic surge was underpinned by mass migration from the British Isles to the USA and the settler societies of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. In the course of little over a century after the end of the Napoleonic wars, 25 million people migrated from the United Kingdom to these countries and the smaller enclaves of the Empire.10 The USA was the most popular destination, particularly for Irish migrants, and drew two-thirds of people leaving the British Isles up until the end of the nineteenth century.

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Migration to South Africa was smaller in scale, despite its late nineteenth-century mineral and gold booms, while Canada became the primary magnet at the turn of the twentieth century for British migrants, drawn to the rapid economic growth of its prairie towns. Although the USA remained the preferred destination for the Irish migrants, the dominions together took nearly 60 per cent of British emigrants in the years running up to the First World War. These were peak years for mass migration to the ‘Old Commonwealth’, as it would later become known.11 Migration on this scale was made possible by the revolutions in transport and communications that took place in the Victorian age. The growth in power and speed of steamships dramatically reduced the cost, in time and money, of long-distance travel.

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Increasingly, it came to be seen as a portal through which various alien peoples could enter the country, and a reactive current of sentiment began to gather around a more tightly drawn, insular sense of the nation. Towards the end of his own career, Churchill was troubled by the emergence of immigration as a popular concern in Britain and expressed considerable scepticism about whether the indigenous population would tolerate mass immigration from the non-white peoples of the Commonwealth. In conversation in 1954 he remarked about the problems that ‘will arise if many coloured people settle here. Are we to saddle ourselves with colour problems in the UK?’32 Conclusions During the middle decades of the last century, the decline of the British Empire was widely viewed as irreversible, although politicians and political parties continued to argue, often sharply, over how quickly decolonisation should happen, how the British state should manage this process, and how its relationships with its former colonies should be arranged.

Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia

anti-communist, antiwork, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, California gold rush, clean water, climate change refugee, collective bargaining, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark matter, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, extractivism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, G4S, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, land reform, late capitalism, lockdown, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, pension reform, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, social distancing, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

—Astra Taylor, author of Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone “Confused about how we got to this point? Harsha Walia explains clearly and concisely the multiple forces causing global poverty and displacement—and the resistance and organizing around the world. Walia provides a historical analysis of policies that have cut down people’s well-being and driven poverty, violence, terror, and mass migration, and highlights the myriad forms of resistance and organizing that are all too often invisibilized. An excellent explanation of borders, migration, and the exploitative systems that produce both.” —Victoria Law, author of Resistance Behind Bars “Harsha Walia’s decades of visionary leadership in border abolition and migrant justice work, along with her relentless intellectual rigor, is apparent in this immensely important book, arriving right when we need it most.

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Language such as “migrant crisis,” and the often-corresponding “migrant invasion,” is a pretext to shore up further border securitization and repressive practices of detention and deportation. Such representations depict migrants and refugees as the cause of an imagined crisis at the border, when, in fact, mass migration is the outcome of the actual crises of capitalism, conquest, and climate change. The border crisis, as I argue in the first part, is more accurately described as crises of displacement and immobility, preventing both the freedom to stay and the freedom to move. American liberals may demand an end to excessive violence against Latinx migrants and refugees, exemplified in their opposition to concentration camps or family separation, but they rarely locate immigration and border policies within broader systemic forces.

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In the middle of the coronavirus crisis, thousands of garment workers, left without wages for a month during a government-ordered shutdown, desperately returned to work for a pittance in overcrowded garment factories in the US-funded Caracol Industrial Park zone in northern Haiti.36 The long shadow of attempts to subjugate Haiti provides the context for Haitian mass migration and ensuing mass expulsion from the US in the 1980s. During the Cold War, Haitian refugees fleeing US destabilization were detained and deported, while Vietnamese refugees characterized as fleeing despotic communist People’s Army and Viet Cong forces were rescued and welcomed, thus revealing the geopolitics of the refugee order.

Melting Pot or Civil War?: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders by Reihan Salam

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bonfire of the Vanities, charter city, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, gentrification, ghettoisation, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, job automation, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mass immigration, megacity, new economy, obamacare, open borders, open immigration, race to the bottom, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, two tier labour market, upwardly mobile, urban decay, working poor

Instead, workers in South Korea and Vietnam are collaborating in ways that allow the former country to remain relatively egalitarian while making Vietnam far more productive and affluent than it would have been in the absence of South Korean investment. A devoted cosmopolitan might fault South Korea’s voters for not being enlightened enough to welcome the prospect of admitting lots of Vietnamese workers, but the deepening of economic ties between South Korea and Vietnam seems to be working out rather well for all concerned, even without mass migration. This example might strike you as counterintuitive. It often seems as though protectionism and immigration restriction are a package deal. And as a matter of cultural sensibilities, they do tend to go together. Simply put, the kind of people who celebrate free trade tend to be the kind of people who have a taste for change, which makes them more favorably disposed toward the free movement of people across borders.11 Similarly, on the other side of the political fence, immigration skeptics are often motivated by a sense of nostalgia, which inclines them to oppose offshoring, automation, and other forces that threaten to change the look and feel of society.

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The book is a prescient case for alarm about the ways in which rapid demographic change is affecting America’s political psyche. The widening racial gap in party identification, in particular, bespeaks “a nation in danger of being driven apart.” But even in the face of this trend, the authors never consider paring back the mass immigration policies that brought it about. Instead they hope that diversity will eventually bury ethnic conflict and usher in a more liberal future—though they acknowledge an alternate possibility, where “the racial divide in US party politics expands to a racial chasm, and the prospects for racial conflict swell.”

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This was Trump’s core issue during the primaries; the force that animated his base; the unifying theme of the populist explosion that has transformed politics throughout the Western world. Much academic and journalistic writing on immigration is defined by what might be called the Backlash Paradox. On the one hand, it is clear to most liberal scholars and journalists that mass immigration has contributed to racism and polarization. On the other, they view slowing the pace of immigration as a callow surrender to bigotry, so the only option is to double down on the status quo and hope that the storm passes—even if this approach risks triggering an “extinction-level event” for open societies.

The Zionist Ideas: Visions for the Jewish Homeland—Then, Now, Tomorrow by Gil Troy

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, demand response, different worldview, European colonialism, financial independence, ghettoisation, guns versus butter model, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mount Scopus, Nelson Mandela, one-state solution, open immigration, Silicon Valley, union organizing, urban planning, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

After the war, Jabotinsky was the least hopeful of all the Zionists that the British would provide real support or smooth relations with the Arabs during the expected period of mass immigration. During the Arab riots of 1920, he organized a self-defense corps in Jerusalem. The British military administration sentenced him to fifteen years for illegal possession of arms—instigating a storm. He was soon pardoned and the conviction subsequently revoked. Jabotinsky’s reputation was now at its height. He was elected to the Zionist Executive in 1921, but he and Chaim Weizmann clashed. Jabotinsky believed in rapid mass immigration to Palestine and in mobilizing Jewish military and police units; Weizmann called for careful colonization and trusted the British.

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Still, a new challenge emerged: surviving. The ongoing fight for Israel’s existence then entailed repeated restatements of the essential Zionist idea. As the state developed amid crushing conditions—facing wars, international repudiation, terrorism, hostile internal populations, and waves of mass migration—leaders kept updating the Zionist vision for war and peace, for democracy and prosperity. Underlying all this was the question Herzl never fully resolved: Should the Jewish state be a normal state or an exceptional light unto the nations? This first selection, Israel’s Declaration of Independence, captures the two sides of Zionism—a movement that is both particular and universal, tempering ethnic nationalism with essential civic and democratic dimensions.

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The current borders of our state guarantee security and peace while expanding the horizons that once were missing, encouraging a thorough national renewal, physically and spiritually. Within these borders, all will enjoy freedom and equality: the fundamental rights the State of Israel provides all of its inhabitants, with no distinctions. Our future depends on the two principles of continuing aliyah, immigration, and settling the land. A mass migration from all over the Jewish Diaspora is an essential condition for fulfilling the Land of Israel’s full national destiny. The new missions and possibilities this era evokes will trigger a new awakening and focus for the People of Israel and the Land of Israel. . . . The Green Space: Without Zionism, It’ll Never Happen (1991) The Green Space is Eretz Yisra’el, the Land of Israel. . . .

Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats by Maya Goodfellow

Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, collective bargaining, colonial rule, creative destruction, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, European colonialism, fake news, falling living standards, G4S, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jeremy Corbyn, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megacity, moral panic, open borders, open immigration, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, Scientific racism, W. E. B. Du Bois, Winter of Discontent, working poor

If all movement were just a case of following the money, author and professor Arun Kundnani writes, ‘everyone in Greece would have moved to Luxembourg where they could instantly double their wages’.49 Many people can’t scrape together enough money to move, and many others might not want to move in the first place. The frenzied discussion about ‘mass migration’ ignores that the vast majority of people stay where they are or move within countries. In 2016, estimates suggested only 3.2 per cent of the world’s population were international migrants; in 1960 it was 3 per cent.50 The world’s population has grown substantially in this period, so although this amounts to more people moving, it’s not a significantly higher proportion than in the past.

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Instead, most analysts focus on the hard statistics on immigration, arguing that it became such a big issue because New Labour relaxed the system too much and let too many people in. In 2009, Andrew Neather, former adviser to Tony Blair and the Home Office, gave succour to this line of argument when he wrote that Labour had an intentional policy to ‘open up the UK to mass migration’.10 An article treasured by the far right, this is taken as proof that Labour were part of an elite group colluding to change the country right under the noses of ‘ordinary’ people but without their consent. The facts seem to be on their side. Between 1993 and 2011 the number of people in the UK who were born abroad doubled from 3.8 million to over 7 million.

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But these ideas about ‘difference’ and otherness, nurtured and disseminated by the New Right, still thrive in contemporary Britain, as people coming from different political traditions advocate for similar ideas. Journalist and commentator David Goodhart is one of those people. A self-described former liberal, he presents himself as a ‘straight-talker’ who is willing to challenge the left when, as he claims, it ignores peoples’ concerns about ‘mass immigration’ and the assumed threat it poses to social democracy and the welfare state. On TV, and in the pages of magazines, newspapers and two books, he’s argued that when there are too many new immigrants coming in the UK, the country’s bonds of solidarity are weakened because more diversity erodes common culture and undermines what’s needed for a cohesive society and welfare state.

The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics by John B. Judis

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, mass immigration, means of production, neoliberal agenda, obamacare, Occupy movement, open borders, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, Winter of Discontent

The EU had led, the platform said, to “open borders inducing relocation, unemployment, market dictatorship, destruction of public services, insecurity, poverty, and mass immigration.” The platform blamed Greece’s debt crisis on “the elites who want to feed the new Minotaur to save the Euro.” The FN demanded that France’s relationship to the EU be “renegotiated” and a referendum held on the Euro. The FN’s new program on economic nationalism became as integral to its appeal as its opposition to mass immigration. Its entire program was now subsumed under the concept of defending French sovereignty—in an echo of Chevenement and earlier de Gaulle, souveraniste was the new watchword.

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Krarup’s crusade against Denmark’s immigration policies was sparked by the Danish parliament’s passage in 1983 of an Alien Act welcoming refugees who had begun pouring into Europe from the Iran-Iraq war, and who after the act began entering Denmark annually by the thousands rather than hundreds. Krarup denounced the act as “legal suicide” for allowing “the uncontrolled and unconstrained mass migration of Mohammedan and Oriental refugees [who] come through our borders.” In 1997, Krarup was invited to address the newly formed People’s Party’s convention, and in 2001, he was elected to parliament from the party and headed its immigration and naturalization committee. The People’s Party campaigns were incendiary.

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties by Christopher Caldwell

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, computer age, crack epidemic, critical race theory, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Attenborough, desegregation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, Future Shock, George Gilder, global value chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, James Bridle, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, libertarian paternalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, new economy, Norman Mailer, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, post-industrial society, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

Until that bill comes due, immigration must be counted among a country’s “off-balance-sheet liabilities.” These liabilities are difficult to quantify. Mass immigration can help a confident, growing society undertake large projects—the settlement of the Great Plains, for instance, or the industrialization of America’s cities after the Civil War. But for a mature, settled society, mass immigration can be a poor choice, to the extent that it is a choice at all. Reagan was tasked by voters with undoing those post-1960s changes deemed unsustainable. Mass immigration was one of them, and it stands perhaps as his emblematic failure. Reagan flung open the gates to immigration while stirringly proclaiming a determination to slam them shut.

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A nation too cavalier about who fit in and who didn’t was losing sight of what made it special, and would not be a nation much longer. An Alien Nation, to cite the title of Brimelow’s book, was a more likely outcome. Most historical experience would lead one to fear that the pessimists were correct. Yet the United States, faced with a comparable wave of mass migration between 1880 and 1920, had confounded similar predictions. “In fifteen of the largest cities of the United States,” the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger had warned in 1921, the foreign immigrants and their children outnumber the native whites; and by the same token alien racial elements are in the majority in thirteen of the states of the Union. . . .

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Feminists wanted to integrate the Metropolitan Club, not the Elks. Steinem mocked “the house-bound matriarchs of Queens and the Bronx.” She complained that, “to top it all off, the problem of servants or child care often proves insurmountable after others are solved”—and this at a time well before mass immigration had reintroduced household servants into American upper-middle-class life. In the eyes of almost all men, women’s liberation was not just by but for such women as Steinem. It aimed at improving the position of women in white-collar work. The question of whether blue-collar work—plowing, lifting, grinding, getting dirty—was appropriate to women came up much less often than one might have anticipated.

Future Files: A Brief History of the Next 50 Years by Richard Watson

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Black Swan, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cashless society, citizen journalism, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deglobalization, digital Maoism, digital nomad, disintermediation, driverless car, epigenetics, failed state, financial innovation, Firefox, food miles, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, hive mind, hobby farmer, industrial robot, invention of the telegraph, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, linked data, low cost airline, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, mass immigration, Northern Rock, Paradox of Choice, peak oil, pensions crisis, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, RFID, Richard Florida, self-driving car, speech recognition, synthetic biology, telepresence, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing test, Victor Gruen, Virgin Galactic, white flight, women in the workforce, work culture , Zipcar

Much has been written about China and India, in particular the sheer size of their populations, but the 60 million Chinese and 20 million Indians already living abroad who are subtly affecting their host nations are often overlooked. Instability in developing countries, brought on by environmental degradation, could send further waves of migration into Europe on a par with the movements that led to the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century. The most likely areas to experience mass migration include Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia, which are affected by water shortages, a decline in food production, rising sea levels and radical Islam. The impact would be seen first at the edges of these areas, but would become more problematic as borders disappear and large urban populations become ungovernable.

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The key consequence of climate change — and one that politicians should worry about — is how higher temperatures, rising sea levels and increasingly severe and unpredictable weather will threaten the food security of millions and perhaps hundreds of millions of people. And remember, this isn’t just an altruistic point. If millions have their food or water supplies shut off, they will do what any sensible person would — they will move to the areas where supply is more certain. Such mass migrations would have profound implications for the stability of the entire world. Water in particular will become a serious problem over the next few years, although not in the way some people expect. It takes 11,000 liters of water to make a hamburger and 83,000 to make a medium-size family car, while the average person uses 135 liters every day (most of it wasted).

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First, it means that animals are moved from one place to another more frequently. Second, people are traveling more often and faster. 234 FUTURE FILES The illness SARS (which was of animal origin) was spread by international travel. As we become more connected through cheap travel, the globalization of jobs and mass migration, we are more susceptible to new and old diseases alike. This brings us on to the issue of global pandemics. The 1918–19 flu pandemic killed somewhere in the region of 20 to 100 million people. Nobody knows for sure how many died, but the figure is almost certainly greater than the number killed during the First World War.

The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It by Yascha Mounk

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, basic income, battle of ideas, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, clean water, cognitive bias, conceptual framework, critical race theory, David Brooks, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Herbert Marcuse, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, Parag Khanna, plutocrats, post-materialism, price stability, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Rutger Bregman, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

In Western Europe this dominance went even further. Founded on a monoethnic basis, countries like Germany or Sweden did not recognize immigrants as true members of the nation. To an extent we often prefer to disregard, the functioning of democracy may have depended on that homogeneity. Decades of mass migration and social activism have radically transformed these societies. In North America, racial minorities are finally claiming an equal seat at the table. In Western Europe, the descendants of immigrants are starting to insist that somebody who is black or brown can be a real German or Swede. But while a part of the population accepts, or even welcomes, this change, another part feels threatened and resentful.

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Its lively civil society featured critical media, strong NGOs, and one of the best universities in Central Europe. Hungarian democracy seemed to be consolidating.13 Then the trouble started. Many Hungarians felt that they were getting too small a share of the country’s economic growth. They saw their identity threatened by the prospect (though not the reality) of mass immigration. When a big corruption scandal enveloped the ruling center-left party, their discontent turned into outright disgust with the government. At parliamentary elections in 2010, Hungarian voters gave Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party a stomping majority.14 Once in office, Orbán systematically consolidated his rule.

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As Alexander Hamilton and James Madison made clear in Federalist No. 63, the essence of the American Republic would consist—their emphasis—“IN THE TOTAL EXCLUSION OF THE PEOPLE, IN THEIR COLLECTIVE CAPACITY, from any share” in the government.5 It was only in the nineteenth century, as the material and political conditions of American society changed with mass immigration, westward expansion, civil war, and rapid industrialization, that a set of entrepreneurial thinkers began to dress up an ideologically self-conscious republic in the unaccustomed robes of a born-again democracy. The very same institutions that had once been designed to exclude the people from any share in the government were now commended for facilitating government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”6 But though America increasingly came to be seen as a democracy, reality lagged far behind.

Legacy of Empire by Gardner Thompson

Albert Einstein, British Empire, colonial rule, European colonialism, facts on the ground, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, lateral thinking, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, zero-sum game

It is worth stressing that, in these first decades, Zionism’s critics were Jews, not gentiles. There could have been no clearer distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Emigration, settlement, regeneration The Zionist colonial project was part ideology, part movement. In its first three decades or so, the actual Zionist colonisation of Palestine was slight: the mass migration of Jews out of Europe went elsewhere. Nonetheless, by 1914 it was unwelcome enough for the resident Arab population – largely Muslim, but also Christian – to resist it and to inspire an incipient Palestinian national consciousness. The early 1880s had seen the first wave of Jewish emigrants.

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He thus set out to gain approval and endorsement for Zionism, in the form of a charter, from one or more of the European powers of his day. A charter would recognise Jewish sovereignty over the designated territory and set in motion a centrally funded, irreversible, internationally sanctioned, mass migration.74 Herzl has been described as a man who combined ‘wild fantasies with an uncanny flair for practical action’.75 He was endowed with exceptional organisational talents. He had convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel. This in turn founded the World Zionist Organisation as a permanent institution that could speak for the movement.

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He wrote: ‘The ultimate aim is to build up this land of Israel and restore to the Jews the political independence that has been taken from them… The Jews, with weapons in their hands if necessary, will announce with a loud voice that they are masters of their ancient homeland.’39 There is no mention here of indigenous inhabitants, Arab or otherwise; but there is no mistaking the colonial aspiration of conquest, by force if needed. Dubnow’s dramatic prophecy dates from 1882. However, only after Herzl founded the Zionist Organisation in 1897 did the prospect of a Jewish majority, through mass immigration, begin to be seriously envisaged. But not easily accomplished. Between 1882 and 1914 around 100,000 Jews emigrated to Palestine (where 20–30,000 Jews already dwelt). Over half of these, however, did not actually settle but left again.40 Jewish immigrants of the first and second aliyahs struggled, dependent on financial support from abroad.

The Origins of the British by Stephen Oppenheimer

active measures, agricultural Revolution, British Empire, Eratosthenes, gravity well, Gregor Mendel, it's over 9,000, mass immigration, Neolithic agricultural revolution, out of africa, phenotype, Recombinant DNA, the scientific method, trade route

For comparison, they also used samples from Friesland and Norway ‘to look for evidence of male immigration from the continent’.20 Their British samples were carefully selected to represent stable populations from at least the time of the Domesday Book (1086).21 In his analysis, Weale wanted to explore three different population processes: simple splitting with subsequent divergence, single mass migration (analogous to the first model described above) and continuous background migration (analogous, but not identical, to the third model, since no other previous sources of migration are considered). Since none of the available mathematical methods allowed these three processes to be examined simultaneously, in their own words they ‘developed an alternative inference method that allowed [them] to explore more flexible models under a range of historical scenarios involving both background [migration] and mass migration in the presence of population splitting and growth’.

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The short answer is that Herodotus, in his identification of the geographical location of the Keltoi, mistakenly thought that the Danube rose somewhere near the Pyrenees rather than in Germany (but more of that below). Celto-sceptics Some archaeologists have, over the last couple of decades, become quite red-faced about the whole issue of Celts. They warn against the dangers of racial migrationism and point to the lack of archaeological evidence for mass migrations into the British Isles during the Iron Age. They further question the relevance and meaning of Celtic ethnicity. Their reasoning is that whatever the term ‘Celt’ may have meant to the ancients, it was not based on a clearly defined language group and thus does not amount to an adequate ethnic description.3 Furthermore, they argue that classical Celts bear little relation to the modern imagined picture of the origins of Atlantic coastal Celts.

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And he explains why: The use of cord decoration was well known among eastern communities extending to the steppes, while the stone battle axes were evidently copied from metal forms already well established among the copper-using communities of south-eastern Europe. In the past it was conventional to explain large-scale culture change in terms of invasions. Thus some archaeologists argued that the Corded Ware/Battle Axe ‘culture’ reflected a mass migration of warriors moving into northern Europe from the Russian steppes. Explanations of this kind are no longer in favour, and it is now generally accepted that the development is likely to have been largely indigenous, growing out of contacts between the local farming groups of the TRB (Funnel-necked Beaker) culture, the metal-using communities of the south, and pastoralists on the Pontic steppes where the domestication of the horse had taken place.120 Figure 5.11 A cult of heroes from the East.

Immigration worldwide: policies, practices, and trends by Uma Anand Segal, Doreen Elliott, Nazneen S. Mayadas

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, borderless world, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, centre right, conceptual framework, credit crunch, demographic transition, deskilling, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, full employment, global village, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, it's over 9,000, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, labour mobility, language acquisition, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, phenotype, scientific management, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, Suez canal 1869, trade route, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, urban planning, women in the workforce

Figure 1-1 presents a framework of the salient ingredients in immigration, regardless of the country of origin or destination, and presents a framework of these dimensions. Salient Factors in Home Country Conditions in Home Country When conditions in a home country are satisfactory and meet physical, social, and emotional needs, the likelihood of leaving is minimal. Economic, political, or religious turbulence can cause dissatisfaction and result in mass migrations. For example, poor economic conditions, low income, and overcrowding in the home country often force individuals to seek opportunities elsewhere. As an illustration, from 1996 and well into 2003, Indonesia evidenced a prolonged economic crisis that continued to deepen, while news reports indicated that political corruption precluded any possibility of rapid recovery.

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In the Soviet period, the opposite—centripetal—trends also existed; however, the total negative migration balance between Russia and other Soviet republics in 1917–1992 was about 4 million persons. These former population movements, which were at that time internal migrations by nature, in many respects determined causes and the structure of the current mass migration exchange between Russia and so-called new foreign states (Iontsev & Magomedova, 1999; Kabuzan, 1998). ‘‘New Foreign States’’ Phenomenon The term ‘‘new foreign states’’ (blijnee zarubejie) appeared in Russia in 1992 to define the former Soviet republics that have become the newborn sovereign states (in contrast to ‘‘old foreign states’’ (dalnee zarubejie), i.e., all other countries outside the ex-USSR territory).

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Slogans of ethnic superiority of indigenous populations popularized by new political leaders for their political self-establishment have resulted in the splash of ethnic intolerance and open nationalistic conflicts, as well as in ousting of ‘‘ethnically different’’ population from local labor markets, and finally in mass migration outflows to the places where these people hoped to find guaranties at least of ethnic security (Iontsev & Ivakhniouk, 2002:57). For ‘‘ethnic Russians’’ living in other ‘‘new foreign states,’’ their historical motherland, Russia, seemed a safe asylum. While some researchers use the term ‘‘repatriation’’ for return migration of Russians in the post-Soviet period, we prefer to put this term in quotes, as in fact persons who moved from their native places to other regions of the USSR during the Soviet or pre-Soviet periods were not emigrants as they participated in internal but not international migrations.

Half In, Half Out: Prime Ministers on Europe by Andrew Adonis

banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, colonial rule, congestion charging, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Dominic Cummings, eurozone crisis, imperial preference, mass immigration, Neil Kinnock, oil shock, Suez crisis 1956

Merkel’s unilateral decision in August to open German borders to hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees sparked a huge and bitter internal EU debate about burden sharing. That the UK had an opt-out from the compulsory mechanism the Commission proposed for allocating refugees to member states added to the sense that the British were semi-detached, and insulating themselves from yet another Continental crisis. For those whose crisis was one of uncontrolled mass migration of refugees from outside the EU, the British obsession with controlling free movement within it by EU citizens, felt like a sideshow. They objected even to the UK ‘migration’ nomenclature, which, for us, covered two issues that, for others, were completely different. So the appetite to spend leader time on the UK question was limited, and the mood fraught.

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However, it is the third point which is perhaps most significant; there is a large ‘dog that didn’t bark’. Immigration barely featured in the 1975 referendum campaign or indeed in the entire controversy about British membership of Europe in the 1970s. Why? Partly because the ‘Europe of the Nine’ – unlike today’s ‘Europe of the Twenty-Eight’ – did not herald mass immigration. But, just as important, because there was, by the mid-1970s, little net immigration from the black Commonwealth, which might have confused the issue, as it did in 2016. And why was that? Because by 1975, black immigration into Britain had been practically halted – by none other than Harold Wilson, following Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘rivers of blood’ speech.

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The referendum rules, OK? Not if you were Edmund Burke. Not if you were Margaret Thatcher. And why are we to do it? Because we believe that we ‘must take back control’ of our destiny, take back control in a world where most of the problems faced by individual member states, including let it be said mass immigration, can only be dealt with through international cooperation. How had we lost control of our ability to run our education system (not conspicuously well), or our health service, or our welfare service, or our steadily diminishing defence forces? The main area where we had allegedly lost control was in the creation of a genuine single market.

Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy by Talia Lavin

4chan, Bellingcat, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark triade / dark tetrad, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, end-to-end encryption, epigenetics, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, information security, Kevin Roose, lockdown, mass immigration, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Overton Window, phenotype, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Susan Wojcicki, The Turner Diaries, Timothy McVeigh, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Chapter 2: The Jews 1 Adam Serwer, “The Coronavirus Was an Emergency Until Trump Found Out Who Was Dying,” The Atlantic (May 8, 2020). https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/americas-racial-contract-showing/611389/. 2 Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 14. 3 “Pogroms,” YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Pogroms. 4 Bernard K. Johnpoll, “Why They Left: Russian-Jewish Mass Migration and Repressive Laws, 1881–1917,” American Jewish Archives (1995). http://americanjewisharchives.org/publications/journal/PDF/1995_47_01_00_johnpoll.pdf. 5 “From Haven to Home: 350 Years of Jewish Life in America: A Century of Immigration, 1820–1924,” The Century, New Series, vol. 88 (New York: The Century Co., 1914). https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/haventohome/haven-century.html. 6 Michael Barkun.

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Earnest also admitted that he’d “scorched a mosque in Escondido”—an arson attempt in a mosque had been reported in that city a week earlier—but it was Jews who were the focal point of his ire, in a tirade that encompassed grievances both ancient and modern. Earnest opened with the proud statement that he was a man of European ancestry, of Irish and Nordic stock. The anti-Semitism exhibited by Earnest echoes some popular white-supremacist and neo-Nazi fixations. He accused Jews of pushing mass immigration, sexual degeneracy, feminism, and race mixing. But Earnest cited his Christian faith as the justification for his alleged murderous act. He referenced Jewish persecution of Christians of old and Christians of the present—some accusations pulled from the pages of the New Testament, some from the web pages of fervent, extremist-Christian conspiracy sites.

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Balliet prefaced his brief rampage with an anti-Semitic rant that echoed familiar themes. Angling his high-cheekboned face and wide green eyes toward the camera, Balliet said, “I think the Holocaust never happened. Feminism is the cause of the decline of the West which acts as a scapegoat for mass immigration. And the root of all these problems is the Jew.” Although he had trained in the German army, he did not have ready access to guns, thanks to the country’s strict gun-control laws. Instead, he had built weapons of his own, using open-source guides he’d found online; he’d constructed homemade explosives in the same fashion.

The English by Jeremy Paxman

back-to-the-land, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Etonian, game design, George Santayana, global village, high-speed rail, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, Khartoum Gordon, mass immigration, Neil Kinnock, Own Your Own Home, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Right to Buy, sensible shoes, Stephen Fry, Suez canal 1869, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

He is right: it was non-conformist denominations from the Methodists to the Salvation Army who tried to meet the challenge of urban life, while Irish immigrants brought their own Catholic faith with them. In the few areas where popular urban Toryism took root, the Church of England broadened its base. But, for the most part, those vast, echoing buildings built by the Anglicans on street corners throughout the great industrial cities as an instinctive response to mass migration from the countryside have never been filled, not even when originally built. Small wonder they look cold and uncared for over a century later, waiting to be bought up and turned into a Sikh temple or nightclub. The Reverend Lionel Espy and others like him are doing their best. But so long after the event, they have no chance at all of making up the ground lost.

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I should still make the same judgements.1 The reasons for this unity are obvious enough – the country had just come though a terrible war, which had required shared sacrifice. The population of England was still relatively homogeneous, used to accepting the inconvenience of discipline and unaffected by mass immigration. It was still insular, not merely in a physical sense but because the mass media had yet to create the global village. It is the world of today’s grandparents. It is the world of Queen Elizabeth and her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh. The young Princess Elizabeth married the naval lieutenant, Philip Mountbatten, in 1947.

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Fashions in food, clothing, music and entertainment are no longer home-grown. Even those customs which remain authentically indigenous are the fruit of a greatly changed ‘English’ population. Within fifty years of the docking of the Empire Windrush at Tilbury, disembarking 492 Jamaican immigrants, the racial complexion of the country had changed utterly. Mass immigration to Britain had been concentrated on England and most cities of any size contained areas where white people had become a rarity. In those places, talking about immigrants as ‘ethnic minorities’ was beginning to sound decidedly perverse. By 1998, it was white children who had become a minority at local-authority secondary schools in inner London and even in the suburbs they made up only 60 per cent of the secondary-school population.

Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US City by Mike Davis

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", affirmative action, Berlin Wall, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, edge city, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, invisible hand, job automation, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, market bubble, mass immigration, new economy, occupational segregation, postnationalism / post nation state, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, The Turner Diaries, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, white picket fence, women in the workforce, working poor

The Liberal Party was an anticommunist secession, engineered by Dubinsky, from East Harlem congressman Vito Marcantonio's American Labor Party, which, until its demise had an in 1954, excellent record of sponsoring Puerto Rican leadership. 195. See the conclusions in William Clark, "Mass Migration and Local Outcomes: International Migration to the United States Creating a New Is Urban Underclass," Urban Studies 35:3 (1998), p. 380. 196. Ramona Hernandez, Francisco Rivera-Batiz and Roberta Godini, Dominican New A Socioeconomic Profile, 1 990, Institute for Urban and Minority Education, Colum- Yorkers: bia University, New York 1995. 197.

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(Activists in the Latino-majority east Valley have retaliated by threatening a subsecession of their own).^"*^ BROKEN RAINBOWS Exactly ment as some Reagan in the cities strategists had hoped, combined with Washington's unwillingness to bear a fair share of the social costs of not local government pockets the mass immigration (national fiscal comers) have exploded what remains of The old civil rights federal disinvest- coalition surplus generated by new- New Deal-era allegiances. between Blacks and Latinos, first built during the progressive campaigns of the 1940s and temporarily newed by Jesse Jackson during the 1990s.

The Light That Failed: A Reckoning by Ivan Krastev, Stephen Holmes

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, anti-globalists, bank run, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Brexit referendum, corporate governance, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, kremlinology, liberal world order, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, the market place, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks

The free movement of people across international borders now provides the most widely available opportunity for liberating oneself and one’s family from an economically hopeless and politically oppressive environment. From this perspective, the twentieth-century revolt of the masses is therefore a thing of the past. Those who hope to defend the status quo now face a 21st-century upheaval caused not by an insurgent working class but by the mass migration into Europe of non-Westerners seeking a better life. Here is how Orbán has described the unfolding crisis: We must confront a flood of people pouring out of the countries of the Middle East, and meanwhile the depth of Africa has been set in motion. Millions of people are preparing to set out.

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Millions of people are preparing to set out. Globally the desire, the urge and the pressure for people to continue their lives in some place other than where they began them is increasing. This is one of history’s largest tides of people, and it brings with it the danger of tragic consequences. It is a modern-day global mass migration, which we cannot see the end of: economic migrants hoping for a better life, refugees and drifting masses mixed up together. This is an uncontrolled and unregulated process, and . . . the most precise definition of this is ‘invasion’.28 Blown out of proportion by Orbán, the northward population flow is not being instigated or steered by organized revolutionary parties.

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His most ardent supporters are intuitively sceptical of the Reagan-era picture of America as an imitation-worthy ‘shining city on a hill’, sensing correctly that Reagan used the image to reiterate that America was ‘still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom’, which for populists includes non-white immigrants from south of the border scrambling to displace and dispossess white Americans.76 Anti-immigrant politics is highly emotional because mass immigration, whether real or fictional, threatens to wash away the last remnants of an imagined community that, for historically contingent reasons, is already coming unstitched. This analysis assumes that identity is experienced most vividly in feelings aroused by perceptions of otherness and belonging.

Wealth, Poverty and Politics by Thomas Sowell

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, European colonialism, full employment, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Herman Kahn, income inequality, income per capita, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, New Urbanism, profit motive, rent control, Scramble for Africa, Simon Kuznets, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, very high income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty

Carl Solberg, Immigration and Nationalism, pp. 49–50. 75. Robert F. Foerster, The Italian Emigration of Our Times, pp. 254–259. 76. Gino Germani, “Mass Immigration and Modernization in Argentina,” Studies in Comparative International Development, Volume 2, Issue 11 (November 1966), p. 170; Laura Randall, An Economic History of Argentina in the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), p. 116. 77. Mark Jefferson, Peopling the Argentine Pampa, p. 76. 78. Gino Germani, “Mass Immigration and Modernization in Argentina,” Studies in Comparative International Development, Volume 2, Issue 11 (November 1966), p. 178. 79.

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Carl Solberg, Immigration and Nationalism, p. 63. 96. Fernand Braudel, A History of Civilizations, translated by Richard Mayne (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), p. 440. 97. Gino Germani, “Mass Immigration and Modernization in Argentina,” Studies in Comparative International Development, Volume 2, Issue 11 (November 1966), pp. 171–172. 98. Fred C. Koch, The Volga Germans, pp. 231–232; M.G. and E.T. Mulhall, Handbook of Brazil (Buenos Ayres, 1877), pp. 148–149. 99. See, for example, Gino Germani, “Mass Immigration and Modernization in Argentina,” Studies in Comparative International Development, Volume 2, Issue 11 (November 1966), pp. 173–174; Eric N.

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In Georgia that same year, no more than half the black adult population had reached the third grade.18 At that time, only 19 percent of black children of high school age in the South actually went to high school.19 It was 1924 before the first permanent public high school for black children in Atlanta was built,20 after years of campaigns for such a school by the local black community. As of 1940, 87 percent of black families in the United States lived below the poverty line. But this declined to 47 percent by 1960, as black education and urban job experience increased in the wake of the mass migrations of blacks out of the South. This 40 percentage point drop in the black poverty rate occurred prior to both the civil rights laws and the “war on poverty” social welfare programs of the 1960s. Over the next 20 years, from 1960 to 1980, the black poverty rate dropped an additional 18 points21— significant, but the continuation of a preexisting trend at a slower pace, rather than being a new result from new civil rights laws and welfare state policies, as so often claimed.

Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders by Jason L. Riley

affirmative action, business cycle, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, Garrett Hardin, guest worker program, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, open borders, open immigration, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

Scapegoating foreigners for domestic problems real or imagined is something of an American tradition. Any student of history knows that the complaints and criticisms lodged against today’s Latinos were thrown at previous immigrant groups. But how easily some of us forget. Ireland was the source country of the first mass migration to the United States. The Irish flooded America in the middle of the nineteenth century, particularly the cities. In 1850, more than a quarter of New York City’s residents were born in Ireland. Throughout the 1800s, the United States absorbed Irish newcomers at more than double the rate of current Mexican immigration.

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An Urban Institute study of immigration’s impact on Southern California in the 1970s—a period of high unemployment nationwide, remember—reached a similar conclusion. “To what extent did the influx of immigrants entering Southern California in the 1970s reduce the jobs available to nonimmigrant workers?” wrote Thomas Muller, the study’s author. “The answer for the 1970s is little if at all,” he concluded. “Despite mass immigration to Southern California, unemployment rates rose less rapidly than in the remainder of the nation.” Muller also found that labor-force participation rates among natives seemed to be unaffected, and “the participation rate for both blacks and whites was higher in Southern California [where the bulk of immigrants settled] than elsewhere in the state and the nation.”

A History of Zionism by Walter Laqueur

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, British Empire, business cycle, illegal immigration, joint-stock company, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mount Scopus, new economy, plutocrats, profit motive, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the market place, éminence grise

The Bilu members, who had set up a central office in Constantinople, waited therefore in vain for a firman (official permit) to establish a series of settlements in Palestine which would create the basis for mass immigration. The Turkish government put many obstacles in their way, and in 1893 banned altogether the immigration of Russian Jews into Palestine and the purchase of land. These orders were frequently circumvented by registering the land that was bought in the name of Jews from western Europe and by distributing baksheesh among the local administration. In this way a few settlements were established, but these were hardly the conditions envisaged by Pinsker for mass immigration, let alone the establishment of a Jewish state. Among the first agricultural settlements established during that period were Zikhron Ya’akov, south of Haifa, and Rosh Pina, built by new immigrants from Rumania.

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For many years he continued to submit detailed programmes for mass immigration, all of them ignored by the experts or treated with disdain. In retrospect, however, Trietsch’s arguments seem weightier than most of his contemporaries were ready to acknowledge: he advocated intensive agriculture in contrast to the advice given by most other experts at the time. Moreover, in view of the lack of agricultural experience among the Jews as well as other obstacles, he insisted on the paramount importance of developing industry for the absorption of mass immigration. Whereas Ruppin and the other experts thought that an investment of £1,000-£1,500 was needed for the absorption of one family, Trietsch argued that since funds of such magnitude would never be available, they should develop cheaper methods of settlement.

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Towards the end of his speech Ruppin made yet another point in justification of ‘practical Zionism’ which had never been made so clearly: ‘For a long time to come our progress in Palestine will depend entirely on the progress of our movement in the diaspora.’* This was a far cry from the early visions of Herzl and Nordau, the idea that there would be a wave of mass migration resulting in the establishment of a Jewish state, and that thereafter the state would be in a position to solve the Jewish question. Ruppin was not a great orator, but his case was forceful and convincing and he got a big ovation. Compared to other Zionist leaders his background was unconventional.

Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities by Eric Kaufmann

4chan, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Brooks, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, immigration reform, imperial preference, income inequality, it's over 9,000, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microaggression, moral panic, Nate Silver, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open borders, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, phenotype, postnationalism / post nation state, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, twin studies, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, white flight, working-age population, World Values Survey, young professional

Islam is also a major theme of the American libertarian right, encompassing online commentators such as Ben Shapiro, Gavin McInnes and Mike Cernovich. Ethno-demographic change is becoming more openly discussed in mainstream right intellectual circles. Christopher Caldwell, a columnist for the Weekly Standard and Financial Times, argues that Europe would not be the same civilization without European people. Mass migration is altering its fundamental essence.99 Thilo Sarrazin, a German Social Democratic politician and ex-central banker, penned his Germany Does Away With Itself (2010), which became a runaway bestseller, notching up sales of 1.5 million in its first year. He argues that low German birth rates coupled with non-European immigration is leading to the decline of the ethnic German population.

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Michael Lind, former editor of the neoconservative Public Interest and Harvard professor Samuel Huntington operated between the neocon and paleocon positions. Lind’s Next American Nation (1995) mounted a stinging critique of the American elite’s universalist individualism. In the book, Lind offered a groundbreaking attack on ‘mass immigration’ as a policy which both right- and left-wing American elites favoured but which was opposed by working-class Americans of all races. John Judis endorsed this view, accusing the neoconservative right of fetishizing a free-market ideology which appealed to few ordinary Americans.57 Huntington, in his final book, Who Are We?

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The third individual was Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo, who ran in the 2008 Republican primary on a hardline anti-immigration ticket, winning 5 per cent support before pledging his support to Mitt Romney. Tancredo founded and led from 1999 to 2007 the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus, which worked closely with FAIR to advance the anti-immigration agenda. In 2001, he sponsored a proposed moratorium on immigration entitled the Mass Immigration Reduction Act which called for immigration to be restricted for a period of five years to the spouses and children of American citizens. Though unsuccessful, it signalled a new assertiveness within the restrictionist movement. FEDERAL IMMIGRATION BATTLES, 2005–2014 A chronically gridlocked Congress made it difficult for federal legislation on border enforcement or the fate of undocumented immigrants to pass – a vacuum increasingly filled by local and state IIROs.

Unequal Britain: Equalities in Britain Since 1945 by Pat Thane

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, call centre, collective bargaining, equal pay for equal work, full employment, gender pay gap, longitudinal study, mass immigration, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, old-boy network, pensions crisis, Russell Brand, sexual politics, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, unpaid internship, women in the workforce

Religious diversity was tolerated, 56 U N E Q UA L B R I TA I N alongside an understanding that Britain remained a Christian country with a dominant established church. The history of multi-faith Britain is inextricably connected with the history of immigration (see Chapter 2). Britain’s indigenous Catholic population was small in the 1830s and it was only mass migration from Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century that re-established Catholicism as a fixed presence on the British mainland. Similarly, the integration and acceptance of Anglo-Jewry is linked to the growth of Britain’s Jewish population. Between the 1880s and 1914, some 100,000 Jews escaping from persecution in Eastern Europe migrated chiefly to the East End of London, as well as establishing smaller communities in Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and Scotland.

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The following comment from columnist Peregrine Worsthorne, published in the Sunday Telegraph in 1991, suggests: Islam, once a great civilization worthy of being argued with . . . has degenerated into a primitive enemy fit only to be sensitively subjugated . . . If they want jihad, let them have it . . . [Islam,] once a moral force, has long been corrupted by variations of the European heresies, fascism and communism – a poisonous concoction threatening seepage back into Europe through mass migration.18 The first Gulf War (1990–1) caused further problems for British Muslims, now defined by some as ‘the enemy within’. During the war, West Yorkshire police noted a 100 per cent rise in racist attacks in Bradford. The classifying of such attacks as ‘racist’ rather than ‘anti-religious’ further demonstrated an unwillingness by public institutions to recognize British Muslim identity.19 The introduction of a question concerning ethnic origin in the 1991 Census was further testimony to a lack of understanding within Whitehall of the predominance of religious identity over ethnic identity within the Muslim community.

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Sixty-four per cent of these were offences against Catholics and 31 per cent were against Protestants, with many of them occurring at football matches where historic sectarian rivalry between Glasgow’s (Catholic) Celtic and (Protestant) Rangers remains strong.10 1950s AND 1960s: IMMIGRATION AND CHANGE Mass immigration from the former Empire during the 1950s and 1960s transformed Britain (in demographic terms) into a multi-faith society (see Chapter 2). Numbers are imprecise, as immigration statistics were not calculated on the basis of religion, but by 1980, Britain’s Hindu and Muslim populations are estimated to have more than doubled to 120,000 and 600,000 respectively (see Table 3.3).

The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind by Jan Lucassen

3D printing, 8-hour work day, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-work, antiwork, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, demographic transition, deskilling, discovery of the americas, domestication of the camel, Easter island, European colonialism, factory automation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, Ford Model T, founder crops, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, labour mobility, land tenure, long peace, mass immigration, means of production, megastructure, minimum wage unemployment, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, pension reform, phenotype, post-work, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, reshoring, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, stakhanovite, tacit knowledge, Thales of Miletus, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, two and twenty, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

Mobility levels, already substantial in different parts of Eurasia in the early modern period, as we have seen in Chapter 5, doubled in the second half of the nineteenth century and even tripled by comparison in the first half of the twentieth century, only to drop substantially later.156 This may not come as a surprise if we think of the well-known mass migrations from Europe to the Americas, especially from the 1840s, once steamships diminished transportation costs and risks. However, equally important were the not-so-well-known migration flows of ‘coolies’ from South Asia and the colonization of Manchuria. In East Asia, mass migrations became possible after the opening-up of China, Japan and Korea. To these three waves of permanent mass migration and many more minor ones we must still add the temporal (at least for the survivors) multi-annual mass migrations of soldiers, mostly drafted since the French Revolution.

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Farben settling in Auschwitz, or Siemens in Ravensbrück.55 In the aftermath of the Second World War and following their own civil war, the Chinese Communist Party took power in 1949. The Party faced similar problems to those experienced by its Russian sister party thirty years before. In China, however, there was an even shorter ‘honeymoon’ period, of no more than five years, after which the state rapidly introduced a rigid policy of labour allocation, ending the mass migrations of the previous century that had been based on individual or household-level decisions. This policy had two faces: the immobilization of the bulk of the population at the place where they lived; and, simultaneously, the forced reallocation of workers.56 In 1955, the well-known hukou (household registration) system was implemented, a combination of the centuries-old Chinese family registers and – through Russian advisors – of the Soviet workbook system.

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The masters were the noble tribes of camel herders, also involved in the caravan trade and the slave trade; below them, vassal tribes of small stock herders; lower still, a semi-serf agricultural population; and, at the bottom of the pile, slaves used as herdsmen.42 In all these cases, the question for the millennia and centuries that we are discussing here is not whether systematic violence was involved in mass immigrations of pastoral herdsmen – that was unequivocal – but whether the labour relations of the vast majority of the population of, so far, reasonably independent farming households – whether or not they were specialists in arable farming or livestock breeding – had already changed substantially by then.

To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland's Global Diaspora, 1750-2010 by T M Devine

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, classic study, deindustrialization, deskilling, full employment, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, railway mania, Red Clydeside, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce

But a secondary purpose is to consider the global ‘scattering’ and impact of Scottish religious and secular ideas, borne to several overseas countries by the emigrants and leaving a deep mark there, as well as commodities and funding exported from Scotland itself. Scottish overseas investment and capital goods production were often basic to the economic transformation of the new lands in the Victorian era and without which mass migration and settlement there would have been much diminished. These factors are therefore seen as an integral part of the history of diaspora as a whole. Viewed from this perspective, the Scots, in the same way as the Jews, the Irish, Chinese, Palestinians and others, can be rightly considered a diasporic people.

…

They come to see the battlefields and ‘clanscapes’ associated with Jacobitism and Jacobite-induced exile. For such pilgrims the Field of Culloden is above all else a sacred place, where the destruction of clanship is seen to have led directly to the displacement of the Clearances and then, inevitably, to the mass migrations of which they are the descendants.43 Key sources for this understanding of the Scottish past are the books of John Prebble, who is still by far the most influential and widely read writer on Scottish history among the Scottish-American diaspora, closely followed by the historical novelist Nigel Tranter and, more recently, the American fantasy writer Diana Gabaldon, whose Outlander series of books recounts time travel between the 1940s and the era of the Jacobite Risings.

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The depression of the 1920s hit Scotland hard. 14. Emigrants waiting for transport across the Atlantic at the Broomielaw, Clydeside. In the 1920s Scotland topped the league table of European emigration. 15. On boat to New Zealand. The development of New Zealand, like that of Canada, was profoundly influenced by mass immigration from Scotland. 16. The Hercules carried several hundred destitute emigrants from the Hebrides to Australia in 1852. The voyage was notorious for the large numbers of deaths on board caused by typhus and smallpox. 17. The ruins of Shiaba township, Isle of Mull. The people were mainly cleared in 1847 and ‘emigrated’ by the Duke of Argyll to Canada. 18.

The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, citizen journalism, Columbine, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, Edward Snowden, equal pay for equal work, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, ghettoisation, hiring and firing, Housing First, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, Laura Poitras, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, mass incarceration, moral panic, Occupy movement, open borders, open immigration, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, strikebreaker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traumatic brain injury, white flight

In fact, in many ways it strengthened it, giving rise to new economic sectors, revitalizing long-abandoned urban neighborhoods, and better integrating the US into the global economy. When the EU lowered its internal borders, there were fears that organized crime would benefit, local cultures would be undermined, that mass migration would create economic chaos as poorer southern Europeans moved north. None of this happened. In fact, migration decreased as the EU began developing poorer areas within Europe as a way of producing greater economic and social stability. We could do the same thing in North America, but instead have largely done the opposite.

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Small informal units were mobilized to limit unauthorized entry of Chinese immigrants, mostly along California’s border with Mexico. The only restrictions on white immigration during this period banned those who were criminals, infirm, or politically radical. Anarchists were specifically banned in 1903, with Italians targeted for particular scrutiny. With the rise of mass immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came growing nativist resentment. Throughout this period, groups such as the Immigration Restriction League and the American Party organized around ideas of racial purity, cultural superiority, and religious prejudice to demand an end to open immigration.

The Lost Decade: 2010–2020, and What Lies Ahead for Britain by Polly Toynbee, David Walker

banking crisis, battle of ideas, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, call centre, car-free, centre right, collective bargaining, congestion charging, corporate governance, crony capitalism, Crossrail, David Attenborough, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, energy transition, Etonian, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, G4S, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global village, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, Large Hadron Collider, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, moral panic, mortgage debt, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, pension reform, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, smart meter, Uber for X, ultra-processed food, urban renewal, working-age population

Events touching on foreign affairs came and went without eliciting more than transient attention with respect to their causes and contexts in the Middle East or Africa – or, indeed, the rest of Europe. As Brexit fever raged, a posse of ex-diplomats spoke up about the UK’s ‘weakened standing in the world [and] threats to national security and loss of influence’. They were preaching to deaf ears. The very possibility of Brexit sprang from a retreat from the world and its problems – mass migration across the Mediterranean, Russian pressure, Isis, Chinese hacking. Reaction to the Skripal poisonings in Salisbury was oddly muted in both right-wing media and among the public. Even aggression in a cathedral city in the heartlands failed to provoke an outwards-directed, adult response – which might, among other things, have raised questions about the capacity of the UK to deal with Russia alone.

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It was the interplay of belief and ideas with the practical conditions of life (often comfortable and moneyed) that made the phenomenon. Substantial numbers of leavers were well enough off, reasonably well educated and lived in the south of England. Resentment, unease and frustration at changed local and social circumstances had swirled through the interviews we did in 2009 and 2010. Mass immigration had been mishandled (by successive governments) and was an electoral accident waiting to happen. ‘Well, it’s not quite as simple as that,’ said Ken Clarke, the Tory remainer, when asked what he would say to leavers. Brexit ‘isn’t going to make the faintest difference to most of the things that so annoy you.

Content Provider: Selected Short Prose Pieces, 2011–2016 by Stewart Lee

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Boris Johnson, Bullingdon Club, call centre, centre right, David Attenborough, Etonian, gentrification, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, Livingstone, I presume, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, pre–internet, Right to Buy, Robert Gordon, Russell Brand, Saturday Night Live, sensible shoes, Socratic dialogue, Stephen Fry, trickle-down economics, wage slave, young professional

Or would our liberty, security and prosperity be better assured by submitting to an elected Bullingdon bureaucracy here at home, accepting the will of demonstrably unaccountable politicians and linking our destiny with that of a sclerotic Eurosceptic camp that tries to achieve the impossible by uniting personalities as diverse as Theresa May, former UKIP hat-wearer Winston McKenzie and Michael Caine? Whom wilst spakey for England? Who for England wilst spakey? Were we to be a self-governing nation, free in this age of mass migration to opt out of the attempts of the wider European community to co-operate to solve the greatest refugee crisis since the Second World War, strike trade agreements with tyrannical dictatorships whenever we choose and dismiss codes of practice regarding environmental safeguards, pollution and human rights if they displease us, like some pusillanimous ostrich, sticking its stupid head into the rapidly dissipating sands of time?

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The below-the-line comments on my piece in the Observer were the usual litany of false victimhood: “You don’t have to do much to incur the wrath of SL and the other guardian’s of the new etiquette of the middle classes, namely ‘PC’. Expressing any nationalist sentiments whatsoever and opposing on-going mass immigration will more than suffice. The unfairness and imbalance that the guardians insist on with their enforced privileges for their chosen minorities is clear to see. Likening the humble UKIP members to ‘apes’ is presented here as clever, satirical and amusing. Suggesting that certain other chosen privileged minorities are like ‘monkeys’ on the football pitch will land you in jail.”

Britain Etc by Mark Easton

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Boris Johnson, British Empire, credit crunch, digital divide, digital rights, drug harm reduction, financial independence, garden city movement, global village, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, mass immigration, moral panic, Neil Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, social software, traumatic brain injury

‘It is traditional that British subjects, whether of Dominion or Colonial origin (and of whatever race or colour), should be freely admissible to the United Kingdom,’ Attlee continued. ‘That tradition is not, in my view, to be lightly discarded, particularly at a time when we are importing foreign labour in large numbers.’ The arrival of the Empire Windrush became the symbolic starting point for mass migration of Commonwealth citizens to the United Kingdom, but it also fundamentally changed the politics of immigration. From the moment those nervous but eager Jamaicans stepped ashore, the alien threat – privately at least – became less about economics and more about the colour of people’s skin. Front of house, post-war Britain was anxious to appear honourable, generous and loyal.

…

Labour had been so timid about discussing immigration that it almost forgot to mention how its open door policy had seen the number of foreigners coming to live in the UK more than double since it took office: from 224,000 in 1996 to 494,000 in 2004. Later, government insider Andrew Neather would claim that there had been a political purpose in using mass immigration to make the UK multicultural. An advisor to the Prime Minister and Home Secretary, Neather let slip how ministers understood the conservatism of their core voters and, while they might have been passionately in favour of a more diverse society, ‘it wasn’t necessarily a debate they wanted to have in working men’s clubs in Sheffield or Sunderland.’

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities by Howard P. Segal

1960s counterculture, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, complexity theory, David Brooks, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, deskilling, energy security, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, Future Shock, G4S, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, intentional community, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nikolai Kondratiev, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, pneumatic tube, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog

Fogarty examined 141 communities that arose between 1860 and 1914, including mystical Shalam in New Mexico, free-love Spirit Fruit in Ohio and Illinois, all-female Women’s Commonwealth in Texas, and socialist, then anarchist, Equality in Washington state. To varying degrees all were inspired by the Book of Revelations’ injunction to “make all things new” and were self-conscious about their need for journeying elsewhere in America or abroad (usually Palestine) to do so. As such they both reflected and took to extremes the mass migrations and frontier extensions of other, non-utopian Americans of their day. Contrary to stereotypes, some of these 141 utopias were conservative, not radical—for example, rejecting the growing calls for class action in favor of older ideals of the common good. Certain communities were even “anti-modernist” in various respects.

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The identification between America as a distinctive social collection and its idyllic crusade for nationwide coherence and homogeneity collapsed in the decade following the Civil War. Obviously the war undermined national unity for decades to come. But the growing nation was becoming fractionalized in other ways and for other reasons. Mass immigration from Central and Eastern Europe, more than any other factor, resulted in an increasingly diverse The American Utopias and Utopians and Their Critics 77 America that, unlike in contemporary times, was lamented more than celebrated. Unlike their mid-nineteenth-century counterparts, late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Americans routinely made firm, fixed, and critical distinctions between peoples, places, and things.

Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn by Daniel Gordis

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, facts on the ground, illegal immigration, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mount Scopus, post-oil, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

In the middle of a great square was the splendid Peace Palace, where international congresses of peace-lovers and scientists were held, for Jerusalem was now a home for all the best strivings of the human spirit: for Faith, Love, Knowledge.40 Nor was it only Jerusalem that had been repaired. The creation of a Jewish homeland had solved the problem of Jews in Europe, no less: Dr. Walter . . . launched on a description of the effects of Jewish mass migration upon the Jews who had remained in Europe. He was bound to say for himself, it had always been clear to him that Zionism was bound to be as salutary for the Jews who remained in Europe as for those who emigrated.41 IT WAS A BOLD DREAM, and a fanciful one in many ways. But it quickly became exceedingly practical, as well.

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Yosef, Rabbi Ovadia—A legal genius and popular rabbi to Israel’s Mizrachim, Rabbi Ovadia, upon completing his tenure as the Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel, formed the Shas Party, the first political party representing Mizrachim. Zangwill, Israel—A novelist and playwright, Zangwill was a Zionist thinker who described Palestine as a “land without a people, waiting for a people without a land.” Zangwill, like Herzl, believed that a mass migration of Jews from Europe to Palestine would serve both Jews and Palestine. Appendix B GLOSSARY OF NON-ENGLISH TERMS aliyah—From the Hebrew verb “to go up,” aliyah is used to refer to people moving to Israel. It is also used to describe a wave of immigration to Palestine or Israel, as in the First Aliyah or the Russian Aliyah.

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So, too, did protests and demonstrations, and no small number of intrepid American Jews who applied for and received visas to visit Russia and used their visits there to take books, music, and other educational and religious items to bolster the spirits and deepen the education of the repressed community. Slowly, the gates opened. In 1970, 992 immigrants to Israel came from the Soviet Union. By 1980, that number was 7,570. In 1990, it was 185,227. By the time the mass immigration had subsided, shortly after 2000, some one million Soviet Jews had made their way to the Jewish state, changing its character dramatically. Like many who had come before them, Soviet immigrants often arrived with little money and needed significant support upon arrival. Many who had been highly trained in the Soviet Union had to settle for menial jobs in the competitive Israeli job market.

Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past by David Reich

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, carbon credits, Easter island, European colonialism, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, invention of agriculture, invention of the wheel, invention of writing, mass immigration, meta-analysis, new economy, out of africa, phenotype, Scientific racism, sparse data, supervolcano, the scientific method, transatlantic slave trade

Chapter 5, “The Making of Modern Europe,” explains how Europeans today descend from three highly divergent populations, which came together over the last nine thousand years in a way that archaeologists never anticipated before ancient DNA became available. Chapter 6, “The Collision That Formed India,” explains how the formation of South Asian populations parallels that of Europeans. In both cases, a mass migration of farmers from the Near East after nine thousand years ago mixed with previously established hunter-gatherers, and then a second mass migration from the Eurasian steppe after five thousand years ago brought a different kind of ancestry and probably Indo-European languages as well. Chapter 7, “In Search of Native American Ancestors,” shows how the analysis of modern and ancient DNA has demonstrated that Native American populations prior to the arrival of Europeans derive ancestry from multiple major pulses of migration from Asia.

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The Nazi ideology of a “pure” Indo-European-speaking Aryan race with deep roots in Germany, traceable through artifacts of the Corded Ware culture, has been shattered by the finding that the people who used these artifacts came from a mass migration from the Russian steppe, a place that German nationalists would have despised as a source.49 The Hindutva ideology that there was no major contribution to Indian culture from migrants from outside South Asia is undermined by the fact that approximately half of the ancestry of Indians today is derived from multiple waves of mass migration from Iran and the Eurasian steppe within the last five thousand years.50 Similarly, the idea that the Tutsis in Rwanda and Burundi have ancestry from West Eurasian farmers that Hutus do not—an idea that has been incorporated into arguments for genocide51—is nonsense.

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With such data, it is possible to reconstruct population changes in exquisite detail, transforming our understanding of the past. By the end of 2015, my ancient DNA laboratory at Harvard had published more than half of the world’s genome-wide human ancient DNA. We discovered that the population of northern Europe was largely replaced by a mass migration from the eastern European steppe after five thousand years ago18; that farming developed in the Near East more than ten thousand years ago among multiple highly differentiated human populations that then expanded in all directions and mixed with each other along with the spread of agriculture19; and that the first human migrants into the remote Pacific islands beginning around three thousand years ago were not the sole ancestors of the present-day inhabitants.20 In parallel, I initiated a project to survey the diversity of the world’s present-day populations, using a microchip for analyzing human variation that my collaborators and I designed specifically for the purpose of studying the human past.

The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future by Naomi Oreskes, Erik M. Conway

Anthropocene, anti-communist, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Great Leap Forward, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Kim Stanley Robinson, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, military-industrial complex, oil shale / tar sands, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, stochastic process, the built environment, the market place

Moreover, the scientists who best understood the problem were ham-strung by their own cultural practices, which demanded an excessively stringent standard for accepting claims of any x i n t r o d u C t i o n kind—even those involving imminent threats. Here, our future historian, living in the Second People’s Republic of China, recounts the events of the Period of the Penumbra (1988–2093) that led to the Great Collapse and Mass Migration (2073–2093). The Collapse of WesTern CivilizaTion The nation formerly known as the Netherlands Once referred to as the “Low Countries” of Europe, much of the land area of this nation had been reclaimed from the sea by extensive human effort from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries.

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Stil , sea level had risen only 9 to 15 centimeters around the globe, and coastal populations were mainly intact. Then, in the Northern Hemisphere summer of 2041, unprecedented heat waves scorched the planet, destroying food crops around the globe. Panic ensued, with food riots in virtually every major city. Mass migration of undernourished and dehydrated individuals, coupled with explosive increases in insect populations, led to widespread outbreaks of typhus, cholera, dengue fever, yellow fever, and viral and retroviral agents never before seen. Surging insect populations also destroyed huge swaths of forests in Canada, Indonesia, and Brazil.

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While governments were straining to maintain order and provide for their people, leaders in Switzerland and India—two countries that were rapidly losing substantial portions of their glacially-sourced water resources— convened the First International Emergency Summit on Climate Change, organized under the rubric of Unified Mass migration of undernour- Nations for Climate Pro- ished and dehydrated indi- tection (the former United viduals, coupled with explosive increases in insect populations, Nations having been disled to widespread outbreaks credited and disbanded over of typhus, cholera, dengue the failure of the UNFCCC).

The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics by David Goodhart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, central bank independence, centre right, coherent worldview, corporate governance, credit crunch, Crossrail, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, gender pay gap, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, low skilled workers, market friction, mass immigration, meritocracy, mittelstand, Neil Kinnock, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, obamacare, old-boy network, open borders, open immigration, Peter Singer: altruism, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, shareholder value, Skype, Sloane Ranger, stem cell, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, World Values Survey

Indeed much of what I call the ‘great liberalisation’ of the past forty years in attitudes to race, gender and sexuality (see the next chapter) has been absorbed and accepted by the majority of Somewheres. But compared with Anywheres the acceptance has been more selective and tentative and has not extended to enthusiasm for mass immigration or European integration. Somewheres are seldom anti-immigrant but invariably anti-mass immigration. They still believe that there is such a thing as Society. The 1960s were not just about challenging traditional ideas and hierarchies—they also marked a further dismantling of the stable, ordered society in which roles were clearly ordained.

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It is true that the effect on jobs and wages, even at the bottom end, is less negative than many people assume—and employment rates in 2016 were at an all time high for the British born. But mass immigration is still somewhat regressive (and would have been more so in recent years without the minimum wage) and there is not a strikingly positive economic story for the existing population on wages, employment or growth per capita either. On fiscal contribution, EU immigrants are mainly slightly positive because the vast majority are of working age and have come to work, but taking immigration as a whole in recent decades the fiscal contribution of newcomers is slightly negative.10 (Economists are overwhelmingly pro-mass immigration but are far better at combating negative assumptions than providing a positive case, see the more detailed discussion of the economics of immigration in my book The British Dream.)11 It is a different story for employers who have been able to sharply cut their training bills in recent years, and replace the sulky, poorly educated local teenager with, say, a keen-as-mustard Latvian graduate who speaks excellent English.

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The Immigration Story How, then, with no strong economic rationale and the opposition of a clear majority of the country did we become a country of mass immigration in the last twenty years? Having absorbed, not without friction, the post-colonial wave in the decades after the 1950s, Britain in the mid-1990s had become a multiracial society with an immigrant and settled minority population of around 4 million, or about 7 per cent. Britain was not at that stage a mass immigration society with persistently large inflows. Today it is. About 18 per cent of today’s working age population was born abroad and in the past generation Britain’s immigrant and minority population (including the white non-British) has trebled to about 12 million, or over 20 per cent (25 per cent in England).15 Some of this is an open society success story—consider the increasingly successful minority middle class.16 But to many people the change is simply too rapid, symbolised by the fact that many of our largest towns, including London, Birmingham and Manchester—where more than half the minority population live—are now at or close to majority–minority status.

The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel by Nicholas Ostler

barriers to entry, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Internet Archive, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, language acquisition, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, open economy, precautionary principle, Republic of Letters, Scramble for Africa, statistical model, trade route, upwardly mobile, Wayback Machine

Africa and Brazil saw some take-up of Portuguese creoles, mostly among slaves. But the spread of Portuguese to Brazil—by now far the most populous speech community that it has—only began in earnest in the late seventeenth century, when discoveries of gold and precious metals, and the opening up of the interior to economic development, caused mass migration from Portugal itself. Once it was known that there were fortunes to be made in Brazil, European settlement, and hence the spread of Portuguese, took off . In general, then, these world languages with less than 40 percent lingua-franca use are languages that have grown through gradual immigration, a process which acts mainly to create larger mother tongue communities rather than lingua-francas, although inevitably in a multilingual environment some bilingualism and recruitment of speakers of other languages will occur.

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This has applied not just to the major western empires of France and Great Britain, but also to smaller (or older) colonial powers such as the Netherlands and Spain, and even (since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991) from the states of Central Asia to Russia. Moreover, this is not just an effect of the twilight of Empire. Similar trends have affected powers that did not have relevant ex-imperial territories: these notably include the mass immigration of Turks into Germany (long characterized as Gastarbeiter ‘guest-workers’, though large numbers have eventually taken up residence), and of Latin Americans into the USA (much of the latter clandestine—hence the term mojados ‘wetbacks’, suggesting informal crossing of the Rio Grande). Most recently (especially in the last decade) additional flows of “asylum seekers” have left the war-troubled countries of the Balkans, Middle East, Africa, and South Asia for quieter and richer lands, usually in Europe or North America.

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect by David Goodhart

active measures, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, computer age, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, deskilling, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shock, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postindustrial economy, precariat, reshoring, Richard Florida, robotic process automation, scientific management, Scientific racism, Skype, social distancing, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thorstein Veblen, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, young professional

The Guardian in the United Kingdom reported in March 2019 on an online survey of nearly 40,000 students that found very high levels of anxiety and thoughts of self-harm, with fully one-third saying they had experienced a serious psychological issue for which they needed help.52 Every autumn 1.5 million British teenagers take part in a mass migration—leaving home to go to university—dividing the country into a residential university class of mobile, professional people and a more rooted nongraduate group. This has surely exacerbated the country’s value and social divisions—and anti-London feeling—revealed in the Brexit vote. Mass residential higher education remains a very British phenomenon, and even more so in England than in Scotland; it is less common in continental Europe and the United States, although the trend is for it to decrease somewhat in Britain—partly because of more students from less mobile low-income and ethnic minority backgrounds—and increase in the rest of the rich world.

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(See Chapter Eight.) There is some potential for the use of smart technologies in elderly care, with more remote monitoring and so on (and this could draw more men into the sector). But most caring jobs cannot easily be automated or performed by machines. Even in aging Japan, with its antipathy to mass immigration, Filipino caregivers are preferred to robots and are gradually being welcomed in larger numbers. The rise of cognitive-analytical ability—Head work—as a measure of economic and social success, combined with the hegemony of cognitive-class political interests, has led to the current great unbalancing of Western politics.

The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World by John Michael Greer

back-to-the-land, Black Swan, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, David Strachan, deindustrialization, Easter island, European colonialism, Extropian, failed state, feminist movement, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, hydrogen economy, hygiene hypothesis, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Jevons paradox, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, McMansion, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, post-industrial society, Project for a New American Century, Ray Kurzweil, Stewart Brand, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

As the petroleum age winds down, many nations with large populations, limited resources and strong maritime traditions will have few options other than mass migration by sea. Consider the situation of Japan: close to 150 million Japanese now live on a crowded skein of islands with little arable land and no fossil fuels at all, supported by trade links made possible only by abundant energy resources elsewhere. As fossil fuel production declines, industrial agriculture and food imports both will become problematic, and over the long term the Japanese population will have to contract to something like the small fraction of today’s figures the Japanese islands supported in the past. Mass migration is nearly the only option for the rest of the population.

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The possibility that twenty million Japanese “boat people” could follow the Pacific currents to the west coast of North America by 2075 or so, or that millions of Indonesians might head for the northern shores of Australia for the same reason, has not yet become a part of our collective discourse about the future. Our unwillingness to grapple with the likelihood of mass migrations in the wake of the industrial age, however, will do nothing to make the impacts of population shifts easier to face. culture death The political and social landscape of the industrial world may not need mass migration to face dramatic change, however. The industrial age has also been the age of the nation-state. In a cascade of change that began a century before the industrial revolution, ­nation-​ A Short History of the Future states defined themselves on two fronts: against both local loyalties and the transnational community of Christendom.

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Sprawling Sun Belt cities with little water and no resources will shrivel and die as the energy that keeps them going sputters and goes out, and tourist communities across the continent will pop like bubbles and become ghost towns once travel becomes a luxury, while Rust Belt towns struggling for survival today will likely find a new lease on life when adequate rain, workable soil and access to waterborne transport become the keys to prosperity, as they were in the early 19th century. völkerwanderung What is less certain is whether it will be the descendants of today’s Americans or some other peoples who will populate the renewed Rust Belt towns and salvage valuable metal scrap from the crumbling ruins of today’s Sun Belt cities. Mass migration is already a fact of life throughout the contemporary world, and the twilight of cheap energy promises to shift this into overdrive. It’s common today to think of nations as a fixed reality with which historical changes have to deal, but this is far from true. Even in periods of relative stability, populations move, cultures relocate and nations flow, fuse and break apart like grease on a hot skillet.

Immigration and Ethnic Formation in a Deeply Divided Society: The Case of the 1990s Immigrants From the Former Soviet Union in Israel by Majid Al Haj

demographic transition, ghettoisation, job satisfaction, mass immigration, phenotype, profit motive, zero-sum game

This debate was spearheaded by the religious parties, in the wake of the considerable number of such cases in the first wave of mass immigration from Europe (ibid.). These parties also demanded a definition of “who is a Jew” before the Law of Return could be enacted. In the end, however, a compromise was 40   reached and the law was passed without reference to what remains a controversial issue to the present day (Hacohen 1998: 85). The movement’s attitude toward large-scale immigration by nonEuropean Jews has been always ambivalent and to some extent even projectionist (Gilbar 1998). This was very obvious in the discussions of mass immigration from Arab and Islamic countries toward the end of the Second World War.

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These issues are analyzed in light of the economic, political, and ideological changes that have taken place in Israel during the past decade, including developments in the peace process and the deterioration in Israeli-Palestinian relations since October 2000. The following questions are addressed: What are the implications of mass immigration for a deeply divided society that is coping with both internal conflicts (the result of internal cleavages) and external (territorial-national) conflict? What are the main factors affecting ethnic formation, ethnic identity, and ethnic cohesiveness among these immigrants? What forms of political organization and behavior exist among immigrants?

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What are the attitudes and social relationships between “Russian” immigrants and the various groups in Israeli society? What are the implications of this wave for the social and ethnonational structure of Israel? Will this influx of immigrants from the FSU enhance multiculturalism and civil society in Israel or deepen its ethno-national character? The study was conducted ten years after the start of the mass immigration from the FSU. As such, it provides an outstanding opportunity for a comparative analysis and re-evaluation of the conclusions in the existing literature about Russian immigrants (for example, the widespread conclusion that the manifestation of Russian-ethnic identity among immigrants is only a transitional phenomenon that may be expected to diminish and disappear after the immigrants master the Hebrew language and overcome the immediate difficulties of settlement and adjustment).

Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today by Jane McGonigal

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, airport security, Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, basic income, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, circular economy, clean water, climate change refugee, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Community Supported Agriculture, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data science, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, fiat currency, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, index card, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mason jar, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microbiome, Minecraft, moral hazard, open borders, pattern recognition, place-making, plant based meat, post-truth, QAnon, QR code, remote working, RFID, risk tolerance, School Strike for Climate, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, stem cell, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, TikTok, traumatic brain injury, universal basic income, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator

If you change “asteroid” to “rising sea levels,” “year-round wildfires,” or “extreme heat incompatible with human life,” you can increase the probability of this scenario from one in twenty thousand to closer to one in two. Yet even with this much higher degree of scientific certainty, humanity is not acting very quickly to plan for a safe, peaceful, and equitable mass migration. This is a topic we’ll return to later in this book, because there is an urgent need for creative thinking around how to handle large-scale climate relocation. The United Nations currently estimates that between 150 million people and 1 billion people will be faced with the question of whether to stay in their homes and continue trying to defend their land from climate threats or become climate migrants.5 Low-lying cities like Miami, New Orleans, Copenhagen, and Shanghai could disappear as sea levels rise.

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Large portions of northern Africa, the Middle East, northern South America, South Asia, and parts of Australia would be so hot as to be “incompatible with human life,” according to a 2020 study prepared by an international research team of archaeologists, ecologists, and climate scientists. We all should start to pre-feel and pre-experience a mass migration event in our own communities, so we can start to prepare for an event exponentially bigger than the migration and refugee crises we are already experiencing today. You may have noticed that the asteroid scenario sounds more like the premise for a Hollywood blockbuster than a long-term climate forecast.

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Try to have a bit of balance in your list—at least one of the forces you pick should feel like a risk to you, and at least one should feel like an opportunity: the climate crisis post-pandemic trauma social justice movements increasing economic inequality social and political tensions caused by refugee crises and mass migration automation of work decreasing birthrates in Western countries and a “youth boom” in Africa shifting religious majorities and increasing theological diversity the global switch to renewable energy sources alternatives to capitalism and market-based economies social media–driven misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories rise of authoritarianism and loss of faith in democracy widespread adoption of facial recognition and surveillance technologies digital currencies, cryptocurrency, and programmable money universal basic income and direct cash transfers internet shutdowns mandated by government or law enforcement the “right to disconnect” movement and four-day workweeks lifelong learning and “reskilling” at the workplace job guarantees regenerative design and the circular economy genomic research and CRISPR genetic modification the Internet of Things augmented and virtual reality satellite networks and space internet If there’s something on the institute’s list above that you don’t know anything about at all, this is the perfect opportunity to go find your first clue.

Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire by Danny Dorling, Sally Tomlinson

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, colonial rule, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Etonian, falling living standards, Flynn Effect, gentrification, housing crisis, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, University of East Anglia, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, wealth creators

The chapter ends with an image of Britain’s contribution to the EU Border Force on the Greek island of Lesbos and asks: how did it come to this? How did we come to think that sending a warship to the tiny Greek island of Lesbos was an appropriate response to families fleeing Syria to seek asylum? Who might have wanted such a picture to be broadcast? In whose interests was it to make it appear as if the UK was under threat from mass migration of people with darker skins or different religions? CHAPTER 3: FROM EMPIRE TO COMMONWEALTH Chapter 3 looks at some of the beliefs and myths underlying British imperialism, which from the mid-nineteenth century onwards were bound up with social Darwinism – beliefs that the white Anglo-Saxon ‘race’ was superior to all other races and peoples, and that hierarchies could be constructed of inherently superior and inferior groups of people.

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The men who came from the colonies to fight in the First World War were firmly told after the war to go home like good little children. Attitudes changed during the 1920s and 1930s. To accommodate Poles unwilling to return to Poland, Great Britain enacted the Polish Resettlement Act 1947, the UK’s first mass immigration law for people not from the empire. It offered citizenship to around 200,000. The Second World War was only won due to the intervention of others: not only the Americans, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders, and (especially) the Russians, but also the Poles, people from the Caribbean, those from British colonies in Africa, Indians, and especially the Gurkhas, who were later denied rights of settlement and pensions, until the actor Joanna Lumley took up their case with her cry of ‘Ayo Gorkhali!’

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America by Victor Davis Hanson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, bread and circuses, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, defund the police, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, El Camino Real, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, old-boy network, Paris climate accords, Parler "social media", peak oil, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, tech worker, Thomas L Friedman, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Numbers were critical. When yearly immigrants came in the tens, rather than the hundreds, of thousands, integration proved far easier. The surrounded immigrant accommodated to the majority culture and language rather than vice versa. In contrast, wave immigration made rapid assimilation far more problematic. Mass migrations of eastern Europeans, Jews, and Italians during the “Great Wave” between 1880 and 1924, in the manner of the earlier massive influx of 1.5 million Irish between 1845 and 1855, cast doubts on the efficacy of the melting pot. Eventually frantic calls arose for immigration restrictions—reflecting nativist fears that nonwestern, non-Protestant, and non–northern European newcomers would not integrate and might establish foreign customs, religions, and ideas contrary to the values and traditions of the majority of Americans.

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And they did so for a variety of reasons, ranging from eliminating internal dissidents, discriminating against indigenous people, and reducing social welfare and health care costs to envisioning expatriates as sources of generous remittances and valuable lobbying and diplomatic levers. There is currently much concern about both Russian and Chinese interference in US election campaigns. Yet, by any fair standard, one could argue that the Mexican government’s policy of deliberately encouraging mass immigration to the United States, under illegal auspices, has been far more influential in its long-term effects of changing the electorate and swaying elections.23 A few in the American establishment originally assumed that an open American border might provide a needed safety valve and thereby ward off communist revolutions in Mexico and Central America.

The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Metropolitan Elite by Michael Lind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, anti-communist, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, cotton gin, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, disinformation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, export processing zone, fake news, future of work, gentrification, global supply chain, guest worker program, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal world order, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Michael Milken, moral panic, Nate Silver, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, trade liberalization, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, working poor

The Pew Research Center reports that in the US, immigrants make up nearly half of all household servants, who are employed by a relatively small number of affluent households.12 As Lynn Stuart Parramore writes for the left-leaning AlterNet, “In the US, nearly half of maids and housekeepers are not native-born, with Latin Americans dominating. (A big chunk of the wealthy is happy to support mass immigration of cheap labor so that these workers can continue to be underpaid.)”13 The adoption by many US hub cities of seemingly idealistic “sanctuary city” laws, which forbid local law enforcement officers from collaborating with federal officials in identifying and deporting illegal immigrants, saves money for managers and professionals by maintaining their access to local pools of low-wage, untaxed, unregulated, off-the-books nannies, as well as other luxury service labor that allows college-educated professionals to maintain their privileged lifestyles.

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For the last two generations, in different decades, and in different Western countries, the occasions of populist protest have been different—the white backlash against the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, the traditionalist backlash against the sexual and censorship revolution of the 1970s, populist resistance to the Japanese import shocks of the 1980s, and then, more recently, mass immigration, globalization, deindustrialization, and the Great Recession. All of these different issues resulted in similar alignments of large portions of the non-college-educated working class against managerial and professional elites. Long before Brexit and Trump, their lack of voice and influence made alienated native working-class voters—mostly but not exclusively white—a destabilizing force in politics.

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The business Republicans, whose preferences Republican politicians promote, on average make $69,711 a year, around $30,000 more than the Republican populists, whose preferences most Republican politicians ignore.2 The second-largest group of voters in the American electorate, those whom Drutman calls “liberals,” that is, the moderate left, shares liberal cultural views and support of mass immigration with the free market libertarian right. But on economic policy issues, leftists, agreeing with populists on issues like Social Security spending, find their policy preferences neglected by the much smaller but more influential neoliberal faction of the Democratic Party. One way to understand these results is to recognize that in the United States and similar Western democracies there are two political spectrums, one for the college-educated managerial-professional overclass minority and one for the non-college-educated working-class majority of all races.

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World by Timothy Garton Ash

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, activist lawyer, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrew Keen, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clapham omnibus, colonial rule, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, index card, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Open Library, Parler "social media", Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snapchat, social graph, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, trolley problem, Turing test, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Yochai Benkler, Yom Kippur War, yottabyte

Who knows, perhaps bioengineering and communications technology will one day combine to reproduce cybercognitively, at a distance of thousands of miles, the incomparable richness of that experience. In the meantime, what characterises our transformed world is external combinations of the virtual and the physical, as a result of developments that I summarise as ‘mass migration and the internet’. COSMOPOLIS In a book called The Gutenberg Galaxy, published in 1962, the media guru Marshall McLuhan declared that ‘the new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village’.37 This was an extraordinary seerlike insight, well ahead of its time, but McLuhan’s simile of ‘global village’ is inadequate, both as description and prescription.

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In doing so, they draw on documents such as the authoritative General Comment of the UN Human Rights Committee on Article 19, the judgements of various courts, and philosophical, political and psychological arguments of the kind I have explored. Their work has traditionally been concentrated on states and international organisations, laws and the executive actions of governments. I have argued that in the cosmopolis created by mass migration and the internet, we must also look at other levels of the multidimensional struggle for word power, especially the role of private powers and that of self-shaping, networked communities, both online and offline. (‘Offline’ is a strange term, almost implying that ‘online’ is the richer, fuller human condition.

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It is something that those inhabiting the territories we now call India and Pakistan have wrestled with for millennia. The emperors Ashoka and Akbar were promoting peaceful coexistence between communities and sects long before Europeans discovered the virtue of ‘toleration’. Yet the combination of mass migration and the internet has produced a staggering growth in visible diversity on the physical streets of a global city and the online pages of the virtual one. Unsurprisingly, some of the most intense free speech controversies of our time have concerned how people express themselves about such differences.

The Little Book of Hedge Funds by Anthony Scaramucci

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, business process, carried interest, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fear of failure, financial engineering, fixed income, follow your passion, global macro, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, index fund, it's over 9,000, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Long Term Capital Management, mail merge, managed futures, margin call, mass immigration, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, tail risk, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the new new thing, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, uptick rule, Vanguard fund, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Manager Selection The Screening Process The Never-Ending Process Filling in the Data Portfolio Construction Stay Alert . . . It’s Your Money Chapter Nine: The Men Behind the Curtains A Quick History Lesson More than Just a Middleman The Specifics Your Dream Team The Pluses . . . . . . and the Minuses Chapter Ten: From Wall Street to Park Avenue Wall Street’s Mass Migration Only the Strongest Survive Inside the Mind of a Super Capitalist A Quick Pop Quiz Scoring a Job at a Hedge Fund A Final Few Words: 15 Things I Would Do If I Were you Conclusion Appendix Acknowledgments Little Book Big Profits Series In the Little Book Big Profits series, the brightest icons in the financial world write on topics that range from tried-and-true investment strategies to tomorrow’s new trends.

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If you are looking to chase money, fortune, or fame and don’t think you have the stomach for managing money or being a part of an asset management organization, then hopefully you will go back to your art or poetry class when you are done reading this chapter. As I tell any young person I advise or mentor: follow your passions and do want you really want to do. Don’t chase what you think you should do; it will only delay your journey to job and life fulfillment. Wall Street’s Mass Migration Growing up, it was fairly simple. Whenever I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, my answer was always the same: I wanted a job that would give me and my family financial security. At the time, I had no idea what a hedge fund was and if someone asked me I probably would have said it had to do with landscaping (as in hedges) and nothing to do with money management.

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From seasoned money managers to up-and-coming MBAs to college students working out of their dorms, everywhere you turned some whiz kid (and in some cases, some not so whiz kid) was starting his own fund. During that time, I, too, caught the hedge fund fever. Seven years out of law school I began my journey and entered the industry by cofounding Oscar Capital with Andrew K. Boszhardt Jr. So, what was the cause of this mass migration? Earnings Potential: Just as insects are attracted to light, money managers are attracted to lucrative fee structures. Take that and throw in the fact that the money manager is joining an exclusive secret club and it’s easy to see why the industry boomed. In the last decade, the top hedge fund managers earned “more money than God in a couple of years of trading,” amassing more wealth than the mightiest masters of the universe at prominent investment banks and private equity firms.

The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis by Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac

3D printing, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, F. W. de Klerk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gail Bradbrook, General Motors Futurama, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mustafa Suleyman, Nelson Mandela, new economy, ocean acidification, plant based meat, post-truth, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, the scientific method, trade route, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

Places such as central India are becoming increasingly challenging to inhabit. For a while people tried to carry on, but when you can’t work outside, when you can fall asleep only at four a.m. for a couple of hours because that’s the coolest part of the day, there’s not much you can do but leave. Mass migrations to less hot rural areas are beset by a host of refugee problems, civil unrest, and bloodshed over diminished water availability.16 Inland glaciers around the world are quickly disappearing. The millions who depended on the Himalayan, Alpine, and Andean glaciers to regulate water availability throughout the year are in a state of constant emergency: there is little snow turning to ice atop mountains in the winter, so there is no more gradual melting for the spring and summer.

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The millions who depended on the Himalayan, Alpine, and Andean glaciers to regulate water availability throughout the year are in a state of constant emergency: there is little snow turning to ice atop mountains in the winter, so there is no more gradual melting for the spring and summer. Now there are either torrential rains leading to flooding or prolonged droughts. The most vulnerable communities with the least resources have already seen what can ensue when water is scarce: sectarian violence, mass migration, and death. Even in some parts of the United States, there are fiery conflicts over water, battles between the rich who are willing to pay for as much water as they want and everyone else demanding equal access to the life-enabling resource. The taps in nearly all public facilities are locked, and those in restrooms are coin-operated.

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Scientists tried to develop varieties of staples that could stand up to drought, temperature fluctuations, and salt, but there was only so much we could do. Now there simply aren’t enough resilient varieties to feed the population. As a result, food riots, coups, and civil wars are throwing the world’s most vulnerable from the frying pan into the fire. As developed countries seek to seal their borders from mass migration, they too feel the consequences. Stock markets are crashing, currencies are wildly fluctuating, and the European Union has disbanded.20 As committed as nations are to keeping wealth and resources within their borders, they’re determined to keep people out. Most countries’ armies are now just highly militarized border patrols.

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

See: https://www.climatecentral.org/news/american-icons-threatened-by-sea-level-rise-in-pictures-19547#mapping-choices-us-cities-we-could-lose-to-sea-level-rise-19542. Ellie Mae O’Hagan wrote in the Guardian: Ellie Mae O’Hagan, “Mass Migration Is No ‘Crisis’: It’s the New Normal as the Climate Changes,” Guardian, August 18, 2015. See: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/18/mass-migration-crisis-refugees-climate-change. the 1947 partitioning of India and Pakistan: “History’s Greatest Migration,” Guardian, September 25, 1947. See: https://www.theguardian.com/century/1940-1949/Story/0,,105131,00.html.

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It was an exodus-driven influx of innovation. While we left the old and sought the new, we brought our ideas, technologies, and cultures along for the ride. And this process is not just how the Harlem Shake got to Hong Kong, it’s how we—all of us—got to now. This has not been an easy journey. A great many of our mass migrations began with people fleeing from danger, disaster, and all the unspeakable horrors we now know as “history.” Yet, despite originating in strife and tragedy, in the long run, migration has a positive impact on culture. In their book Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future, Oxford’s Ian Goldin and Geoffrey Cameron explain it this way: The history of human communities and world development highlights the extent to which migration has been an engine of social progress.

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To implement those ideas, we’ll also need greater global collaboration and cooperation, and a deep empathy that crosses borders, cultures, and continents. And thanks to five of the greatest migrations the world has yet seen, we’ll soon see all of this and more. In this chapter, as we widen our view from the next decade to the century that follows, we’re about to witness mass migration on a massive scale. In some cases, we’re moving for familiar reasons—to avoid environmental disaster and chase economic opportunity—but in shorter time frames and greater numbers than anything yet seen. In others, we’re crossing borders we’ve never crossed before. Moving off world and into outer space; moving out of regular reality and into virtual reality; moving, if the cutting-edge of brain-computer-interface development continues apace, out of individual consciousness and into collective consciousness, a technologically enabled hive mind, or, for those who speak “Trekkie,” a kinder, gentler Borg.

Climate Change by Joseph Romm

biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, Climatic Research Unit, data science, decarbonisation, demand response, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, failed state, gigafactory, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge worker, mass immigration, ocean acidification, performance metric, renewable energy transition, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, the scientific method

In 2008, Thomas Fingar, then “the U.S. intelligence community’s top analyst,” estimates that it will happen by the mid-2020s, as “droughts, food shortages and scarcity of fresh water will plague large swaths of the globe, from northern China to the Horn of Africa.” This “will trigger mass migrations and political upheaval in many parts of the developing world.” The UK government’s chief scientist, Professor John Beddington, laid out a scenario similar in a 2009 speech. He warned that by 2030, “A ‘perfect storm’ of food shortages, scarce water and insufficient energy resources threaten to unleash public unrest, cross-border conflicts and mass migration as people flee from the worst-affected regions,” as the UK’s Guardian put it. What is the plausible best-case scenario for climate change this century?

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The editorial warned that “Climate change poses an immediate and grave threat, driving ill health and increasing the risk of conflict, such that each feeds on the other.” The threat posed by climate change to regional security “will limit access to food, safe water, power, sanitation, and health services and drive mass migration and competition for remaining resources.” There will be a rise in starvation, diarrhea, and infectious diseases as well as in the death rate of children and adults. The authors note that “in 2004, seven of the 10 countries with the highest mortality rates in children under 5 were conflict or immediate post-conflict societies.”

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The study, “Climate Change in the Fertile Crescent and Implications of the Recent Syrian Drought,” published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that global warming made Syria’s 2006 to 2010 drought two to three times more likely. “While we’re not saying the drought caused the war,” lead author Dr. Colin Kelley explained, “We are saying that it certainly contributed to other factors—agricultural collapse and mass migration among them—that caused the uprising.” “It’s a pretty convincing climate fingerprint,” Retired Navy Rear Admiral David Titley has said. Titley, also a meteorologist, said, “you can draw a very credible climate connection to this disaster we call ISIS right now.” In particular, the study finds that climate change is already drying the region out in two ways: “First, weakening wind patterns that bring rain-laden air from the Mediterranean reduced precipitation during the usual November-to-April wet season.

After Europe by Ivan Krastev

affirmative action, bank run, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, central bank independence, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, job automation, mass immigration, meritocracy, moral panic, open borders, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, public intellectual, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, The Brussels Effect, too big to fail, Wolfgang Streeck, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

Now it’s generally right-wing parties that claim the right of prosperous European communities to defend their way of life and to resist those refugees who aspire to live in Europe as they have lived in their own countries. The Left is struggling with how to respond to this new reality. The European center-left is also facing its own identity crisis, as it has been gravely weakened electorally in these years of mass migration. Social democratic parties throughout the continent are themselves in free fall as the worker’s vote flees to the Far Right. In Austria, almost 90 percent of blue-collar workers voted for the far-right candidate in the second round of the May 2016 presidential elections. In the German regional elections, more than 30 percent of that same group supported the reactionary Alternative for Germany.

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The reaction of eastern Europeans to globalization is not so different, frankly, than that of Trump’s white working-class supporters. They both view themselves as forgotten losers. Eastern Europeans’ hostile reaction to refugees and migrants is also rooted in a sense of betrayal that many feel when they hear European leaders describe mass migration as a win-win proposition. In his book Exodus, Oxford economist Paul Collier makes clear that while the migration of people from poor countries to the West is beneficial to the migrants and as a whole benefits host societies, it can negatively affect the lower classes of these same host societies and particularly the chance that their children will have better lives.28 The resistance of liberals to conceding any negative effects of migration has triggered the antiestablishment (and particularly anti-mainstream-media) reaction that is convulsing political life in democracies in so many places today.

The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us by Joel Kotkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, birth tourism , blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, citizen journalism, colonial rule, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic winter, Deng Xiaoping, Downton Abbey, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, financial independence, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, labor-force participation, land reform, Lewis Mumford, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, microapartment, new economy, New Urbanism, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, pensions crisis, Peter Calthorpe, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seaside, Florida, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, starchitect, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, Ted Nelson, the built environment, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, young professional

Migration from abroad, as well as from the rural hinterland, made sure that New York did not stagnate, bringing new economic forces and entrepreneurs into the city and keeping Gotham in what he called “a state of effervescence.”38 A city’s appeal to newcomers has remained critical in modern times. One notable example was the mass migration of skilled migrants and entrepreneurs from Hitler’s Europe, which flooded London as well as New York and Los Angeles. These people brought with them their skills, connections, and creative input. This critical migration has continued to the modern day, although the countries that people come from are now more diverse and less European in origin.

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It is not too late to adopt more children, but they won’t look like her.”142 Germany, with its ultra-low birth rate and rapidly aging population, epitomizes the stakes of migration arbitrage. By 2025, Germany’s economy will need 6 million additional workers, or an annual 200,000 new migrants, to keep its economic engine humming, according to government estimates.143 The rationale for mass migration seems inexorable. Germany is unlikely to meet this demand internally due to a shrinking workforce.144 Additionally, many migrants to Germany do not have the skills to participate in that country’s high-end economy. They also threaten to inject many of their homelands’ maladies, ranging from jihadism to street crime, into what have been fairly prosperous and peaceful places.

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“Germany’s Big Firms Pay Price for Small-Town Ties,” Wall Street Journal, http://www.wsj.com/articles/germanys-big-firms-pay-price-for-small-town-ties-1419305459. GERMAN, Erik and PYNE, Solana. (2010). “Dhaka: fastest growing megacity in the world,” GlobalPost, http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/asia/100831/bangladesh-megacities-part-one. ——— (2010, September 10). “Disasters drive mass migration to Dhaka,” GlobalPost, http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/asia/100831/bangladesh-megacities-part-three-migrant. GILBERT, Alan and GUGLER, Josef. (1991). Cities, Poverty and Development: Urbanization in the Third World, Oxford: Oxford University Press. GIROUARD, Mark. (1985). Cities and People: A Social and Architectural History, New Haven: Yale University Press.

This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook by Extinction Rebellion

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, banks create money, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, Colonization of Mars, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, drug harm reduction, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, feminist movement, full employment, Gail Bradbrook, gig economy, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, mass immigration, negative emissions, Peter Thiel, place-making, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, rewilding, Sam Altman, smart grid, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, the scientific method, union organizing, urban sprawl, wealth creators

The science is clear: we are in the sixth mass extinction event and we will face catastrophe if we do not act swiftly and robustly. Biodiversity is being annihilated around the world. Our seas are poisoned, acidic and rising. Flooding and desertification will render vast tracts of land uninhabitable and lead to mass migration. Our air is so toxic the United Kingdom is breaking the law. It harms the unborn while causing tens of thousands to die. The breakdown of our climate has begun. There will be more wildfires, unpredictable super-storms, increasing famine and untold drought as food supplies and fresh water disappear.

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Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the ageing process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape. There’s nothing wrong with madly optimistic appraisals of how technology might benefit human society. But the current drive for a post-human utopia is something else.

Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, clean water, David Graeber, demographic dividend, demographic transition, deskilling, domesticated silver fox, facts on the ground, founder crops, invention of writing, joint-stock company, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, means of production, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, zoonotic diseases

Instead of the population of the alluvium having to shift camp from one ecological zone to another, it could stay in the same place while, as it were, the different habitats came to them.14 A subsistence niche in the southern Mesopotamian wetlands was, compared with the risks of agriculture, more stable, more resilient, and renewable with little annual labor. A propitious location and a sense of timing are crucial to hunter-gatherers in another way. The “harvest” of hunters and gatherers is less a daily hit-or-miss proposition than a carefully calculated effort to intercept the roughly predictable (late-April and May) mass migration of game such as the huge herds of gazelle and wild asses in the alluvium. The hunt was carefully prepared in advance. Long, narrowing lanes were prepared to funnel the herds onto a killing ground, where they could be dispatched and preserved by drying and salting. For the hunters, as for hunting folk elsewhere, a crucial part of their yearly animal protein supply came from a week or so of intense round-the-clock efforts to take as much migrating prey as practicable.

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In many cases the factor limiting the “protein harvest” was not the scarcity of prey but the scarcity of labor to process it before it spoiled. The point is that the rhythm of most hunters is governed by the natural pulse of migrations that represent much of their most prized food supply. Some of these mass migrations of prey may well be a response to human predation, as Herman Melville suggested for the sperm whale, but there is no doubt that it gives a radically different tempo to the lives of hunting and fishing peoples in contrast to agriculturalists—a rhythm that farmers often read as indolence. The most common route for a great many of these migrations has been via the wetlands, estuaries, and river valleys of major waterways, owing to the density of nutritional resources they offer.

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Quoted in Maria Golia, “After Tahrir,” Times Literary Supplement, February 12, 2016, p. 14. 29. The account immediately below owes much to Lewis, The Early Chinese Empires; Keightley, The Origins of Chinese Civilization; and Yates, “Slavery in Early China.” 30. See, for example, Yates, “Slavery in Early China.” 31. Readers will perhaps have noted that mass migration to northern Europe and North America, though largely voluntary, accomplishes much the same thing in terms of making the productive life of people raised and trained elsewhere available to the country where they settle. 32. Taylor, “Believing the Ancients.” For a dissent from this position, see Scheidel, “Quantifying the Sources of Slaves.” 33.

The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work by Richard Baldwin

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bread and circuses, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer vision, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, future of work, George Gilder, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Hans Moravec, hiring and firing, hype cycle, impulse control, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, new economy, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, post-work, profit motive, remote working, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, standardized shipping container, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, universal basic income, warehouse automation

Second, telecom breakthroughs—like telepresence and augmented reality—are making remote workers seem less remote. Widespread shifts in work practices (toward flexible teams) and adoption of innovative collaborative software platforms (like Slack, Asana, and Microsoft 365), are helping to turn telemigration into tele-mass-migration. And there is more. This new competition from “remote intelligence” (RI) is being piled on to service-sector workers at the same time as they are facing new competition from artificial intelligence (AI). In short, RI and AI are coming for the same jobs, at the same time, and driven by the same digital technologies.

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Just as in England, the dynamic duo of trade and mechanization was creating millions of new jobs in industry, and rising incomes were creating millions of service sector jobs. The introduction of railroads, acquisition of new land, and the construction of inland waterways had the effect of grandly expanding the amount of arable land. That, plus mass migration from Europe, resulted in booming farm-sector employment. The shares shown in the right panel of Figure 2.4 display the classic structural transformation of an agrarian/rural economy into an urban/industrial one. Agriculture’s share plummeted, while services and manufacturing shares soared. The number of US jobs in manufacturing rose for much longer than in the UK—even though the two nations’ share figures fell from about 1965.

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The radical transformations that came with the industrial revolution and the shift from feudalism to capitalism destroyed the social fabric that had, for centuries, been based on reciprocity and ancient hierarchical relationships. As Karl Polanyi wrote in his 1942 book, The Great Transformation, the commoditization of labor and mass migration to urban and industrial areas disturbed traditional values to such an extent that the people pushed back by embracing communism or fascism. Back then, however, the push and pushback both took many decades. The industrial and societal revolutions started accelerating around 1820, but communism and fascism took off only in the 1920s.

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class by Owen Jones

Asperger Syndrome, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, deindustrialization, Etonian, facts on the ground, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mass immigration, meritocracy, Neil Kinnock, Occupy movement, pension reform, place-making, plutocrats, post-war consensus, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, rising living standards, social distancing, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working-age population

The white working class had become another marginalized ethnic minority, and this meant that all their concerns were understood solely through the prism of race. They became presented as a lost tribe On the wrong side of history, disorientated by multiculturalism and obsessed with defending their identity from the cultural ravages of mass immigration. The rise of the idea of a 'white working class' fuelled a new liberal bigotry. It was OK to hate the white working class, because they were themselves a bunch of racist bigots. One defence of the term' chav' points out that 'Chavs themselves use the word, so what's the problem?' They have a point: some young working-class people have even embraced the word as a cultural identity.

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In reality, it simply boostedthe image of white working-class people as a race-obsessed, BNP- voting rump. Their problems were not portrayed as economic-thingslike housing and jobs that affect working-class people of all colours did not get a look-in. They were simply portrayed as a minority culture under threat from mass immigration. 'The White season examines why some feel increasingly marginalised and explores possible reasons behind the rise in popularity of far-right politics in some sections of this community,' the BBC announced. But the trailer for the series said it all: a white man's face being scrib- bled over by dark-skinned hands with a black marker pen until he disappeared into the background.

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But two years ago, they virtually got no votes-just a couple of per cent. So I think you tend to get a problem of racism in an area undergoing transition.' Hackney is one of the most mixed areas in the country, and as a result the far right has died out there. But it flourishes in areas such as Barking and Dagenham, where mass immigration is a new phenomenon and where the BNP has done well; or, conversely, where there is very little immigration but a tremendous fear of it. The demonization of the working class has also had a real role to play in the BNP's success story. Although ruling elites have made itclear that there is nothing of worth in working-class culture, we have been (rightly) urged to celebrate the identities of minority groups.

How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It by Arthur Herman

British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, creative destruction, do-ocracy, Edward Jenner, financial independence, gentleman farmer, global village, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Joan Didion, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land tenure, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, oil shale / tar sands, Republic of Letters, Robert Mercer, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, tontine, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, working poor

—Sir Charles Napier One afternoon Robert Louis Stevenson noted a story in an Edinburgh newspaper about an apartment house in the Old Town that had suddenly collapsed, burying the residents in plaster and rubble. “All over the world,” he mused to himself, “in London, in Canada, in New Zealand, fancy what a multitude of people could exclaim with truth, ‘The house that I was born in fell down last night!’ ” The Scottish mass migration of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Stevenson himself was born in Edinburgh and died in Samoa) was as momentous as any in history. In sheer numbers, it hardly stands out: perhaps 3 million all told, compared to the 8 million Italians who left their native land between 1820 and World War I.

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In Bernard Aspinwall’s phrase, they were “the shock troops of modernization, ” the first echelon of skilled immigrant labor to reach America’s shores and make it a productive nation. They transformed the new republic from an agricultural community of “agrarian yeoman” into an industrial powerhouse, the quintessential modern nation. The Scots who came to the United States in the nineteenth century reveal once again why the Scottish diaspora was so different from other mass immigrations in history. Despite their relatively small numbers (less than three-quarters of a million, compared with 5 million Irish), the vast majority of Scottish immigrants could read and write English. Most knew some trade other than farming. Almost half of the Scottish males who came to America between 1815 and 1914 qualified as either skilled or semiskilled workers.

Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain by John Darwin

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, Corn Laws, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, European colonialism, financial independence, friendly fire, full employment, imperial preference, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, Kowloon Walled City, land tenure, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, open economy, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Scientific racism, South China Sea, special economic zone, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing

Clerics were hired to preach apposite sermons: John Donne gave one for the Virginia Company.32 By the mid eighteenth century, the promotional literature included plausible maps: the one for Halifax carefully thinned out the forests, omitted wild animals and excluded the Indians.33 In the nineteenth century, there were huge numbers of ‘emigrant guides’, warning, cajoling, steering, misinforming. The migrants had to make the best sense they could: hence, perhaps their reliance on the letters sent home – although even these could be doctored by a vigilant company. But perhaps most important of all was the fact that by the time the era of mass migration arrived in the 1840s and 1850s, the British at home were already a nation of movers and settlers: from region to region, from village to town, from all over Britain to the metropolis in London. Migration, like charity, began at home. ARRIVING For most emigrant families, it was the arrival not the journey that mattered.

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There exclusion (by wipe out) was practised against the San (or Bushmen) hunter-gatherers. But against the Xhosa, the Zulus and other pastoralist peoples (who also grew foodgrains), these tactics were useless. They were too numerous, too rooted, and in white eyes too useful, to be driven away. In a country too poor (before the finding of gold) to attract mass immigration from Europe (the British were always fewer in number than the local-born ‘Dutch’), black land and black labour were equally valuable. So the mode of exclusion was varied. South Africa’s blacks were (largely) dispossessed of their land and transformed into serfs. Penned into ‘locations’ and forced to earn their living by labour, they were excluded by rule from the white man’s South Africa.

Horizons: The Global Origins of Modern Science by James Poskett

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clockwork universe, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, complexity theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, double helix, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, German hyperinflation, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Mount Scopus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, personalized medicine, polynesian navigation, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Virgin Galactic

More broadly, governments from Latin America to East Asia believed that modern genetics might bring about dramatic improvements in human health, particularly through a better understanding of inherited diseases. There was also an interest in the use of modern genetics to answer questions concerning national and ethnic identity, another major concern during a period of state formation and mass migration. Today, we know that race is not a meaningful biological category. Indeed, as early as 1950 the United Nations had issued a statement describing race as a ‘social myth’ rather than a ‘biological fact’. Nonetheless, throughout the Cold War, governments around the world organized countless genetic surveys, hoping to distinguish different ethnic groups, such as ‘Turks’ and ‘Arabs’, by their genetic make-up, even if this ultimately proved impossible.14 As all this suggests, the development of modern genetics was inseparable from Cold War politics.

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Hugh Slotten, Ronald Numbers, and David Livingstone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 424, 434–5, and 438–43. 73Rabkin, ‘Middle East’, 424–43, Arnold Reisman, ‘Comparative Technology Transfer: A Tale of Development in Neighboring Countries, Israel and Turkey’, Comparative Technology Transfer and Society 3 (2005): 331, Burton, Genetic Crossroads, 107–13, 138–50, and 232–9, and Murat Ergin, ‘Is the Turk a White Man?’: Race and Modernity in the Making of Turkish Identity (Leiden: Brill, 2017). 74Kirsh, ‘Population Genetics’, 641, Shifra Shvarts, Nadav Davidovitch, Rhona Seidelman, and Avishay Goldberg, ‘Medical Selection and the Debate over Mass Immigration in the New State of Israel (1948–1951)’, Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 22 (2005), and Roselle Tekiner, ‘Race and the Issue of National Identity in Israel’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 23 (1991). 75Burton, Genetic Crossroads, 108 and 146, El-Haj, The Genealogical Science, 63, Kirsh, ‘Population Genetics’, 635, and Joyce Donegani, Karima Ibrahim, Elizabeth Ikin, and Arthur Mourant, ‘The Blood Groups of the People of Egypt’, Heredity 4 (1950). 76Nurit Kirsh, ‘Geneticist Elisabeth Goldschmidt: A Two-Fold Pioneering Story’, Israel Studies 9 (2004). 77Burton, Genetic Crossroads, 157–9, Batsheva Bonné, ‘Chaim Sheba (1908–1971)’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 36 (1972), Raphael Falk, Zionism and the Biology of Jews (Cham: Springer, 2017), 145–8, and Elisabeth Goldschmidt, ed., The Genetics of Migrant and Isolate Populations (New York: The Williams and Wilkins Company, 1973), v. 78Goldschmidt, The Genetics of Migrant and Isolate Populations, Burton, Genetic Crossroads, 161–3, El-Haj, The Genealogical Science, 63–5 and 99, Kirsh, ‘Population Genetics’, 653, and Kirsh, ‘Geneticist Elisabeth Goldschmidt’, 90. 79Burton, Genetic Crossroads, 161–3, El-Haj, The Genealogical Science, 63–5 and 99, Kirsh, ‘Population Genetics’, 653, Kirsh, ‘Geneticist Elisabeth Goldschmidt’, 90, Newton Freire-Maia, ‘The Effect of the Load of Mutations on the Mortality Rate in Brazilian Populations’, in The Genetics of Migrant and Isolate Populations, ed.

Losing Earth: A Recent History by Nathaniel Rich

An Inconvenient Truth, carbon tax, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, energy security, green new deal, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, the scientific method

The proximate cause will be not the warming itself—we won’t burst in flame and crumble all to ashes—but its secondary effects. The Red Cross estimates that already more refugees flee environmental crises than violent conflict. Starvation, drought, the inundation of the coasts, and the smothering expansion of deserts will force hundreds of millions of people to run for their lives. The mass migrations will stagger delicate regional truces, hastening battles over natural resources, acts of terrorism, and declarations of war. Beyond a certain point, the two great existential threats to our civilization, global warming and nuclear weapons, will loose their chains and join to rebel against their creators.

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In “How to Wreck the Environment,” an essay published in 1968, while he was a science adviser to Lyndon Johnson, MacDonald predicted a near future in which “nuclear weapons were effectively banned and the weapons of mass destruction were those of environmental catastrophe.” The world’s most advanced militaries, he warned, would soon be able to weaponize weather. By accelerating industrial emissions of carbon dioxide, they could alter weather patterns, forcing mass migration, starvation, drought, and economic collapse. In the decade since, MacDonald had grown alarmed to see humankind accelerate its pursuit of this particular weapon of mass destruction, not maliciously, but unwittingly. President Carter’s initiative to develop high-carbon synthetic fuels—gas and liquid fuel extracted from shale and tar sands—was a frightening blunder, the equivalent of building a new generation of thermonuclear bombs.

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg

A. Roger Ekirch, back-to-the-land, British Empire, California gold rush, colonial rule, Copley Medal, desegregation, Donald Trump, feminist movement, full employment, gentleman farmer, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, joint-stock company, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, mass immigration, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration

We can no longer ignore the stagnant, expendable bottom layers of society in explaining the national identity. The poor, the waste, the rubbish, as they are variously labeled, have stood front and center during America’s most formative political contests. During colonial settlement, they were useful pawns as well as rebellious troublemakers, a pattern that persisted amid mass migrations of landless squatters westward across the continent. Southern poor whites figured prominently in the rise of Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party, and in the atmosphere of distrust that caused bad blood to percolate among the poorer classes within the Confederacy during the Civil War. White trash were dangerous outliers in efforts to rebuild the Union during Reconstruction; and in the first two decades of the twentieth century, when the eugenics movement flourished, they were the class of degenerates targeted for sterilization.

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The small, struggling band lost half their number to starvation and disease during the first year. The wife of one of the leaders, William Bradford, mysteriously disappeared over the side of the Mayflower. It would be a full decade before the English settlers in Massachusetts made significant inroads in attracting new settlers to the region.39 When the mass migration of 1630 did take place, it was the well-organized John Winthrop who led a fleet of eleven ships, loaded with seven hundred passengers and livestock, and bearing a clear objective to plant a permanent community. Far more intact families migrated to the colony than had to Virginia, and a core of the settlers were Puritans who did not need the threat of a death sentence to attend church services on the Sabbath—one of the many examples of heavy-handedness practiced in the early days of Jamestown.

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The glorious title of cultivator would remain beyond the reach of most backcountry settlers.48 CHAPTER FIVE Andrew Jackson’s Cracker Country The Squatter as Common Man Obsquatulate, To mosey, or to abscond. —“Cracker Dictionary,” Salem Gazette (1830) By 1800, one-fifth of the American population had resettled on its “frontier,” the territory between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi. Effective regulation of this mass migration was well beyond the limited powers of the federal government. Even so, officials understood that the country’s future depended on controlling this vast territory. Financial matters were involved too. Government sale of these lands was needed to reduce the nation’s war debts. Besides, the lands were hardly empty, and the potential for violent conflicts with Native Americans was ever present, as white migrants settled on lands they did not own.

The Flat White Economy by Douglas McWilliams

access to a mobile phone, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, computer age, correlation coefficient, Crossrail, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, George Gilder, hiring and firing, income inequality, informal economy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, loadsamoney, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, vertical integration, working-age population, zero-sum game

Many of them are attracted to London by jobs – London has been the only place in Europe creating jobs for young people at Western rates of pay on a significant scale over the past ten years. And the virtual collapse of employment opportunities for young people in most of the Eurozone has stimulated mass migration into London. But the people aren’t only attracted by the jobs. Often they come to London to look for fun. Once they are in London, of course, they then look for work to pay for the fun. This creates the supply of skills that support either the Flat White Economy itself with high-tech skills knowhow or the support industries that rely on more prosaic abilities like making coffee or mending bikes.

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Its unique geopolitical situation also seems to foster a necessary culture of innovation in the face of daunting opposition – much of the reasons for Israel’s strength in telecommunications technology, security and encryption stems from substantial funding by the government for military purposes. It also has an exceptional, multicultural and multilingual talent base and Jewish mass migration from Eastern Europe in the past quarter century has massively expanded its skills base.18 Despite the geopolitical problems of the Middle East, the Israeli tech sector has such momentum that it is highly unlikely to stumble unless Israel gets involved in a war on so large a scale that it makes it impossible for the industry to operate.

Zero-Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety by Gideon Rachman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Global Witness, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, pension reform, plutocrats, popular capitalism, price stability, RAND corporation, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sinatra Doctrine, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, zero-sum game

The inability to stabilize failing states could see countries such as Afghanistan and Pakistan slipping further into violent anarchy, with dangerous consequences for the rest of the world. Over the longer term, a failure to deal with climate change could provoke the most serious international crises of all—leading to flooding, famine, mass migration, and even war. Crises such as these ultimately threaten the future of the whole world. Yet the world’s major powers are unable to deal with them cooperatively. That is because a damaged and dysfunctional world economy and the growth of new international rivalries—in particular between the United States and China—are increasingly trapping the world in a zero-sum logic, in which one country’s gain looks like another’s loss.

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The president chose to highlight terrorism, war, genocide, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, global warming, global poverty, and the threat of pandemics. To that list could be added global economic tensions; shortages of food, water, and energy; failed states; international crime; and uncontrolled mass migration. All of these issues are problems of globalization. Some have been created or worsened by the process of global economic integration that has defined international politics since 1978. None of them can be solved without a significant degree of international cooperation. And yet the world lacks the international political structures needed to fix global problems.

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A spate of terrorist attacks inside India is also increasing the dangers of war between Pakistan and India, two nuclear-armed neighbors. The dangers of climate change have been amply rehearsed. If the United Nations’ International Panel on Climate Change is correct, there is a serious risk in the coming decades of desertification, crop failures, the flooding of coastal cities, and mass migration by displaced people—with war and conflict following in the wake of environmental disaster. Even many of those who are skeptical about the UN-endorsed science on climate change accept the need for international action to curb greenhouse gases, even if only as an insurance policy against catastrophe.

The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War by Robert D. Kaplan

Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, clean water, Deng Xiaoping, edge city, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Honoré de Balzac, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Peace of Westphalia, Ronald Reagan, Thomas Malthus, trade route, unemployed young men, Yom Kippur War

The 20 / THE COMING ANARCHY political and strategic impact of surging populations, spreading disease, deforestation and soil erosion, water depletion, air pol­ lution, and, possibly, rising sea levels in critical, overcrowded regions like the Nile Delta and Bangladesh—developments that will prompt mass migrations and, in turn, incite group con­ flicts—will be the core foreign-policy challenge from which most others will ultimately emanate, arousing the public and uniting assorted interests left over from the Cold War. In the twenty-first century water will be in dangerously short supply in such diverse locales as Saudi Arabia, Central Asia, and the southwestern United States.

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Like prosperous and peaceful Japan on the one hand, and war-torn and poverty-wracked Armenia on the other, Israel is a classic national-ethnic organism. Much of the Arab world, however, will undergo alteration, as Islam spreads across artifi- 42 / THE COMING ANARCHY cial frontiers, fueled by mass migrations into the cities and a soaring birth rate of more than 3.2 percent. Seventy percent of the Arab population has been born since 1970—youths with lit­ tle historical memory of anticolonial independence struggles, postcolonial attempts at nation-building, or any of the ArabIsraeli wars. The most distant recollection of these youths will be the West's humiliation of colonially invented Iraq in 1991.

A River in Darkness by Masaji Ishikawa

colonial rule, Great Leap Forward, mass immigration

In the early days of the so-called repatriation, some seventy thousand people left Japan and crossed the sea to North Korea. With the exception of a brief three-and-a-half-year hiatus, the process continued until 1984. During this period, some one hundred thousand Koreans and two thousand Japanese wives crossed over to North Korea. That’s one hell of a mass migration. In fact, it was the first (and only) time in history that so many people from a capitalist country had moved to a socialist country. The Japanese government actively promoted the repatriation, supposedly on humanitarian grounds. But in my opinion, what they were actually pursuing was opportunism of the most vile and cynical kind.

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I’m a Japanese citizen. My father was Korean. My mother Japanese. Way back in 1960, my father was conned into taking us to North Korea. We were promised a new life in a paradise on earth. The Japanese government was all for it. The United Nations knew all about it. Your charity was happy to supervise the greatest mass migration in the history of the world. Have you any idea what you did to us? You consigned us to a living hell. I’ve finally escaped. No one else has. I’m the first. The rest of us are dying or dead. It would be nice if you could help me get home.” It all came pouring out of me. Silence. I’ve gone too far, I thought.

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems by Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo

3D printing, accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, company town, congestion pricing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, fear of failure, financial innovation, flying shuttle, gentrification, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, high net worth, immigration reform, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, loss aversion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, middle-income trap, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, Paul Samuelson, place-making, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart meter, social graph, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, universal basic income, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

Borjas, “Still More on Mariel: The Role of Race,” NBER Working Paper 23504, 2017. 24 Jennifer Hunt, “The Impact of the 1962 Repatriates from Algeria on the French Labor Market,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 45, no. 3 (April 1992): 556–72. 25 Rachel M. Friedberg, “The Impact of Mass Migration on the Israeli Labor Market,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 116, no. 4 (November 2001): 1373–1408. 26 Marco Tabellini, “Gifts of the Immigrants, Woes of the Natives: Lessons from the Age of Mass Migration,” HBS Working Paper 19-005, 2018. 27 Mette Foged and Giovanni Peri, “Immigrants’ Effect on Native Workers: New Analysis on Longitudinal Data,” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 8, no. 2 (2016): 1–34. 28 The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2017), https://doi.org/10.17226/23550. 29 Christian Dustmann, Uta Schönberg, and Jan Stuhler, “Labor Supply Shocks, Native Wages, and the Adjustment of Local Employment, “Quarterly Journal of Economics 132, no. 1 (February 2017): 435–83. 30 Michael A.

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When President Trump compared the migrants from “shithole countries” to the good ones coming from Norway, he most probably did not know that a long time ago Norwegian immigrants were part of the “huddled masses” Emma Lazarus talked about.34 There is actually a case study of Norwegian migrants to the United States during the age of mass migration, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.35 At the time, there was nothing to stop migration, other than the price of passage. The study compared the families of migrants to the families where nobody migrated. It found migrants tended to come from among the poorest families; their fathers were substantially poorer than average.

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Postel, “Immigration Restrictions as Active Labor Market Policy: Evidence from the Mexican Bracero Exclusion,” American Economic Review 108, no. 6 (June 2018): 1468–87. 31 Foged and Peri, “Immigrants’ Effect on Native Workers.” 32 Patricia Cortés, “The Effect of Low-Skilled Immigration on US Prices: Evidence from CPI Data,” Journal of Political Economy 116, no. 3 (2008): 381–422. 33 Patricia Cortés and José Tessada, “Low-Skilled Immigration and the Labor Supply of Highly Skilled Women,” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 3, no. 3 (July 2011): 88–123. 34 Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus,” in Emma Lazarus: Selected Poems, ed. John Hollander (New York: Library of America, 2005), 58. 35 Ran Abramitzky, Leah Platt Boustan, and Katherine Eriksson, “Europe’s Tired, Poor, Huddled Masses: Self-Selection and Economic Outcomes in the Age of Mass Migration,” American Economic Review 102, no. 5 (2012): 1832–56. 36 “Immigrant Founders of the 2017 Fortune 500,” Center for American Entrepreneurship, 2017, http://startupsusa.org/fortune500/. 37 Nakamura, Sigurdsson, and Steinsson, “The Gift of Moving.” 38 Jie Bai, “Melons as Lemons: Asymmetric Information, Consumer Learning, and Quality Provision,” working paper, 2018, accessed June 19, 2019, https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B52sohAPtnAWYVhBYm11cDBrSm M/view. 39 “For the conversion of his money into capital, therefore, the owner of money must meet in the market with the free labourer, free in the double sense, that as a free man he can dispose of his labour-power as his own commodity, and that on the other hand he has no other commodity for sale, is short of everything necessary for the realisation of his labour-power.”

Why America Must Not Follow Europe by Daniel Hannan

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, carbon tax, mass immigration, obamacare, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, stakhanovite, Upton Sinclair

Between 1945 and 1974, Western Europe did indeed outperform the U.S. And in retrospect, we can see why. Europe happened to enjoy perfect conditions for rapid growth. Infrastructure had been destroyed during the war, but an educated, industrious, and disciplined workforce remained. There was also, for the first time in Europe’s history, mass migration. Within individual nations, people moved in unprecedented numbers from the countryside to the growing cities. Within Europe, they journeyed from the Mediterranean littoral to the coalfields and steelworks of northern Europe. And millions more came from beyond Europe – from North Africa, Turkey, and the former British, French, and Dutch colonies.

The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction by Jamie Woodcock, Mark Graham

Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Californian Ideology, call centre, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, future of work, gamification, gender pay gap, gig economy, global value chain, Greyball, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, inventory management, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, low interest rates, Lyft, mass immigration, means of production, Network effects, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planetary scale, precariat, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, TaskRabbit, The Future of Employment, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

Second, while most gig economy firms are focused on the provision of local services (for example, cleaning or food delivery), some gig economy firms have been able to set up global-scale platforms for services like data entry, graphic design or transcription that have fewer geographic limitations on where they need to be delivered from (see chapter 2 for more on this). These global platforms set up what you might think of as ‘planetary labour markets’ (Graham and Anwar, 2019). In the words of Guy Standing (2016), they enable a mass migration of labour, but not of people. Clients suddenly have a world of workers to choose from, and workers from around the global are placed into competition with one another – all made possible because the majority of humanity has now been connected to the global network. Consumer attitudes and preferences New economic activity requires consumer demand.

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When you email customer support or report an image as inappropriate on your favourite social platform, the workers handling those tasks could either be in your city or on the other side of the globe. The untethering of work from place that this has allowed has meant that, for the first time, we potentially have a mass migration of labour without the migration of workers (Standing, 2016). In order to adequately discuss why our expectations and visions about the relationships between work and economic development may have changed, it is useful to first outline what is and isn’t new about digital work. Long, complicated global production networks have always existed.

Sustainable Minimalism: Embrace Zero Waste, Build Sustainability Habits That Last, and Become a Minimalist Without Sacrificing the Planet (Green Housecleaning, Zero Waste Living) by Stephanie Marie Seferian

8-hour work day, Airbnb, big-box store, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, climate anxiety, Community Supported Agriculture, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, do what you love, emotional labour, food desert, imposter syndrome, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lifestyle creep, Mason jar, mass immigration, microplastics / micro fibres, ride hailing / ride sharing

Climate scientists warn that floods, droughts, heat waves, and powerful storms will increase in both frequency and intensity in the coming decades.127 Melting glaciers and rising sea levels will flood coastal towns, and they may remain under water for good. Powerful storms may wipe out our power grids for extended periods of time, and mass migrations of entire nations attempting to escape the consequences of climate change will likely strain communities that are unprepared for the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees. Droughts, too, may significantly impact the industrial food system we rely on so heavily.128 These days, you and I are a generation or two removed from a crisis.

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Science informs us that by 2050, intense droughts will significantly disrupt both global agriculture and water supply.154 Other extreme weather events—including massive hurricanes and crippling snow storms—will become commonplace. I wonder what such a constant, day-to-day barrage will do to societies around the globe. The very rich, within their fortified and air-conditioned homes, will be able to weather extreme heat, lack of essential resources, and conflicts stemming from mass migrations. The rest of humanity, however, will likely be left to duke it out. As is often the case, the poorest will likely suffer the most, despite having contributed to climate change the least. It has never been more important for you and I to step up as change-makers. Change-makers do all that they can as sustainable minimalists within their homes, yes, but they also work tirelessly outside of their homes to both educate and inspire others about the benefits of simpler, reduction-based lifestyles.

Revolting!: How the Establishment Are Undermining Democracy and What They're Afraid Of by Mick Hume

anti-communist, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, central bank independence, colonial rule, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Jeremy Corbyn, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, open borders, plutocrats, post-truth, public intellectual, Slavoj Žižek, the scientific method, We are the 99%, World Values Survey

Concerns about immigration in the UK today generally have little in common with old-fashioned send-them-back racism. Instead mass immigration to the UK, especially from Eastern Europe, has become a symbol of the way that many people feel their world has been changed without anybody asking them. They have woken up to find that their communities are disintegrating, their traditional values trashed from on high. Some of their new neighbours may have their own native tongues, but the ones who really seem to speak a foreign language are the UK elites ignoring the UK’s own ‘ghastly people’. In particular since the New Labour government of the late 1990s, mass immigration to the UK has been encouraged and organised from the top down, but without any public debate about its benefits or costs to society.

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Think of Labour prime minister Gordon Brown, unknowingly recorded dismissing a lifelong Labour voter as ‘some bigoted woman’ because she asked him about Romanian immigration on camera in the 2010 general election campaign. Britain’s borders have effectively been opened by the state, not as a consequence of governments or experts winning an argument for mass immigration, but instead by avoiding one and going ahead without public consent. In this context the immigration issue has become another symbol of the yawning gap between millions of people and the political establishment, of the absence of democracy and open public debate. You did not need to be a racist to revolt against that state of affairs.

Arabs: A 3,000 Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, colonial rule, disinformation, domestication of the camel, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, invention of movable type, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, liberation theology, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, New Urbanism, out of africa, Pax Mongolica, plutocrats, post-truth, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route

If there was indeed a great diaspora of settled peoples as a result of the breakdown of irrigation and society in the South, as the stories claim, the dispersal would have happened long before that last, late pre-Islamic damburst. The folk histories, as we shall see, go on to speak of the migration from Marib of the great tribe of Azd and its important sub-tribe, Ghassan, which must have taken place a few centuries earlier. Whether there was in fact a single mass migration is not known; a gradual ebbing away of settled populations is much more likely. But in either case it would have far-reaching effects: it may not have been a cataclysm, but the setting in motion of settled people in large numbers would be a catalyst for change across the Arabian subcontinent.

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Now, hijrah became a form of super-migration, a severance not just from one’s birthplace, but altogether from one’s Arabian roots. The severance enabled far conquest, or super-raids. It was Muhammad’s move to Medina, writ large. In fact, very large. The idea of hijrah has some similarities with the modern Zionist idea of mass-migration to a physical Promised Land. But it is that idea blown wide open: all lands are promised. The Wandering Zionist eventually settles in what he looks on as the land of his ancestors; the Wandering Arab forsakes the land of his ancestors and is potentially always on the move. As the Qur’an puts it in one of many passages encouraging travel, And Allah has made the earth for you as a carpet spread out, That you may go about therein on broad roads.

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In theory – at least in later theory – Muhammad’s revolution had shifted the whole foundation and focus of Arab society from tribal to theocratic. Din had shifted in meaning from honouring ancestors and tribal deities to worshipping the One God, and sunnah from emulating tribal heroes to emulating God’s prophet. The revolution had set off mass migrations and great victories. It had brought the peoples of South Arabia under its aegis, and made Persians and Egyptians members of the family of Islam. It had made these peoples equal with Arabs, and Arabs with each other. Superiority, nobility could only come from piety, not parentage. And yet here were two members of the same small tribe arguing about whose immediate family was posher.

Global Financial Crisis by Noah Berlatsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, centre right, circulation of elites, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, energy security, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Money creation, moral hazard, new economy, Northern Rock, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, social contagion, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, working poor

Ban said it is important that governments protect the rights of foreign workers in order to prevent mass migrations of angry, unemployed, and impoverished workers. 131 The Global Financial Crisis “I would also urge those countries who accommodate many migrants—they should ensure, through their domestic legislation and political and social framework—to protect and promote the human rights of migrant workers,” he said. But there are signs that the opposite is taking place in some countries. [UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon] said it is important that governments protect the rights of foreign workers in order to prevent mass migrations of angry, unemployed, and impoverished workers.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

Taking their cue from Tesla founder Elon Musk colonizing Mars , Palantir’s Peter Thiel reversing the aging process , or artificial intelligence developers Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether. Their extreme wealth and privilege served only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us. These people once showered the world with madly optimistic business plans for how technology might benefit human society. Now they’ve reduced technological progress to a video game that one of them wins by finding the escape hatch.

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Instead of just lording over us forever, however, the billionaires at the top of these virtual pyramids actively seek the endgame. In fact, like the plot of a Marvel blockbuster, the very structure of The Mindset requires an endgame. Everything must resolve to a one or a zero, a winner or loser, the saved or the damned. Actual, imminent catastrophes from the climate emergency to mass migrations support the mythology, offering these would-be superheroes the opportunity to play out the finale in their own lifetimes. For The Mindset also includes a faith-based Silicon Valley certainty that they can develop a technology that will somehow break the laws of physics, economics, and morality to offer them something even better than a way of saving the world: a means of escape from the apocalypse of their own making. 1 The Insulation Equation BILLIONAIRE BUNKER STRATEGIES B y the time I boarded my return flight to New York, my mind was reeling with the implication of The Mindset.

Arrival City by Doug Saunders

agricultural Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, call centre, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, foreign exchange controls, gentrification, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, guest worker program, Hernando de Soto, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Kibera, land reform, land tenure, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megacity, microcredit, new economy, Pearl River Delta, pensions crisis, place-making, price mechanism, rent control, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, white flight, working poor, working-age population

And, while social mobility remained a visible and concrete goal for most migrants, rural–urban migration was by no means always an ascent to better living standards. A significant number of the thousands of abandoned children who roamed the streets of London, according to the Victorian reformer Thomas Barnardo, were “victims of the family dislocation involved in mass migration to London.”19 At least half of all prostitutes at any time were born outside London. As everywhere, the move to a city almost always meant an improvement in livelihood—but one that was not without risk. London in the latter half of the nineteenth century became famous for the wide range of public-housing schemes developed by philanthropic and government bodies.

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Rushdie, facing the fatwa, defended his novel The Satanic Verses by describing it as an arrival city, like the arrival cities that fill its pages, like the arrival cities throughout the world: a place that “celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelisation and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Melange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the world, and I have tried to embrace it.”22 This is the way of the world. The functioning arrival city slowly colonizes the established city (just as the failed arrival city is likely, after festering and simmering, to invade it violently). The city discovers, confronts, and, in fortunate circumstances, embraces the arrival city.

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., 23–34. 24 David Mitch, “Literacy and Occupational Mobility in Rural Versus Urban Victorian England,” Historical Methods 38, no. 1 (2005); Jason Long, “Social Mobility within and across Generations in Britain since 1851,” in Economic History Society Conference (Oxford: 2007). 25 Aside from the previously cited works by Andrew Miles and Jason Long, see Sara Horrell, Jane Humphries, and Hans-Joachim Voth, “Destined for Deprivation: Human Capital Formation and Intergenerational Poverty in Nineteenth-Century England,” Explorations in Economic History 38 (2001); Kenneth Prandy and Wendy Bottero, “Social Reproduction and Mobility in Britain and Ireland in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” Sociology 34, no. 2 (2000); Paul Lambert, Kenneth Prandy, and Wendy Bottero, “By Slow Degrees: Two Centuries of Social Reproduction and Mobility in Britain,” Sociological Research Online 12, no. 1 (2007), www.socresonline.org.uk/12/1/prandy.html. 26 Jason Long and Joseph Ferrie, “A Tale of Two Labor Markets: Intergenerational Occupational Mobility in Britain and the U.S. since 1850,” ed. National Bureau of Economic Research (Cambridge, MA: 2005). 27 Leslie Page Moch, Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 149. 28 Timothy J. Hatton and Jeffrey G Williamson, “What Drove the Mass Migrations from Europe in the Late Nineteenth Century?” ed. National Bureau of Economic Research (Cambridge, MA: 1992); Dudley Baines, Migration in a Mature Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 29 Cited in Richard Harris, Unplanned Suburbs (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 111–25. 30 Ibid., 200–232; David G.

Transatlantic Liners by J. Layton

Great Leap Forward, mass immigration

There was also no small amount of national pride over who had the world’s largest, fastest or most luxurious ocean liners, and this further drove competition between the great steamship lines. Despite the hazards involved, there were many reasons why people travelled across the Atlantic. Some travelled for business, some for pleasure, and others formed part of the mass migration from the Old World to the New. These passengers were divided into different categories, or classes, based on their financial and social status. Immigrants formed a large proportion of ocean-going clientele. Steamship lines provided them with simple, relatively inexpensive accommodation in the less desirable areas of their ships, and found great profits in doing so.

Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet by Jeffrey Sachs

agricultural Revolution, air freight, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, biodiversity loss, British Empire, business process, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, digital divide, Edward Glaeser, energy security, failed state, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Global Witness, Haber-Bosch Process, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, mass immigration, microcredit, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, peak oil, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, unemployed young men, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, zoonotic diseases

In the twenty-first century our global society will flourish or perish according to our ability to find common ground across the world on a set of shared objectives and on the practical means to achieve them. The pressures of scarce energy resources, growing environmental stresses, a rising global population, legal and illegal mass migration, shifting economic power, and vast inequalities of income are too great to be left to naked market forces and untrammeled geopolitical competition among nations. A clash of civilizations could well result from the rising tensions, and it could truly be our last and utterly devastating clash. To find our way peacefully through these difficulties, we will have to learn, on a global scale, the same core lessons that successful societies have gradually and grudgingly learned within their own national borders.

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These problems can still be overcome by helping impoverished farmers to adopt improved technologies and diversified income strategies, but such gains will not be sufficient to keep ahead of a doubling of population every generation! Figure 7.7: Average Farm Size by Continent front 1930 to 1990 Source: Estimates from Eastwood et al. (2004) Note: Vertical axis on logarithmic scale Fourth, and finally, there are the threats to the rest of the world. Rapid population growth raises the pressures for mass migration and local conflict. Today’s conflicts in Africa mainly reflect a breakdown of order among hungry and impoverished communities. Violence is not just a matter of poverty but also of the age-population structure. Higher fertility rates, we’ve seen, lead to age-population pyramids with a wide base and a narrow apex: too few elders per adolescent.

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Many of these migrants were unemployed or working at very low productivity in their home villages. Second, part of that increased income has been sent back to the villages to support local consumption, business formation, and investments in homes and farms. The costs, however, are high, since the mass migration has very often meant separated families, and even mothers and children left behind in the villages, with the husbands not seen again. THE BENEFITS AND LIMITS OF INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION One solution for desperate regions is out-migration. The solution for China’s poor interior is clearly a combination of out-migration and investment and remittances in.

Moon Oregon Trail Road Trip: Historic Sites, Small Towns, and Scenic Landscapes Along the Legendary Westward Route by Katrina Emery, Moon Travel Guides

Airbnb, bike sharing, California gold rush, car-free, crowdsourcing, desegregation, Donner party, glass ceiling, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mason jar, mass immigration, pez dispenser, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, trade route, transcontinental railway, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Works Progress Administration

The luxury hotel boasts 100 spacious rooms, many with balconies and some with fireplaces or an outdoor fire pit. Suites offer access to a private cocktail lounge for guests only, but all guests can enjoy the impeccable room service and elegant accommodations. History Mass Migration The Rise of the Railroad The Trail Today Mass Migration The Oregon Trail is one of the largest voluntary mass migrations in world history—an entire nation shifted westward in the wagons, changing the face of the continent forever. Numbers are hard to pinpoint, but historians estimate 350,000 to 500,000 people traveled the trail when it was most active, 1843-1869.

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In 1.6 miles (2.6 km), veer right to remain on the road, and continue 0.6 mile (1 km) to South Pass City. South Pass City and Vicinity South Pass was the key to the entire overland trek. Without its gentle slope, which allowed wagons to gradually climb and cross the Continental Divide, it’s entirely possible that mass migration to Oregon wouldn’t have happened. While emigrants knew it as a landmark place, many may not have grasped the importance of the pass as they rolled through. Nearby, the mining town of South Pass City boomed in the mid-1800s—near the end of the Oregon and California Trails’ popularity—when gold and coal were discovered in the hills.

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

As populations flooded into early industrial cities such as Manchester, they quickly became crowded and unsanitary. With the invention of the railway, it became possible to move many more goods and heavier loads over longer distances far more quickly. That in turn allowed industrial activity to take root in a greater number of cities, but the dispersal was not quick enough to outpace the continued mass migration into urban areas. As a result, cities continued to grow ever larger, with lower mortality rates thanks to the advancing state of medicine and public health adding to this growth. Ebenezer Howard was one of the many who had grown appalled by the living conditions of the poor in industrial cities.

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In the US, the inhumane working conditions and unsanitary practices of Chicago’s meatpacking district, known as the Union Stock Yards, were brought to the public’s awareness by Upton Sinclair’s fictionalized 1906 account The Jungle. Of Chicago’s working poor, Sinclair wrote: ‘They are penned up in filthy houses and left to rot and stew in misery, and the conditions of their life make them ill faster than all the doctors in the world could heal them.’9 As industrialization led to the mass migration of the poor from the countryside, it profoundly altered the structure of cities. Marketplaces and merchant’s houses were replaced by factories and warehouses, surrounded by slum-like housing for workers who lacked any mode of transportation. As the merchant class evolved into an increasingly prosperous bourgeoisie, those with the financial means escaped the pollution and visible destitution of the inner ring of the city, aided by the development of the streetcar and intra-city rail systems.10 In 1922, the sociologist Ernest Burgess developed his Concentric Zone Model to describe the typical shape of the city emerging from industrialization.11 In it, a central business district is surrounded by a factory zone, around which the working class lives in low-quality housing, followed by a ring of middle-income neighbourhoods, and lastly a commuter zone for the wealthy.

The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City by Alan Ehrenhalt

anti-communist, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, British Empire, crack epidemic, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Edward Glaeser, Frank Gehry, gentrification, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, land bank, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, McMansion, megaproject, messenger bag, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Peter Calthorpe, postindustrial economy, Richard Florida, streetcar suburb, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, working poor, young professional

There are partially inhabited or partially complete condominium towers awaiting the return of an economy in which more people who find them attractive will be able to afford them. But this state of affairs will not last forever. It is important to reiterate that demographic inversion and mass migration are not the same thing. Mass migration means, to me, at least, a reversal in which a much greater proportion of the residents of a large metropolitan area will live near the center of the city than have lived there for the past thirty or forty years. Robert Fishman, one of America’s most respected urban historians, believes that a “fifth great migration” is taking place.

The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival by Charles Goodhart, Manoj Pradhan

asset-backed security, banks create money, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, commodity super cycle, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, deglobalization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, financial repression, fixed income, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, job automation, Kickstarter, long term incentive plan, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, middle-income trap, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, Phillips curve, price stability, private sector deleveraging, quantitative easing, rent control, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, special economic zone, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, working poor, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

Just as the production of goods was shifted from the West into China over the last three decades, could a similar shift lead to the production of goods moving to the Indian subcontinent and, particularly, to Africa, where the rate of growth of the working population in countries like Nigeria and the Congo will be quite remarkable over the next few decades? There is also, of course, the possibility of further waves of migration from these poor countries into the richer countries in America, Europe and Asia. But the political, social and economic problems caused by mass migration are so severe, that the only viable alternative would be to take capital and management to the workers in these poor countries, rather than having them migrate to the rich countries. We shall argue that while such a new direction for globalisation is possible, we nevertheless think it somewhat unlikely.

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Middle cycle, of population growth Middle East ‘Middle-income trap’ Migration Migration, fear of enhanced Migration, internal Migration, inward into AEs, declining Migration, needed, but politically unpopular Migration, outward from EMEs, declining Migration, problems of mass Migration, within USA, reduced Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) Milanovic, B. Mill, John Stuart Minimum wage laws Minimum wage rates Ministers Ministers of Finance Ministers of Finance, naturally cautious Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) Ministry of Finance Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) Mirrlees Review Mishkin, F.S.

How to Be Right: In a World Gone Wrong by James O'Brien

Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, clockwatching, collective bargaining, death of newspapers, Donald Trump, fake news, game design, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, mass immigration, Neil Armstrong, plutocrats, post-industrial society, QAnon, ride hailing / ride sharing, sexual politics, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, young professional

There’s scant evidence [from the Bank of England in 2015] that immigration effected some wage compression in the completely unskilled labour market but there’s actually a shortage of qualified plumbers in this country, which is probably why you’ve gone self-employed. So it’s not that, is it? So, just in terms of Andy in Nottingham and the damage that uncontrolled mass immigration has done to your life, just give me the headline. Andy: Um. Walking through the city centre and seeing mobs of, um, of immigrants not willing to integrate. James: And how do you think leaving the European Union is going to disperse those mobs, Andy? Andy: I think we’ll have more control— James: They’re already here, mate.

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They are, in most cases, paying more in rent than they would be required to pay towards a mortgage. But because they cannot raise the hefty deposit now needed to secure a mortgage they are, in fact, ‘buying’ the home in which they live for their landlords. For all the talk of ‘Polski Skleps’, ‘uncontrolled mass immigration’ and changing demographics, this is surely the most profound alteration British society has undergone in the last 18 years. Many people also on the ‘winning’ side of this generational divide are, however, remarkably reluctant to acknowledge it. I’m not sure why. Exchanges like the following are commonplace whenever the subject of housing costs comes up on the programme.

The Liberal Moment by Nick Clegg, Demos (organization : London, England)

banking crisis, credit crunch, failed state, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, income inequality, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Right to Buy, smart grid, too big to fail, Winter of Discontent

The best predictions science offers suggest that, if the planet warms by more than 2 degrees centigrade, it will tip us into a nightmare scenario that will lead to climate chaos we cannot control. It will affect not only the world’s prosperity, but also our very ability to feed ourselves, threatening resource wars and mass migration on an unprecedented scale. While Labour has done more than previous administrations to tackle carbon emissions, that is largely because the need is more apparent now than it had been in the past. Just doing more is not sufficient: only doing enough to stop the 2 degrees temperature rise will be good enough.

Future Shock by Alvin Toffler

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, East Village, Future Shock, global village, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, information retrieval, intentional community, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Menlo Park, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open immigration, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, social intelligence, Teledyne, the market place, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, urban renewal, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

They want desperately to be "where the action is." (Indeed, some hardly care what the action is, so long as it occurs at a suitably rapid clip.) James A. Wilson has found, for example, that the attraction for a fast pace of life is one of the hidden motivating forces behind the much publicized "brain-drain"—the mass migration of European scientists to the United States and Canada. After studying 517 English scientists and engineers who migrated, Wilson concluded that it was not higher salaries or better research facilities alone, but also the quicker tempo that lured them. The migrants, he writes, "are not put off by what they indicate as the 'faster pace' of North America; if anything, they appear to prefer this pace to others."

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In France, a continuing housing shortage contrives to slow down internal mobility, but even there a study by demographer Guy Pourcher suggests that each year 8 to 10 percent of all Frenchmen shift homes. In Sweden, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, the rate of domestic migration appears to be on the rise. And Europe is experiencing a wave of international mass migration unlike anything since the disruptions of World War II. Economic prosperity in Northern Europe has created widespread labor shortages (except in England) and has attracted masses of unemployed agricultural workers from the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern countries. They come by the thousands from Algeria, Spain, Portugal, Yugoslavia and Turkey.

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The earth's weather system is an integrated whole; a minute change at one point can touch off massive consequences elsewhere. Even without aggressive intent, there is danger that attempts to control a drought on one continent could trigger a tornado on another. Moreover, the unknown socio-psychological consequences of weather manipulation could be enormous. Millions of us, for example, hunger for sunshine, as our mass migrations to Florida, California or the Mediterranean coast indicate. We may well be able to produce sunshine—or a facsimile of it—at will. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is studying the concept of a giant orbiting space mirror capable of reflecting the sun's light downward on night-shrouded parts of the earth.

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

Yet today many scholars still hold political boundaries to be the most fundamental man-made lines on the map out of a bias toward territory as the basis of power, the state as the unit of political organization, an assumption that only governments can order life within those states, and a belief that national identity is the primary source of people’s loyalty. The march of connectivity will bring all these beliefs to collapse. Forces such as devolution (the fragmentation of authority toward provinces), urbanization (the growing size and power of cities), dilution (the genetic blending of populations through mass migration), mega-infrastructures (new pipelines, railways, and canals that morph geography), and digital connectivity (enabling new forms of community) will demand that we produce maps far more complex. SUPPLY CHAIN WORLD It’s time to reimagine how human life is organized on earth. There is one—and only one—law that has been with us since we were hunter-gatherers, outlasted all rival theories, transcended empires and nations, and serves as our best guide to the future: supply and demand.

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— BY 2100, THE BROADER Persian Gulf geography is projected to be too excruciatingly hot and humid for humans to safely spend more than a few hours outside.10 The twentieth century witnessed the population of the global south eclipsing that of the north, but the twenty-first century may require mass migrations from south to north as equatorial and southern populations stricken by the triple whammy of increasing temperatures, drought, and rising sea levels flock toward more temperate and agriculturally productive regions. As Canada and Russia become massive agricultural breadbaskets that could produce most of the world’s subsistence crops, their almost completely depopulated geographies will need workers to run the agribusiness industries.

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Mid-twentieth-century concerns over world population growth and food shortages led some legal scholars to argue that a few million Australians could not justify possessing an entire continent while billions were deprived basic nourishment. As the earth’s overpopulated equatorial latitudes experience drought, crop failure, and desertification while the depopulated far northern latitudes experience thaw, warming, and abundance, will mass migrations to Canada and Russia turn them into internationally governed agribusiness colonies? Because neither country would suddenly accept the burden of massive numbers of new citizens, there are initial financial and administrative costs that would need to be managed by international agencies and investors.

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism by Ed West

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, assortative mating, battle of ideas, Beeching cuts, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Bullingdon Club, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, gender pay gap, George Santayana, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Jeremy Corbyn, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lump of labour, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ralph Nader, replication crisis, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, twin studies, urban decay, War on Poverty, Winter of Discontent, zero-sum game

The party were now polling around 14 per cent, although they had lost the support of Britain’s twenty-three or so libertarians, and had just won their first seats in Parliament. It seemed like a rising force, and being part of Breitbart would make me part of the insurgency. On the big issues I basically agreed, in particular that mass migration to the West was a bad idea that would, at best, turn us into a sort of America or Brazil. I’d written a book about it, copies of which I kept hidden in a drawer at home in case any of my SWPL neighbours saw it. But the issue always left me feeling troubled; what worried me about ‘diversity’ was that it would make us less civil, more bitterly divided, even bring about religious violence, a fear that I suppose was influenced by my Irish background.

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That’s the true definition of decadence, knowing we’re all going to hell and yet feeling so fatalistic about it that you just want to enjoy the ride. As the Yiddish proverb goes: ‘Money lost, nothing lost; courage lost, everything lost’. But I could probably handle being a social leper; I couldn’t the thought of hating myself. I personally feel some weary hostility towards the people who support and enable mass migration, because they are causing unnecessary problems out of motivated naivety or narcissism, or perhaps personal gain. But not towards the immigrants themselves. Many are indeed unwelcome, and I certainly shared the widespread dismay that so many unsavoury individuals are allowed to swan around because our rulers consider immigration controls a bit déclassé.

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In today’s culture, the nonconformists are conservatives.’8 There is a certain truth in this, but then nonconformists and rebels don’t have to be James Dean or Marlon Brando in The Wild One – they can also be very uncool. ‘If there is hope it lies in the proles’ – George Orwell’s quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four has often been cited by conservatives who argue that opposition to mass migration and other forms of social engineering will come from the working class. Perhaps that is true, but the system also seems to be breeding a hardcore of highly educated ultra-conservatives. So while the proportion of American students identifying as consistently liberal has rapidly increased, the percentage of postgrad and college graduates with ‘consistently conservative’ views also went up between 2004 to 2014, from 4 to 11 per cent.9 Perhaps this is inevitable intra-elite conflict, or maybe also that Anglophone societies are becoming more isolated and atomised, and since liberalism is associated with higher sociability and social trust, it’s now producing more conservatives, too.

Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made by Vaclav Smil

8-hour work day, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Boeing 747, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, energy transition, European colonialism, Extinction Rebellion, Ford Model T, garden city movement, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, peak oil, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, power law, precision agriculture, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, Skype, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, working-age population

These transitions have affected all aspects of civilization as they transformed traditional arrangements into modern societies by changing population dynamics; agricultural practices and food production; choice of energy resources and the scale and efficiency of their conversions; the extent and pace of industrial production and, more recently, of the service sector; intensity of trade; distribution of wealth; and the state of the environment. The premodern world—with the divide between traditional and early modern societies conventionally set in 1500—witnessed change on many levels, ranging from recurrent violent conflicts (progressing from close fights with edge weapons to powerful artillery), invasions, mass migrations, and empire-building enterprises to admirable advances in technical skills in metallurgy and in arts as diverse as monumental architecture and oil painting, the latter craft advancing from the formally stiff figurative religiosity of early Byzantine altars to the supple allegorical delights of Botticelli’s canvases.

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Yet another way to illustrate this concentration and specialization is by comparing the shares of US farms with domestic animals: in 1900 90% of all farms had chicken, and close to 80% had cattle, milk cows, and hogs; a century later about half of the farms had cattle, but fewer than 10% had other animals (USCO 1902; USDA 2018). Productivity gains made most of the agricultural labor force redundant and allowed its mass migration to industrializing cities. Rising productivities meant that even as the agricultural labor force kept on declining—in the United States from 74% in 1800 to 40% in 1900 and to just 1.7% by the year 2000 (Lebergott 1966; FRED 2018)—and even as populations were increasing, per capita availability of plant foods has been rising.

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Ayres, R. 2017. Gaps in mainstream economics: Energy, growth, and sustainability. In: S. Shmelev, ed., Green Economy Reader: Lectures in Ecological Economics and Sustainability, Berlin: Springer, pp. 39–54. Bandiera, O. et al. 2010. The Making of Modern America: Migratory Flows in the Age of Mass Migration. https://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Workshops-Seminars/Development/rasul-110502.pdf Bank for International Settlements. 2019. Total credit to households (core debt). https://stats.bis.org/statx/srs/table/f3.1 Bar-On, Y. et al. 2018. The biomass distribution on Earth. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115:6506–6511.

The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization by Richard Baldwin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Branko Milanovic, buy low sell high, call centre, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, commodity super cycle, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, domestication of the camel, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, financial intermediation, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Henri Poincaré, imperial preference, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invention of the telegraph, investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Dyson, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, low skilled workers, market fragmentation, mass immigration, Metcalfe’s law, New Economic Geography, out of africa, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, profit motive, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, Simon Kuznets, Skype, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telerobotics, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus

As the dramatic drop in transport costs—especially the construction of railroads and canals—opened U.S. frontier areas to staple production, the United States experienced a sequence of fifteen-to twenty-year booms driven by migration and capital flows that were responding to the newly opened land. TABLE 3 Nineteenth-century mass migration from Europe to the New World. % of own population 1880s 1890s 1900s Senders: U.K. −3.1 −5.2 −2.0 Italy −1.7 −3.4 −4.9 Spain −1.5 −6.0 −5.2 Sweden −2.9 −7.2 −3.5 Portugal −3.5 −4.2 −5.9 Receivers: U.S. 5.7 8.9 4.0 Canada 2.3 4.9 3.7 Europe in the nineteenth century was overpopulated while the New World was underpopulated.

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The resulting U.S. growth and higher exports, however, were of a very different nature than would have been expected from Ricardo’s framework. First, the migration changed (strengthened) U.S. comparative advantage in the sense that wheat exports rocketed. Second, unlike lower trade costs, the impact was not global. It was geographically limited to the nations that got the mass migration (United States, Canada, Argentina, etc.). This is how I suggest we think about the second unbundling. The ICT revolution is like the open-migration policy of the United States in that it allows the G7’s source of comparative advantage (know-how) to move to the I6’s source of comparative advantage (labor).

Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System by Alexander Betts, Paul Collier

Alvin Roth, anti-communist, centre right, charter city, corporate social responsibility, Donald Trump, failed state, Filter Bubble, global supply chain, informal economy, it's over 9,000, Kibera, mass immigration, megacity, middle-income trap, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, open borders, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, rising living standards, risk/return, school choice, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, trade route, urban planning, zero-sum game

See, for example, Ruud Koopmans, ‘How to Make Europe’s Immigration Policies More Efficient and More Humane’, Migration and Citizenship: Newsletter of the American Political Science Association, 4/2 (2016): 55–9; and for debate on the empirical legacy of ‘Wir schaffen das’, see also Cathryn Costello, ‘Europe’s Refugee and Immigration Policies – Obligation, Discretion, Cooperation and Freeriding’, Migration and Citizenship: Newsletter of the American Political Science Association, 4/2 (2016): 59–66, and Georg Menz, ‘Europe’s Odd Migration Policy Choices’, Migration and Citizenship: Newsletter of the American Political Science Association, 4/2 (2016): 51–5. See, for example, Clár Ní Chonghaile, ‘People Smuggling: How It Works, Who Benefits and How It Can be Stopped’, Guardian, 31 July 2015. For an alternative view, see Thomas Spijkerboer, ‘Fact Check: Did “Wir Schaffen Das” Lead to Uncontrolled Mass Migration?’, Guest Blog, 28 September 2016, Oxford University Faculty of Law, https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centrecriminology/centreborder-criminologies/blog/2016/09/fact-check-did-. See, for example, Save the Children, ‘Children on the Move in Europe: Save the Children’s Response to the Deepening Child Refugee and Migrant Crisis in Europe’, 26 July 2016, https://savethechildreninternational.exposure.co/children-on-the-move-ineurope.

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For an analysis of the role of business in relation to refugees, see, for example, Alexander Betts et al., Refugee Economies: Forced Displacement and Development (Oxford, 2017: Oxford University Press), Chapter 9. For analysis of the manipulation of refugee sending for foreign-policy purposes, see, for example, Kelly Greenhill, Weapons of Mass Migration: Forced Displacement, Coercion, and Foreign Policy (Ithaca, 2010: Cornell University Press). See, for example, Will Jones and Alex Teytelboym, ‘The Refugee Match’, presentation at the CMS conference on ‘Rethinking the Global Refugee System Protection’, New York, 6 July 2016. Hein de Haas, ‘Turning the Tide?

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy by Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, back-to-the-land, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, degrowth, disruptive innovation, do-ocracy, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, Fairphone, Food sovereignty, four colour theorem, future of work, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, holacracy, hydraulic fracturing, initial coin offering, intentional community, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Money creation, multi-sided market, Murray Bookchin, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-work, precariat, premature optimization, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TED Talk, transaction costs, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, undersea cable, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

The disruptions of the early third millennium cascade and intersect. Human civilization’s exhaust has caused extreme weather events to grow in frequency and force, together with the long, slow devastation of droughts. These combine with a whack-a-mole world war on terrorism to set off waves of mass migration. Globalized markets let capital flow freely but stop the desperate migrants at the borders. The liberal-democratic consensus that some expected to spread everywhere has buckled as voters around the world elect autocrats. We’ve also been living through a disruption of networks. For Silicon Valley, the internet has created the favorite case in point of disruptive innovation.

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We know there are benefits to staying as nomadic as we can manage. This is a sort-of-chosen kind of nomadism. Others come by their nomadism less voluntarily. Following the 2008 financial crisis, giant holding companies started buying homes once owned by resident families, turning more residents into tenants. We live in a time, meanwhile, of mass migrations due to the linked causes of war, climate change, and famine. Stateless insurgents sow terror through spectacle. Spells of automation and other disruptions keep workers on the run, changing occupations more during their lifetimes than in times past. We’re living through a shift of population from rural areas to cities, a shift far more drastic and sudden than anything in Ibn Khaldun’s historical data set.

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital map, driverless car, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, full employment, G4S, game design, general purpose technology, global village, GPS: selective availability, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, law of one price, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, mass immigration, means of production, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-work, power law, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, telepresence, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

Mariel brought over one hundred thousand people to the city in less than a year and increased its labor force by 7 percent, yet Card found “virtually no effect on the wages or unemployment rates of less-skilled workers, even among Cubans who had immigrated earlier.”28 Economist Rachel Friedberg reached virtually the same conclusion about mass migration from Russia and the rest of the former Soviet Union into Israel.29 Despite increasing the country’s population by 12 percent between 1990 and 1994, this immigration had no discernible adverse effect on Israeli workers. Despite this and other evidence, concerns persist in America that large-scale immigration of unskilled workers, particularly from Mexico and other Latin American countries and particularly by illegal means, will harm the economic prospects of the native-born labor force.

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Measuring the Economic Benefits of Immigration Reform,” Cato Institute, August 13, 2009, http://www.cato.org/publications/trade-policy-analysis/restriction-or-legalization-measuring-economic-benefits-immigration-reform (accessed December 14, 2012); Robert Lynch and Patrick Oakford, “The Economic Effects of Granting Legal Status and Citizenship to Undocumented Immigrants,” Center for American Progress, March 20, 2013, http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/immigration/report/2013/03/20/57351/the-economic-effects-of-granting-legal-status-and-citizenship-to-undocumented-immigrants/ (accessed August 12, 2013). 28. David Card, “The Impact of the Mariel Boatlift on the Miami Labor Market,” Working Paper (National Bureau of Economic Research, August 1989), http://www.nber.org/papers/w3069. 29. Rachel M. Friedberg, “The Impact of Mass Migration on the Israeli Labor Market,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 116, no. 4 (2001): 1373–1408, doi:10.1162/003355301753265606. 30. Amy Sherman, “Jeb Bush Says Illegal Immigration Is ‘Net Zero,’ ” Miami Herald, September 3, 2012, http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/09/01/2980208/jeb-bush-says-illegal-immigration.html. 31.

When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence by Stephen D. King

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bond market vigilante , British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, congestion charging, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, endowment effect, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, mass immigration, Minsky moment, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk free rate, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, technology bubble, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population

Argentina was a major outperformer between 1870 and the outbreak of the First World War, thanks largely to the free-trade instincts of the late nineteenth-century British Empire, new scientific advances and the mass migration of people in the late nineteenth century. It may have been a long way away from Europe and the US but Argentina was able to take full advantage of the Royal Navy's commitment to keep international sea lanes open. New refrigerator technologies – and faster ships – meant its beef could be exported to destinations many thousands of miles away. Its working age population grew rapidly, a reflection of the Belle Époque mass migration from Europe – particularly from southern Europe – that led to equally dramatic demographic changes in the US, Canada and Australia.

The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class by Guy Standing

8-hour work day, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bread and circuses, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, crony capitalism, death from overwork, deindustrialization, deskilling, emotional labour, export processing zone, fear of failure, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, it's over 9,000, job polarisation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land reform, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, mini-job, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, nudge unit, old age dependency ratio, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, placebo effect, post-industrial society, precariat, presumed consent, quantitative easing, remote working, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, technological determinism, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, Tobin tax, transaction costs, universal basic income, unpaid internship, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population, young professional

Earlier generations of social scientists would have called them semi-proletarian. But there is no reason to think they are becoming proletarians. First, stable jobs would have to come and stay. That is unlikely and surely will not come before social tensions turn ugly. Already, while the authorities are organising mass migration, the floating labour force has posed a threat to locals, creating ethnic tensions. An example was the government-organised transportation of Turkic-speaking Muslim Uighurs 3,000 miles to labour for the Xuri toy factory in Guangdong. The Uighurs, housed near the Han majority, were paid much less than the Hans they displaced.

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But the scale of the movement was bound to raise tensions. As one Han worker told a journalist, ‘The more of them there were, the worse relations became’. In those riots, the Uighurs claimed their death toll was understated and that the police did not protect them. Whatever the truth, the violence was an almost inevitable outcome of mass migration of temporary workers across unfamiliar cultures. The internal migration in China is the largest migratory process the world has ever known. It is part of the development of a global labour market system. Those migrants are having an effect on how labour is being organised and compensated in every part of the world.

Cheese and Culture: A History of Cheese and Its Place in Western Civilization by Paul Kindstedt

agricultural Revolution, classic study, cotton gin, Kickstarter, mass immigration, New Urbanism, trade route

Pastoralism enabled peoples who were threatened by crop failures and hunger to take advantage of surrounding unused marginal land that was unsuitable for crop cultivation but could support sheep and goat grazing (Zarins 1990). This in turn encouraged the movement of pastoral populations in search of new land, which soon erupted into mass migrations that led to the settlement of northwest Anatolia around this time. There, along the fertile shores of the Sea of Marmara, the settlers shifted their pastoral emphasis from small ruminants to cattle, and the production of cow’s milk commenced probably for the first time (Evershed et al. 2008).

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Layered on top of these developments were dramatic social and demographic changes that accompanied the bubonic plague outbreak of 1348 through 1350, during which between 30 and 45 percent of the general population of England perished. The scarcity of labor that resulted dealt a fatal blow to the labor-intensive manor demesnes and catalyzed a progressive shift away from demesne agriculture in favor of capitalistic yeomanry. In the process, mass migrations of peasants who became dislocated from the rural countryside as the manors broke up streamed into London and other population centers in search of work, creating large urban centers for the first time in England and new markets for cheese. The London market would profoundly influence the next chapter in English cheese history, that of the yeoman cheeses.

This America: The Case for the Nation by Jill Lepore

Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, desegregation, Donald Trump, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, immigration reform, liberal world order, mass immigration, Steve Bannon

Illiberal nationalism is often thought of as what happens when a nation-state demands extraordinary sacrifices from its people—especially by participation in wars of aggression—and, requiring their consent, asks for that sacrifice in the name of the nation. The more outrageous the war, the harder it is to gain that consent, the more grotesque the depiction of the nation’s enemies. But illiberal nationalism is an outgrowth of other late nineteenth-century developments as well, including mass politics, mass communication, and mass migration. More than twenty million Europeans emigrated to the United States between 1880 and 1920. The smaller and more fluid the world became, the flimsier were stories of ancient nations made of a single people, united by a shared line of descent, and the more eagerly people keen for political power searched for rationales for exclusion, discrimination, and aggression.

1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War by Benny Morris

Albert Einstein, British Empire, family office, friendly fire, illegal immigration, mass immigration, Mount Scopus, Suez crisis 1956

Herzl reached a dismal conclusion: There was no hope and no future for the Jews in Europe; it could not and would not assimilate them. And in the large, multiethnic Continental empires, Jews would eventually face the hostility of the various minorities bent on selfdetermination. Ultimately, the Jews of Europe faced destruction. The solution was a separate, independent Jewish state to be established after a mass migration of Jews out of Europe. Herzl dashed off a political manifesto, The Jews' State (1896), and spent his remaining years organizing the "Zionist" movement. He unsuccessfully canvassed Europe's potentates, including Sultan Abdulhamid II of Turkey, to grant the Jews a state. But the sultan, unwilling to relinquish any part of his steadily diminishing empire, rebuffed Herzl, a master bluffer, who had promised the Ottomans billions (which he did not have and probably could not have raised).

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The AAC's recommendations were unanimous. But the AAC had done nothing to heal the basic Anglo-American rift. Truman once again endorsed the passage of a hundred thousand DPs to Palestine and approved the scrapping of the white paper's land sale provisions, which the AAC had deemed discriminatory; Attlee ruled out mass immigration until the Yishuv was disarmed (which he knew was a nonstarter). The Jewish Agency endorsed the report's immigration recommendation but rejected all the rest. The Arabs rejected everything. They demanded immediate independence for an Arab-ruled Palestine, not "binationalism," whatever that might mean, and called for an immediate cessation of immigration.

The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality by Brink Lindsey

Airbnb, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Build a better mousetrap, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, inventory management, invisible hand, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, patent troll, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, software patent, subscription business, tail risk, tech bro, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

Skill-biased technological change, for instance, means that information technology serves as a valuable complement for skilled “knowledge workers” while substituting for less-skilled manual and clerical workers. The slowdown in the growth of workers’ average years of schooling completed means that the relative supply of skilled workers lags behind relative demand. Mass immigration expands the ranks of low-skill workers even as demand for them has flagged. People increasingly marry within their social class, reducing the marital pathway to social mobility. The factors contributing to outsized gains at the very top are similarly diverse. They include the rise of “winner-take-all” markets produced by information technology’s network effects as well as globalization’s expansion of relevant market size; a huge run-up in stock prices; continuing growth in the size of big corporations (which has helped to fuel rising CEO pay); and a big drop in the top income tax rate (which has facilitated the use of high compensation as a strategy for attracting top managers, professionals, and executives).

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With the rise of policies that suppress and distort competition in key sectors, productivity growth has been hampered instead of encouraged; consequently, the country’s growth outlook is now even cloudier. At the same time, increasing inequality was powered by a number of different factors, including the rise of IT, women’s increasing labor market opportunities, and the return of mass immigration. A large-scale political project to siphon off further resources and funnel them to the rich was the opposite of what was needed, yet that is what we got. In short, our case studies show the rise of policies that deliver the maximum benefit for a favored few while inflicting maximum harm on everybody else.

Catch-67: The Left, the Right, and the Legacy of the Six-Day War by Micah Goodman

Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, European colonialism, mass immigration, one-state solution, public intellectual, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

As the Nazis were gaining power in Germany in the 1930s, Jabotinsky warned repeatedly of a terrible catastrophe that would soon befall the Jews of Europe: “We are living on the brink of the abyss, the eve of a final disaster in the global ghetto.”2 He tried to shake the Zionist movement out of its complacency, and urged the Zionists to push for the migration of the Jews of Europe to Palestine. The man who correctly predicted the Jews’ betrayal at the hands of the British also correctly predicted their annihilation at the hands of the Germans.3 Jabotinsky was also right about the Arabs. Contrary to widespread opinion among Zionists, Jabotinsky foresaw that mass immigration to Palestine by the Jews would provoke mass resistance in Palestine from the Arabs. Jabotinsky wrote that the anti-Jewish Jaffa riots of 1921 were not an exception to the norm but were now the norm.4 The Zionist movement was unwittingly marching toward a violent confrontation with the Arab national movement.

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Millions of Jews lived in Europe; if most of them had immigrated, Palestine would have had a massive Jewish majority. But the extermination of European Jewry changed Jewish demographics forever, making it impossible for them to dream any longer of realizing all three ambitions. The way to create a Jewish majority in Jabotinsky’s day was to encourage mass immigration—and some Israelis still believe that a majority can be achieved thus, without territorial compromise. But when the princes relinquished the objective of a land united in favor of safeguarding the Jewish majority on a land divided, they compromised on one goal of Jabotinsky’s philosophy. They did so, however, in order to realize a different, no less important, goal of that philosophy.

Empire by Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, colonial rule, conceptual framework, disinformation, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global pandemic, global village, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, invisible hand, late capitalism, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, social intelligence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois

Obviously they will come into view and consolidate themselves only after tremendous socialist crises.’’8 We cannot say exactly what Nietzsche foresaw in his lucid delirium, but indeed what recent event could be a stronger example ofthe power ofdesertion and exodus, the power ofthe nomad horde, 214 I N T E R M E Z Z O than the fall ofthe Berlin Wall and the collapse ofthe entire Soviet bloc? In the desertion from ‘‘socialist discipline,’’ savage mobility and mass migration contributed substantially to the collapse ofthe system. In fact, the desertion of productive cadres disorganized and struck at the heart ofthe disciplinary system ofthe bureaucratic Soviet world. The mass exodus ofhighly trained workers from Eastern Europe played a central role in provoking the collapse of the Wall.9 Even though it refers to the particularities of the socialist state system, this example demonstrates that the mobility ofthe labor force can indeed express an open political conflict and contribute to the destruction ofthe regime.

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Network Production The first geographical consequence ofthe passage from an industrial to an informational economy is a dramatic decentralization of pro- duction. The processes ofmodernization and the passage to the industrial paradigm provoked the intense aggregation ofproductive forces and mass migrations of labor power toward centers that became factory cities, such as Manchester, Osaka, and Detroit. Ef- ficiency ofmass industrial production depended on the concentra- tion and proximity ofelements in order to create the factory site and facilitate transportation and communication. The informatization of industry and the rising dominance ofservice production, however, have made such concentration ofproduction no longer necessary.

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Moreover, where would the great innovative sectors of immaterial production, from design to fashion, and from electron- ics to science in Europe, the United States, and Asia, be without the ‘‘illegal labor’’ ofthe great masses, mobilized toward the radiant 398 T H E D E C L I N E A N D F A L L O F E M P I R E horizons ofcapitalist wealth and freedom? Mass migrations have become necessary for production. Every path is forged, mapped, and traveled. It seems that the more intensely each is traveled and the more suffering is deposited there, the more each path becomes productive. These paths are what brings the ‘‘earthly city’’ out of the cloud and confusion that Empire casts over it.

SUPERHUBS: How the Financial Elite and Their Networks Rule Our World by Sandra Navidi

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, digital divide, diversification, Dunbar number, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, financial repression, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Gordon Gekko, haute cuisine, high net worth, hindsight bias, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Jaron Lanier, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, McMansion, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Network effects, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Parag Khanna, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Satyajit Das, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Predators' Ball, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, women in the workforce, young professional

EU populist parties and “extremist” U.S. presidential candidates reflect the explosive anger of globalization’s losers, who are now lobbying for radical change in greater numbers. Protectionism and isolationism are resurging, manifesting themselves in the opposition to trade agreements, and in separatist movements in the U.K. with regard to Europe, in Scotland with regard to the U.K., and in Catalonia with regard to Spain. Global inequality has also driven mass migration, which in turn polarizes politics even further. According to the WEF’s Global Risk Report, we are currently seeing the highest level of protests since the 1980s, because through access to information on the Internet, people realize the extent of inequality and their own powerlessness.19 Several years ago, former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski warned of the impending “global political awakening.”

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Perhaps—as Einstein said—we don’t need to think more, but think differently. Traditionally, we have been trained to think analytically and deal with parts of problems separately. However, today’s multidimensional, complex world is not linear, but is the result of dynamic, simultaneously interacting phenomena. Brexit, unpredictable monetary policies, mass migration and terrorism are but a few examples. We can attain a deeper understanding of these problems by employing a different approach called “systems thinking” and focusing more on the relationship of individual parts than on the parts themselves, which alone say nothing about the system’s behavior.39 According to organizational theorist Stephen Haines, “major change fails 75 percent of the time because of a piecemeal and analytical approach to a systems problem that tries to cure one problem at a time.”40 And in the opinion of world systems analyst Immanuel Wallerstein, part of the problem is that “we have studied . . . phenomena in separate boxes to which we have given special names—politics, economics, the social structure, culture—without seeing that these boxes are constructs more of our imagination than of reality.”41 The postcrisis banking regulation exemplifies the analytical, one-dimensional approach to problem solving.

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blockadia, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Chekhov's gun, climate anxiety, cognitive bias, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, effective altruism, Elon Musk, endowment effect, energy transition, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, failed state, fiat currency, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, it's over 9,000, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kevin Roose, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, megastructure, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, microplastics / micro fibres, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the built environment, The future is already here, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Whole Earth Catalog, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

Farmlands that had produced the same strains of grain or grapes for centuries or more will adapt, if they are lucky, to entirely new crops; in Sicily, the breadbasket of the ancient world, farmers are already turning to tropical fruits. Arctic ice that formed over millions of years will be unleashed as water, literally changing the face of the planet and remodeling shipping routes responsible for the very idea of globalization. And mass migrations will sever communities numbering in the millions—even tens of millions—from their ancestral homelands, which will disappear forever. Just how long the ecosystems of Earth will be thrown into flux and disarray from anthropogenic climate change also depends on how much more of that change we choose to engineer—and perhaps how much we can manage to undo.

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For Rushkoff, these are all facets of the same impulse, broadly shared by the class of visionaries and power brokers and venture capitalists whose dreams for the future are received as blueprints, especially by the armies of engineers they command like impetuous fiefdoms—investing in new forms of space travel, life extension, and technology-aided life after death. “They were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion,” he writes. “For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.” “An Account of My Hut”: Christina Nichol, “An Account of My Hut,” n+1, Spring 2018. Nichol explains the title this way: I once read a story called “An Account of My Hut,” by Kamo no Chōmei, a 12th-century Japanese hermit.

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason by William Davies

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, Colonization of Mars, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, first-past-the-post, Frank Gehry, gig economy, government statistician, housing crisis, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, post-industrial society, post-truth, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Turing machine, Uber for X, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The earth’s climate is already 0.85°C warmer than in 1880; only a rapid reduction in atmospheric greenhouse gases would avoid a rise to potentially catastrophic levels over the twenty-first century. Even the upper limits of warming aimed for by the Paris climate accord (c. 1.5–2°C above pre-industrial levels) could have an impact on sea levels and agriculture that would produce mass migrations, famines, and resource wars. Cities such as New York, with its 520-mile coastline, are severely imperiled by rising seas. Increased global temperature levels have already had a measurable impact on public health, from the impact of extreme heat on the elderly and the greater prevalence of dengue fever.6 If this weren’t frightening enough, resistance of diseases to drugs is rising steadily.

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The central claim of Black Lives Matter is brutally simple: the American Leviathan does not deliver on its function of protecting all lives equally. It is almost certain that the number and scope of such political demands is going to multiply in the coming years, especially as climate-related mass migration increases. Threats to life do not need to be as direct as those publicized by Black Lives Matter in order to be politicized. The Missing Migrants Project has sought to count the number of migrants who have died or gone missing while migrating, initially in response to the mounting humanitarian crisis of boats sinking in the Mediterranean.

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them by Nouriel Roubini

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, 9 dash line, AI winter, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, game design, geopolitical risk, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, GPS: selective availability, green transition, Greensill Capital, Greenspan put, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meme stock, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, negative equity, Nick Bostrom, non-fungible token, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Phillips curve, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Second Machine Age, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

These are all relatively slow-moving crises that are unlikely to generate the massive, coordinated response of an asteroid-like threat. International cooperation is vital yet elusive, if not hopeless. Think global climate change, pandemics, cyberwarfare, global financial crises, conflict between the United States and China and Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Deglobalization, global financial crises, mass migration, and ethical uses of artificial intelligence sound very different to authorities in rich and poor countries, or even among leading economic and geopolitical rivals. Perils hide in plain sight. A widening gulf between haves and have-nots signals the proximity and severity of megathreats. Trade and globalization produce economic winners and losers in advanced economies and emerging markets.

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Wait for a much more severe crisis and political backlash when dozens of millions of refugees want to flee desperate conditions. Increasingly, war and conflict—on top of climate change and failed states—will create waves of millions of refugees, as the war in Ukraine and the civil war in Syria tragically showed us. National and regional disorder and clashes will multiply in size and frequency, leading to incipient mass migration that will face closing borders. Inequality and climate change are systemic. What about our looming financial crises? Innovation can solve many problems, but it won’t erase unsustainable debt. We have borrowed our way to prosperity with no exit strategy. Loans secured with home equity and other assets lifted consumption in the 2000s as income growth slowed.

Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics of Flags by Tim Marshall

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, colonial rule, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, It's morning again in America, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, trade route, white picket fence

Then it began to fall out of fashion, and the English flag was almost a no-go area for those nervous of being associated with the Far Right. There was an unspoken assumption in England that prominent displays of either flag, outside state events, might symbolize an aggressive mindset supporting a pre-mass-immigration white culture. To some it undoubtedly did. In the mid 1980s I took a bus from Oxford train station bound for Oxford United football club, which was due to play Leeds United. The bus, packed with Leeds supporters, passed a group of young black men in their late teens. From the top deck came the chant ‘There’s no black in the Union Jack!

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However, back home they are also aware that nationalist parties, such as the Swedish Democrats, are increasingly displaying it and a Far Right magazine is called Blue-Yellow Questions, so it is again becoming . . . problematic. The popular view of Sweden is that it is a haven of cultural ultra-liberalism and third-way economic policies. This view is at least two decades out of date and belongs to the Sweden of Abba, not the Sweden of mass immigration. Since the 1990s the market has been slowly allowed into the state. Welfare and education spending are significantly down, and some schools have even been privatized. Strict police and intelligence surveillance laws have been passed by several successive governments. Ethnic enclaves are common in the urban areas and unemployment is high, especially among non-white Swedes.

Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy by David Frum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-globalists, Bernie Sanders, carbon tax, centre right, coronavirus, currency manipulation / currency intervention, decarbonisation, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, employer provided health coverage, fake news, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, illegal immigration, immigration reform, labor-force participation, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nate Silver, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, QAnon, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, W. E. B. Du Bois

In August 2019, Patrick Crusius opened fire upon a predominantly Hispanic crowd in El Paso, Texas. Crusius killed twenty-two and wounded many more. His manifesto cited the New Zealand shooting, half a world away, as his inspiration. “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” he wrote. He blamed politicians “of both parties” for enabling mass immigration and insisted, “My opinions on automation, immigration, and the rest predate Trump and his campaign for president.” Yet among Crusius’s complaints about Hispanic immigration into Texas was that it could shift the state’s politics from Republican to Democrat—not a complaint you’d expect to hear from a person wholly alienated from the political system and equally hostile to both parties.

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But more important than the number of immigrants should be the composition of immigration: more people who come to meet a gap in the US labor market; fewer who come because a relative got here first. The United States runs an immigration policy as if it were a country facing a desperate labor shortage. In fact, the United States faces a desperate social cohesion shortage. Immigration done right can tighten the bonds of nationhood. Done wrong, as the United States is doing it, mass immigration only intensifies the mutual suspicions of American society—and impedes any effort to rewrite the social contract to offer a better deal to the average American. There are extreme fringes in the immigration debate for sure, and no moderate policy will appease them. As in the 1950s, so it is today, the goal is not to convert convinced extremists, but to render them harmless by denying them followers.

Getting Back to Full Employment: A Better Bargain for Working People by Dean Baker, Jared Bernstein

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, business cycle, collective bargaining, declining real wages, full employment, George Akerlof, high-speed rail, income inequality, inflation targeting, low interest rates, mass immigration, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Phillips curve, price stability, publication bias, quantitative easing, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rising living standards, selection bias, War on Poverty