open borders

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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

Abingdon, UK: Routledge. 22. From Jefferson's instructions to Virginia delegates to the 1774 Continental Congress. Cited in Alan Dowty. 1989. Closed Borders: The Contemporary Assault on Freedom of Movement. London: Yale University Press, p. 47. 23. Michael Walzer. 1983. Spheres of Justice. New York: Basic Books, p. 61. 24. Ibid.: 61. 25. Joseph H. Carens. 1987. “Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders,” The Review of Politics 49(2): 251–273, pp. 265–270. 26. Joseph H. Carens. 2009. “The Case for Amnesty,” Boston Review, May/June 2009. 27. Seyla Benhabib. 2005. “Borders, Boundaries, and Citizenship,” PS: Political Science and Politics 38: 673–677. 28.

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Furthermore, as many developed countries are facing shrinking workforces and aging populations, they are increasingly unable to afford closing their borders. Open Borders Alternatively, what if a country unilaterally opened its borders to the free flow of people? What if anyone from anywhere could move to, say, the United Kingdom to live and work? Such a scenario may seem to be unrealistic, but it was the status quo (albeit with notable exceptions) during much of the nineteenth-century period of globalization, as we discussed in chapter 2. The free movement of people was seen to be a logical corollary of liberalizing trade and finance and of throwing off the shackles of feudalism. 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.

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THE INTERWAR PERIOD: ECONOMIC DECLINE AND REGULATED MIGRATION Following World War I, the Treaty conference at Versailles involved negotiation over the creeping exclusions that signaled the end of open borders. Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the British Empire all insisted on their right to limit migration (often on the basis of race). Despite Japanese, Chinese, and Indian demands for the free movement of labor, the new League of Nations did not include any institutional support for international migration.44 Efforts advanced through the League to liberalize or abolish the new passport system were ultimately unsuccessful.45 Government opposition meant that the International Labour Organization stayed away from the issue of migration, and the efforts of the International Federation of Trade Unions to create an International Office on Migration failed.46 Instead, within a climate of nationalism and economic stagnation, states reserved their right to increasingly regulate migration and impose restrictions on the rights of foreigners within their borders.

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

3D printing, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, charter city, circular economy, clean water, colonial exploitation, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, European colonialism, failed state, gentrification, global pandemic, Global Witness, green new deal, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, job automation, joint-stock company, Kim Stanley Robinson, labour mobility, load shedding, lockdown, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, megacity, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, old age dependency ratio, open borders, Patri Friedman, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, place-making, planetary scale, plyscraper, polynesian navigation, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rewilding, Rishi Sunak, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, urban planning, urban sprawl, white flight, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game, Zipcar

There are many alternative visions to today’s status quo of nation states, borders and passports – which are, after all, relatively recent. Instituting global freedom of movement, for instance, would boost national economies, as well as saving or improving billions of lives. Open borders would, it’s fair to assume, result in very large flows of people – estimations range from a few million to more than 1 billion – and could increase global GDP by tens of trillions of dollars. However, opening borders doesn’t have to mean no borders or the abolition of the nation state. In the brief time we have to prepare for massive disruption to our planetary system, it seems unwise to try also to completely abandon our geopolitical system.

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Pacific nations already have agreements with Australia and New Zealand, for instance, and other regional groups have agreements over reciprocal labour rights, recognition of skills and qualifications, and freedom of movement. The best model of this is the European Union with freedom of movement, including trade and labour, across its member states, and in which, if southern Spain suffers an unbearable heatwave, residents are free to move northwards to less affected countries. The African continent is working towards a similar system of free movement across all nations as part of its Agenda 2063 development initiative, which includes an African Union passport and free-trade agreement.

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Kung peoples; lack of water resources; low levels of migration to; migration from as relatively low; poor infrastructure and city planning; population rise in; rainfall due to Indian irrigation; remittances from urban migrants; and restoring of planet’s habitability; Transaqua Project of water diversion; transatlantic slave trade; transport infrastructure in; urbanization in African Union agoraphobia AI and drone technology aid, development/foreign air-conditioning/cooling airships or blimps Alaska algae Aliens Act (UK, 1905) Alps, European Amazon region Americas Anatolia Anchorage, Alaska Anderson, Benedict animals/wildlife; global dispersal of; impact of fires on; impact of ice loss on see also livestock farming Antarctica; ice sheet Anthropocene era; four horsemen of Aravena, Alejandro Archaeology architecture/buildings: Aravena’s ‘partial houses’; energy-efficiency retrofits; floating infrastructure; heat- and light-responsive materials; low-carbon concrete; prefabricated and modular housing; in successful migrant cities; wooden skyscrapers; zero-carbon new-builds Arctic region; first ice-free summer expected; opening up of due to climate change Argentina Arrhenius, Svante Asia: cities vulnerable to climate change; drought-hit areas; extreme La Niña events; extreme precipitation in monsoon regions; Ganges and Indus river basins; and heat ‘survivability threshold’; huge populations of South Asia; lack of water resources; rivers fed by glaciers; small hydropower installations; urbanization Aswan High Dam asylum-seekers: Australia’s dismal record on; Britain’s proud history on; dominant hostile narratives about; drownings in English Channel; limbo situation due to delayed claim-processing; misinformation about see also refugees Athens Australia: Black Summer (2019–20); energy-supply economy; impact of climate emergency; indigenous inhabitants; low population density in; migration to; and mineral extraction in Greenland; renewable power in; treatment of asylum-seekers; White Australia Policy aviation Aztecs Babylon bacteria, in food production bamboo Bangkok Bangladesh; ‘Bangla’ communities in London; Burmese Rohingya refugees; impact of climate emergency; migration across Indian border; population density in; relocation strategies; training for rural migrants Bantu people Barber, Benjamin Barcelona Beckett, Samuel Belarus Belgium Bergamo, Italy Bhutan Bijlmermeer (outside Amsterdam) biodiversity loss/ecosystem collapse; coral reefs as probably doomed; crash in insect and bird populations; depletion of fish stocks; due to agriculture; due to farming; four horsemen of the Anthropocene; and human behaviour; Key Biodiversity Areas; links with climate change; and marine heatwaves; and overuse of fertilizers; restoring of; species extinction; and urban adaptation strategies see also environmental sustainability bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) biotech industry birds black soldier flies black-footed ferrets BoKlok (IKEA spinoff) Bolivia Borneo Bosch, Carl Boston, Massachusetts Boulder, Colorado Brazil Brexit Brin, Sergey British Columbia Brown, Pat bureaucracy Burke, Marshall Burma business/private sector Cairo California; forest fires in Cambodia Cameroon Canaan Canada; and charter cities model; Climate Migrants and Refugee Project; economic benefits from global heating; expansion of agriculture in; first carbon-neutral building in; forest fires in; indigenous populations; infrastructure built on permafrost; regional relocation schemes Capa, Robert, capitalism Caplan, Bryan Caprera (Italian warship) carbon capture/storage; BECCS; ‘biochar’ use in soil; carbon capture and storage (CCS); direct capture from the air; by forests; in grasslands; Key Biodiversity Areas; in oceans; by peatlands; by phytoplankton; vegetation as vital carbon pricing/taxing carbon/carbon dioxide: amount in atmosphere now; Arrhenius’ work on; and biomatter decay in soil, ‘carbon quantitative easing’; continued emitting of; decarbonizing measures; effect on crop growth; emissions cut by building from wood; emissions from farming; emissions from human energy systems; emissions from urban buildings; geoengineering to remove; during last ice age; Miocene Era levels; new materials made from; ocean release of; released by wildfires; tree-planting as offsetting method; in tropical rainforests Carcassonne, France Card, David Cardiff Castro, Fidel Çatalhöyük, ancient city of Central African Republic Central America Chad ‘char people’ charcoal (‘biochar’) Chicago children: childcare costs; deaths of while seeking safety; ‘invisible’/living on the margins; left behind by migrant parents; and move to cities; numbers at extreme risk; in refugee camps; and sense of ‘belonging’ Chile China: adaptation for heavy rainfall events; Belt and Road Initiative; cities vulnerable to climate change; demography; desertification of farmland in north; economic domination of far east; emigrants and knowledge-flow; emissions as still rising in; extreme La Niña events; ‘green wall’ tree-planting projects; and heat ‘survivability threshold’; Hong Kong–Shenzhen–Guangzhou mega-region; hukou system; integrated soil-system management; internal migration in; migrant workers in Russia’s east; and mineral extraction; net zero commitment; small hydropower installations; South-to-North Water Diversion Project; ‘special economic zones’; Uyghur Muslim communities in; and water scarcity; ‘zhuan‘ documents Chinatowns Churchill (town in Manitoba) Churchill, Winston cities: adapting to net-zero carbon economy; city state model; coastal cities; as concentrated nodes of connectivity; ‘consumption cities’ in Africa; control of migration by; deadly urban heat; demand for cooling; devolving power to communities; in eighteenth/nineteenth-century Europe; entrenched assets; and extreme flood risk; flood defences; as focal points for trade networks; food production in; genetic impacts of; in high altitude locations; large megacities; merging into mega-regions; as particularly vulnerable to climate change; phased abandonment of; population densities in; private gardens in; relocation of; relocation strategies within; sprawling shanty towns in; strategies against impact of heat; zero-carbon new-builds see also migrant cities; migration, urban citizenship; patriotism of welcomed migrants; ‘UN/international passport’ idea Clemens, Michael climate change, historic: Cretaceous–Palaeogene meteorite impact event; in late-bronze-age Near East; and migration; in Miocene Era; and transition to farming climate change/emergency; 3–5° C as most likely scenario; as affecting all of Earth; cities as particularly vulnerable to; destruction of dam infrastructure; enlisting of military/security institutions against; every tenth of a degree matters; extreme weather events; global climate niches moving north; global water cycle as speeding up; greenhouse gas emissions as still growing; impact of cities; impact on lives as usually gradual; inertia of the Earth’s climate system; lethality by 2100; links with biodiversity loss; near-universal acceptance of as human made; net zero pledges; Paris Agreement (2015); path to 3–4° C-hotter world; situation as not hopeless; slow global response to; as threat multiplier; warming as mostly absorbed by oceans see also biodiversity loss/ecosystem collapse; drought; fires; floods; heat climate models: future emissions scenarios; heating predictions; impact of 4° C-hotter world; IPCC ‘Representative Concentration Pathways’ (RCPs); optimum climate for human productivity; threshold for mass migrations coastal areas: coastal cities; migration from; retreating coastlines; seawater desalination plants cochineal scale insect Colombia colonialism, European Colorado Columbia Concretene construction industry copper coral reefs Cornwall Costa Rica cotton Covid-19 pandemic; cooperation during cross-laminated timber (CLT) Crusaders Cruz, Abel Cuba cultural institutions/practices: cultural losses over time; diversity as improving innovation; migration of; in well-planned migrant cities cyclones Cyprus Czech workers in Germany Dar es Salaam Death Valley Delhi Democratic Republic of Congo demographic changes/information: and decline of nationality viewed in racial terms; depopulation crisis; elderly populations in global north; GenZ; global climate niches moving north; global population patterns; global population rise; ‘household formation’; huge variation in global fertility rates; migrants as percentage of global population; population fall due to urban migration; population-peak projection; post-war baby boom; and transition to farming Denmark Denver, Colorado desert conditions Dhaka Dharavi (slum in Mumbai) diet and nutrition: edible seeds of sea grasses; genetically engineered microbes; global disparities in access to nutrition; and Haber–Bosch process; insects as source of protein and fats; loss of nutrition due to heat stress of crops; move to plant-based diet; vitamin D sources; zinc and protein deficiencies dinosaurs direct air capture (DAC) disease; waterborne Doha Domesday Book (1086) Driscolls (Californian berry grower) drone technology drought; as affecting the most people; in Amazon region; impact on farming; in late-bronze-age Near East; and rivers fed by glaciers; and sulphate cooling Dubai Duluth, Minnesota Dunbar, Robin economies; Chinese domination of far east; economic growth; forced move towards a circular economy; GDP per capita measure; Global Compact for Migration; global productivity losses due to heat; immigrant-founded companies; and influx of low-skilled migrant workers; migration as benefitting; mining opportunities exposed by ice retreat; and nation state model; need to open world’s borders; new mineral deposits in northern latitudes; northern nations benefitting from global heating; ‘special economic zone’ concept; taxing of robots see also employment/labour markets; green economy; political and socioeconomic systems; trade and commerce education: availability to migrants; as key to growth; and remittances from urban migrants; systems improved by migration Egypt; Ancient electricity: current clean generation as not sufficient; decarbonizing of production; electric vehicles; grid systems; hydroelectric plants; and net zero world; renewable production Elwartowski, Chad employment/labour markets: amnesties of ‘illegal’ migrants; and arguments against migration; and automation; controlled by city authorities; and global labour mobility; and the green economy; impact of heat on jobs; indentured positions; and influx of low-skilled migrant workers; jobs in growth industries; jobs restoring diversity; jobs that natives don’t want to do; mechanization/automation slowed down by migrant workers; migrants bring greater diversity to; need for Nansen-style scheme; occupational upgrading of locals due to immigration; refugees barred from working; role of business in migrant integration; rural workers moving to cities; skilled migrants; support/access for migrants; Trump’s work visa restrictions; ‘urban visas’ in USA; workforce shortages in global north energy systems: access to in global south; air-conditioning/cooling demand; and carbon capture; ‘closed-loop’ radiator construction; decarbonizing of; and economic growth; geothermal production; global energy use as increasing; new dam-construction boom in south; nuclear power; oceans as source; poor grid infrastructure in global south; power outages; power sharing as not equitable; reducing growth in demand; replacement of inefficient heating/cooling systems; transmission/transport see also electricity English Channel Environmental Protection Agency, US environmental sustainability: decarbonizing measures; decoupling of GDP from carbon emissions; and economic growth; heat- and light-responsive materials; low-energy plastic recycling methods; and migrant cities; need for open mind in planning for; phytoplankton as hugely important; replacement of inefficient heating/cooling systems; zero-carbon new-builds see also biodiversity loss/ecosystem collapse environmentalists; negative growth advocates; opponents of geoengineering equatorial belt Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip Eritrea Estonia Ethiopia Europe: 2003 heatwave; depopulation crisis; eighteenth/nineteenth-century shanty towns; impact of climate emergency; medieval barriers to movement; Mediterranean climate moving north; migrant indentured labour in; migration of women working in domestic service; small hydropower installations; three mass migrations in Stone and Bronze Ages European Union: free movement within; fund for aid to Africa; Green New Deal; no ‘asylum crisis’ within; nuclear power in; open-border policy for refugees from Ukraine; as popular migrant destination; seeks quota system for refugees; as successful example of regional union; war against migrants Fairbourne (Welsh village) farming: in abandoned areas in south; in Africa; ancient transition to; bad harvests as more frequent; barns/storehouses; benefits of warming in Nordic nations; biodiversity loss due to; cereal crops; closing the yield gap; early nineteenth century expansion of; ever-decreasing, sub-divided plots of land; expanded growing seasons; fertile land exposed by ice retreat; genetic research to produce new crops; genetically modified crop varieties; global disparities in food production; Green Revolution; greenhouse gas emissions from; in Greenland; Haber–Bosch process; heat-tolerant and drought-resistant crops; high-yielding wheat and rice variants; impact of climate emergency; indoor industrial systems; modern improvement in yields; nutrient and drip-irrigation systems; pre-twentieth-century methods; relying on new forms of; Russian dominance; salt-tolerant rice; smallholder; and solar geoengineering; solar-powered closed-cycle; urban vertical farms; use of silicates; and water scarcity; wildflower strips in fields see also livestock farming Fiji Fires fish populations: artisanal fishers; boost of in Arctic region; and decommissioned offshore oilrigs; fish farming; future pricing of fish products; as under huge pressure; insects as farmed-fish feed; land-based fish-farming Five Points slum, New York floods; flash floods; low-lying islands and atolls; sea walls/coastal defences; three main causes; in urban areas; water-management infrastructure Florida food: algal mats; carbon-pricing of meat; impact of soaring global prices; insect farming; kelp forest plantations; lab-grown meats; meat substitutes; for migrant city dwellers; move to plant-based diet; need for bigger sources of in global north; need to cut waste; photosynthesizing marine plants and algae; plant-based dairy products; reduced supplies due to temperature rises; refrigerated storage; replication of Maillard chemical reaction; sourced from the oceans see also diet and nutrition; farming; livestock farming food security Ford, Henry forests: advance north of in Nordic nations; deforestation; impact of climate emergency; ‘negative emissions activity’; replanting of; Siberian taiga forest fossil fuels; carbon capture and storage (CCS); as embedded in human systems France Fraser, Sean freedom of movement French Polynesia Friedman, Patri Gargano, Gabriele gas industry Gates, Bill gender: heat related inequalities; physical/sexual danger for female migrants; women in domestic service in Europe; women rejoining workforce genetic modification genetics, population Genghis Khan geoengineering; artificial sill proposals; cloud-brightening idea; as controversial/taboo; and ideal temperature question; possible unwanted effects; proposals for dealing with ice melt; to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide; solar radiation reduction tools; sulphate cooling concept; thin-film technology; tools to reflect the sun’s heat away from Earth geology GERD dam, Ethiopia Germany; Syrian refugee resettlement in Ghana Glasgow climate meeting (2021) Global Parliament of Mayors global south; benefit of solar cooling idea; capital costs of deploying new renewables; cutting of food waste in; future repopulation of abandoned regions; global income gap as rising; little suitable landmass for climate-driven migration; migration to higher elevations with water; need for improved infrastructure; need for sustainable economic growth; new dam-construction boom in; new domestic sources of energy; population rise in; remittances from urban migrants; resource extraction by rich countries; and vested interests in the rich world see also Africa; Asia; Latin America and entries for individual nations golf courses Gore, Al, An Inconvenient Truth (2006) Gothenburg Grand Inga hydroelectric dam project (Congo River) Granville, Earl grasslands Great Barrier Reef Great Lakes region, North America Greece; Ancient green economy; and building of fair societies; Green New Deals; migration as vital to; multiple benefits of see also environmental sustainability; renewable power production; restoring our planet’s habitability greenhouse gas emissions; charging land owners for; in cities; emitters trying to avoid/delay decarbonization; from farming; national emissions-reductions pledges; underreporting of; unfair global impact of see also carbon/carbon dioxide Greenland; ice sheet; potato farming in Gulf states Haber, Fritz Hangzhou Hawaii health: climate change as threat multiplier; dementia care; diseases of poor sanitation; healthcare in successful migrant cities; heat related inequalities; lethality of extreme heat; and life in cities; mental illness and migration; migration as benefitting social care systems; pathogens in frozen tundras; rural living as single largest killer today; and smoke pollution heat: 35°C wet bulb threshold crossed; climate model predictions; cloud and water vapour feedbacks; combined with humidity; and demand for cooling; extreme hotspots; global productivity/work hour losses; impact of 4° C-hotter world; impact on farming/food supplies; infrastructure problems due to; lethality by 2100; lethality of extreme temperatures; Paris pledge of below 2°C; solar radiation reduction tools; subtropical climate spreading into higher latitudes; temperatures above 50°C; threshold for mass migrations; ‘threshold of survivability’; urban adaptation strategies; urban heat island effect; ‘wet bulb’ temperature calculations Held, David Hernando, Antonia HIV Höfn, southeastern Iceland Holocene epoch Honduras Hong Kong horses, domestication of housing: Aravena’s ‘partial houses’; controlled by city authorities; equitable access to; floating infrastructure; in flood-affected areas; and heat related inequalities; and migrants; planning and zoning laws; policies to prevent segregation; prefabricated and modular; twentieth-century social programmes see also slum dwellers Hudson Bay Huguenot immigrants human rights, universal Hungary hunter-gatherers hurricanes hydrogen ice age, last ice loss; as accelerating at record rate; in Antarctica; in Arctic region; artificial reflective snow idea; artificial sill proposals; and flash floods; loss of glaciers; permafrost thaw; reflective fleece blankets idea; retreat of ice sheets; rising of land due to glaciers melting; tipping points for ice-free world Iceland ICON, construction company identity: accentuation of small differences; and ancient transition to farming; borders as ‘othering’ structures; language as tool of self-construction; mistrust of outsiders; pan-species; sense of ‘belonging’; social norms of ‘tribe’; social psychology; stories crafting group identity see also national identity immigration policies: bilateral or regional arrangements; deliberately prejudicial policy; development of since later nineteenth-century; and harnessing migrant potential; immigrant inclusion programmes; immigration lottery schemes; move needed from control to managing,; points-based entrance systems; poorly designed; quota systems; responses to terrorist incidents; restrictions as for people not stuff; restrictive border legislation; Spain’s successful policy Impossible Foods India; crop irrigation in; emigrants and knowledge-flow; emissions as still rising in; falling fertility rate in; Ganges Valley; and heat ‘survivability threshold’; impact of climate emergency; internal migration in; lime-washing of roofs in; Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA); National River Linking Project; population density in; young population in indigenous communities Indo-European language Indonesia industrial revolution inequality and poverty: and access to reliable energy; benefit of solar cooling to south; climate change as threat multiplier; climate migration and social justice; and demand for cooling; despair and anger of ‘left behind’ natives; and environmental destruction; and European colonialism; as failure of social/economic policy; and geoengineered cooling; global disparities in access to nutrition; and global food prices; global income gap as rising; heat related; and impact of flooding; increased by ancient transition to farming; as matter of geographical chance; migration as best route out of; and modern farming; and national pride; need for redistributive policies; the poor trapped in vulnerable cities; and post-war institutions; rural living as single largest killer today; slow global response to crisis of; superrich and private jets; tribalism as not inevitable; and vested interests in the rich world insects; collapsing populations; farming of; as human food source insulation insurance, availability of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) International Energy Agency (IEA) International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) International Labour Organization Iquique (Chile) Ireland iron, powdered Islam islands, small/low-lying Israel Italy Ithaca, city of (New York) Jakarta Japan Jobs, Steve Johnson, Boris Jordan kelp Kenya Khan, Sadiq Khoisan Bushmen Kimmel, Mara King, Sir David Kiribati knowledge and skills: better environment for in rich countries; ‘brain drain’ issue; channelled through migrant networks; diversity as improving innovation; global knowledge transfer; Global Skill Partnerships model; impact of European colonialism; migrants returning to origin countries; and Nansen-style schemes; need for rapid transference of; and points-based entrance systems Kodiak Island, Alaska krill Kuba Kingdom, West Africa !

Brexit, No Exit: Why in the End Britain Won't Leave Europe by Denis MacShane

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, fixed income, Gini coefficient, greed is good, illegal immigration, information security, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, labour mobility, liberal capitalism, low cost airline, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, post-truth, price stability, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reshoring, road to serfdom, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Thales and the olive presses, trade liberalization, transaction costs, women in the workforce

As Martin Schulz, the president of the European Parliament, who was chosen as the Social Democratic Party candidate to run against Angela Merkel in the contest to be chancellor of Germany, wrote in an article on the day of his visit to see the Prime Minister and Mayor of London there is a clear ‘majority in the European Parliament for insisting that the fundamental freedoms are inseparable, i.e. no freedom of movement for goods, capital and services, without free movement of persons. I refuse to imagine a Europe where lorries and hedge funds are free to cross borders but citizens cannot. I cannot accept any hierarchy between these four freedoms.’ Until judges intervened, Brexit Minister David Davis had made clear that parliament and the electorate would not be informed about the UK’s negotiations – a return to the secret conclaves of Eurocrats behind closed doors that Eurosceptics always denounced.

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While the EU is young, Europe is getting older and has stopped having babies. Thanks to its open borders to immigration from Asia, Britain is one of the few EU nations with a growing population. But even in Britain the share of the active employed population has fallen below the inactive population (those without work, the young, retired people and others) and the UK needs more healthy, young, tax-paying workers if it is to survive, let alone thrive. Elsewhere Europe is ceasing to reproduce itself and one reason for maintaining free movement of workers is to have enough younger low-pay workers to look after ageing Europeans who are in need of care from younger people to wash, clean and feed them.

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The UK economy was based on low-paid, taxpayer-subsidised employment, with employers encouraged to hire the cheapest possible labour. The biggest employer of EU citizens is the NHS. But state employers are exempt from freedom of movement obligations. Britain could do much more to train British citizens for jobs and introduce other measures of internal labour market control without violating freedom of movement rules, as other EU countries or Switzerland have done. I pointed out that Ireland had 180,000 Polish workers – 4 per cent of the Irish population, compared to 1.7 per cent of the UK population that was Polish.

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

Agreeing to end freedom of movement – the only freedom they proposed abandoning of the four that make up the single market – meant they failed to take the lead on anti-immigration politics that undergirded the EU referendum.12 It’s not that free movement in Europe should be protected while non-EU migrants continue to navigate processes that have for decades been exclusionary, racialised and unfair. The focus should be on levelling up non-EU migrant rights, not bringing their European counterparts into an already unjust system. Even if only implicitly, committing to ending freedom of movement feeds anti-immigration politics.

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In 2007, Home Secretary John Reid, who was known for taking an overtly tough stance on immigration, showed that he had few qualms about pitting people against each other. He claimed that it was ‘an underlying reality that we have not been tough enough in policing access to such services as council housing, legal aid or NHS care’.58 The year before, with public discourse increasingly focused on European freedom of movement, he had announced that the British labour market would be closed to Romanians and Bulgarians when their countries joined the EU in January 2007. That same year, the government extended the length of time immigrants had to wait to become eligible for residency from four to five years and the year before that they abolished a scheme that let non-EU graduate doctors work in training posts without a permit; to get one would mean proving there was no British or EU graduates who could fill the post.59 There was a human cost to these policies.

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Once David Cameron had committed the UK to the referendum – all in the name of keeping together the Conservative Party, which has for decades been deeply divided over Europe – he realised he needed to renegotiate the country’s relationship to try and please backbenchers and voters who might otherwise opt to leave. After decades of accepting and reinforcing that immigration was a problem in the UK, Cameron came to the conclusion that changing freedom of movement was essential to satisfy those potential leavers. When he tried to negotiate an ‘emergency brake’, which would put a cap on how many EU migrants could work in the UK, German chancellor Angela Merkel pointed out that such a mechanism would only be considered in the event of a social or economic crisis.25 This simply wasn’t the case for the UK; immigration was not causing any of the problems that politicians claimed it was.

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

A single market in goods and services and, with some reservations, capital, is compatible with multiple nations trading with each other. Freedom of movement of people takes the relationship to a different level. British reservations are, to a somewhat lesser degree, shared by many of the richer northern European countries like Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden—yet freedom of movement in these countries also underpins a vision of a borderless Europe, with citizens mixing freely as Europeans, that has a favourable echo especially among young people. This is, in part, based on a misunderstanding: freedom of movement is conflated with all movement around Europe, yet visa free travel and various forms of special intra-European movements, of students for example, are perfectly compatible with the normal national immigration controls that freedom of movement prohibits.

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(Not to mention various lower level crises such as the inability to respond properly to the renewed threats from Russia and even the corrupt nature of EU decision-making revealed by the Volkswagen emissions scandal.) Neither the introduction of the Euro between 1999 and 2002 nor the sudden surge in the numbers taking advantage of freedom of movement (especially to Britain) after the arrival of the much poorer former communist states after 2004, were necessary answers to pressing problems and they have both been achieved at a very high political price for the EU, including now Brexit. Both a single currency and free movement have some economic benefits when functioning properly but neither have been able to do so, or at least with democratic legitimacy, because of the continuing attachment to national ways of doing things among political elites and even more so among voters across the EU.

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But there is no reason why some of the benefits could not persist with a better designed and more controlled form of movement. (Visa-free travel and some special terms for labour migration are likely to be on offer to EU citizens as part of the Brexit deal.) It is often said that the principle of free movement is inviolable but freedom of movement has not always been as free as it is now. It has been substantially widened and extended by the European Court of Justice over recent decades. This culminated in the creation of the legal category ‘EU citizen’ in the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 which entrenched the principle of non-discrimination, meaning that citizens of other EU countries have to be treated like national citizens in all important respects.

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

., “Predatory Value: Economies of Dispossession and Disturbed Relationalities,” Social Text 36, no. 2 (June 2018): 2. 21.Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 13. 22.Shannon Speed, Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler-Capitalist State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019). 23.Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Cassell, 2011), 209. 24.Jenna M. Loyd, “Prison Abolitionist Perspectives on No Borders,” in Open Borders: In Defense of Free Movement, Reece Jones, ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019). 25.Ngai, Impossible Subjects. 26.Brenden W. Rensink, Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2018). 27.Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015), 231. 28.Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 18, 99. 29.Laleh Khalili, Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 18. 30.Maggie Blackhawk, “The Indian Law That Helps Build Walls,” New York Times, May 26, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/opinion/american-indian-law-trump.html. 31.George Manuel and Michael Posluns, The Fourth World: An Indian Reality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019). 32.Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future (New York: Verso, 2019), 148. 33.Jodi A.

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Shear and Julie Hirschfeld Davis, “Shoot Migrants’ Legs, Build Alligator Moat: Behind Trump’s Ideas for Border,” New York Times, October 1, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/10/01/us/politics/trump-border-wars.html. 13.Ryan Devereaux, “Mining the Future,” The Intercept, October 3, 2019, https://theintercept.com/2019/10/03/climate-change-migration-militarization-arizona/. 14.Associated Press, “Trump Administration to Expand DNA Collection at Border and Give Data to FBI,” Guardian, October 3, 2019, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/02/us-immigration-border-dna-trump-administration. 15.Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York and Cambridge: Zone Books, 2017), 132. 16.Brown, Walled States, 105. 17.Reece Jones, “Introduction,” in Open Borders: In Defense of Free Movement, Reece Jones, ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019), 3. 18.Todd Miller, Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Homeland Security (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2014), 42. 19.Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019), 10. 20.Reece Jones, Border Walls: Security and the War on Terror in the United States, India, and Israel (London: Zed Books, 2012), 2. 21.Kate Smith, “Immigrant Deportation Filings Hit Record High in 2018, New Report Shows,” CBS News, November 8, 2018, www.cbsnews.com/news/ice-deportations-in-2018-hit-record-high/. 22.Emily Kassie, “Detained: How the US Built the World’s Largest Immigrant Detention System,” Guardian, September 24, 2019, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/24/detained-us-largest-immigrant-detention-trump. 23.National Catholic Reporter Editorial Staff, “Editorial: Don’t Look Away from Concentration Camps at the Border,” National Catholic Reporter, June 19, 2019, www.ncronline.org/news/opinion/editorial-dont-look-away-concentration-camps-border. 24.César Cuauhtémoc Garcia Hernández, “Abolishing Immigration Prisons,” Boston University Law Review 97, no. 1 (2017): 245–300. 25.UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Women on the Run: First-Hand Accounts of Refugees Fleeing El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico, October 26, 2015, www.unhcr.org/5630f24c6.html. 26.Alice Speri, “Detained, Then Violated,” The Intercept, April 11, 2018, https://theintercept.com/2018/04/11/immigration-detention-sexual-abuse-ice-dhs/. 27.Nicoll Hernández-Polanco quoted in Adam Frankel, “Do You See How Much I’m Suffering Here?

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“Declaration on the Repression of African Immigrants” quoted in Clara Lecadet, “Europe Confronted by Its Expelled Migrants: The Politics of Expelled Migrants’ Associations in Africa,” in De Genova, The Borders of “Europe,” 149. 30.No Borders Morocco, “Violence, Resistance, and Bozas at the Spanish-Moroccan Border,” in Open Borders: In Defense of Free Movement, Reece Jones, ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019), 237. 31.No Borders Morocco, “Violence, Resistance, and Bozas,” 231. 32.Médecins Sans Frontières, “Violence, Vulnerability and Migration: Trapped at the Gates of Europe; A Report on the Situation of Sub-Saharan Migrants in an Irregular Situation in Morocco,” March 2013, www.msf.org/violence-vulnerability-and-migration-trapped-gates-europe. 33.Médecins Sans Frontières, “Violence, Vulnerability and Migration,” 15. 34.No Borders Morocco, “Violence, Resistance, and Bozas,” 231-2. 35.Olivia Sundberg Diez, “What You Don’t Hear about Spain’s Migration Policy,” EU Observer, February 23, 2020, https://euobserver.com/opinion/147429. 36.Dale Fuchs, “Canary Islands Fear Disaster as Number of Migrants Soar,” Guardian, September 4, 2006, www.theguardian.com/world/2006/sep/04/spain.mainsection. 37.Ruben Andersson, Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe (Oakland: University of California Press, 2014), 36; “Canaries Migrant Death Toll Soars,” BBC News, December 28, 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6213495.stm. 38.Ruben Andersson, “Rescued and Caught: The Humanitarian-Security Nexus at Europe’s Frontiers,” in De Genova, The Borders of “Europe,” 78. 39.Zach Campbell, “Europe’s Plan to Close its Sea Borders Relies on Libya’s Coast Guard Doing Its Dirty Work, Abusing Migrants,” The Intercept, November 25, 2017, https://theintercept.com/2017/11/25/libya-coast-guard-europe-refugees/. 40.Andersson, “Rescued and Caught,” 64-94. 41.African Civil Society Organizations, “Joint Statement: African Civil Society Condemns the Hunt for Migrants on the Continent,” 2016, www.statewatch.org/news/2016/may/eu-africa-ngos-statement.pdf. 42.Benjamin Bathke, “More Than 150 Migrants Scale Fence to Spain’s Ceuta Enclave in Morocco,” Info Migrants, September 2, 2019, www.infomigrants.net/en/post/19221/more-than-150-migrants-scale-fence-to-spain-s-ceuta-enclave-in-morocco. 43.Jones, Violent Borders, 23. 44.Human Rights Watch, “Q&A: Why the eu-turkey Migration Deal Is No Blueprint,” November 14, 2016, www.hrw.org/news/2016/11/14/qa-why-EU–Turkey-migration-deal-no-blueprint. 45.Trilling, Lights in the Distance, 189. 46.Gabriella Lazaridis and Vasiliki Tsagkroni, “Posing for Legitimacy?

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

A number of richer countries will continue to erect walls to help stem the flow of migrants. Some people argue, however, that we should simply dispense not just with walls, but with borders themselves – and allow completely free movement, so that any person can go anywhere on the planet they wish. In a 2017 Foreign Affairs essay, Nathan Smith, Assistant Professor of Economics at Fresno Pacific University’s School of Business, described this ‘open borders’ idea as: a regime of nearly complete freedom of migration worldwide, with rare exceptions for preventing terrorism or the spread of contagious disease . . . Ending migration controls in this way would increase liberty, reduce global poverty, and accelerate economic growth.

…

Behind the fences were cleared ‘killing zones’, allowing a clear line of fire in case anyone was brave – or foolish – enough to try to cross the border. After a clanking, stop-start, four-hour journey, we rolled into Berlin and towards the symbol of the greatest ideological divide of the twentieth century. This was a city wall like no other – built not to repel invaders, but to keep people in. These days most Europeans take the idea of freedom of movement for granted. But it was not so long ago that travel across the continent was severely restricted. During the Cold War, to cross borders in Western Europe you had to have a passport, but it was a routine act. Crossing the Iron Curtain into Eastern Europe, on the other hand, required a passport, paperwork and security checks, and was done in the knowledge that your every movement would be monitored.

…

Now, however, the Euro is struggling and is hardly an enticement for EU applicants; and there have been financial winners and losers. Greece, for example, suffers horrendous levels of youth unemployment, due partially to economic policies forced upon it by Berlin and Brussels. The EU has also faced the challenge of uniting East and West Europe, after expanding in 2004 to allow in several of the eastern states. Freedom of movement is one of the ideals of the EU, giving Europeans the right to live, work and travel throughout the member countries. It was intended both to enable growth across Europe and to encourage integration among the European populations. It is an ideal many have embraced, travelling around the continent in a way that wouldn’t have been possible just a few decades ago, especially to places previously hidden behind the Iron Curtain.

Brexit: What the Hell Happens Now?: The Facts About Britain's Bitter Divorce From Europe 2016 by Ian Dunt

Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, energy security, Jeremy Corbyn, low skilled workers, non-tariff barriers, open borders, Silicon Valley, UNCLOS, UNCLOS

Standing next to May outside the Élysée Palace, the French President Francois Hollande said: ‘There cannot be freedom of movement of goods, free movement of capital, free movement of services if there isn’t a free movement of people.’ When Boris Johnson joked that he was ‘pro having my cake and pro eating it’, Donald Tusk replied: ‘To all who believe in it, I propose a simple experiment. Buy a cake, eat it, and see if it is still there on the plate.’ The message is clear: no movement on free movement. It is a European red line. But possibly there is more wriggle room there than the EU is making out. Brussels is bound to hold a firm line on free movement, especially in advance of negotiations.

…

The Brexit vote had been a comprehensive rejection of freedom of movement: the right of citizens from any EU state to settle in the UK. This indeed was the main message the new prime minister, Theresa May, took from the result and there was much cross-party consensus to support her. Labour MPs reported there was rage about free movement on predominantly white council estates, just as Tory MPs returned from the shires with similar demands from the country golf club ringing in their ears. Very quickly a view took hold in the political class: the free movement of people was a symbol of a public sense of powerlessness.

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(https://twitter.com/daviddavismp/ status/735770127564607489) What will we do about freedom of movement? Bruegal released a report arguing that the EU should concede on this point. The Bruegal paper caused outrage in Europe for going against the consensus on protecting free movement at all costs, but some several senior figures who were more sympathetic in private (http://bruegel.org/2016/08/europe-after-brexit-a-proposal-for-a-continental-partnership/) An emergency brake on immigration was ‘certainly one of the ideas now on the table’. The Observer reports cited ‘senior British and EU sources‘ (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/24/brexit-deal-free-movement-exemption-seven-years) Recent court cases in Germany have seen Romanians who failed to look for work before claiming benefits sent back to their home country.

Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World by Anthony Sattin

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anton Chekhov, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, digital nomad, Donald Trump, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, invention of writing, Islamic Golden Age, James Hargreaves, Jessica Bruder, Khartoum Gordon, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nomadland, open borders, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, spinning jenny, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, traveling salesman

The ‘collective brain’ shows that we have been at our most successful and progressive when diverse groups have come together and pooled their understanding, their history and their ways of seeing. The best things about humankind have come through cooperation, open markets and borders, free movement, freedom of thought and conscience, and nomads have always been among the best conduits and accumulators of these elements. Of course there have been many problems in the mix, flashpoints over landholding, water resources, freedom of movement and much else. But ‘the bigger, fuller picture is never as stark as “nomad” versus “settled”, tribes versus peoples. It never has been.’82 The biggest, fullest picture of humankind is one that contains both nomads – the moving settled, as Iranians call them – and settled people, the settled movers.

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Karma 281–2 Circe 69 circularity 127, 149–50, 152, 165, 196, 197, 203 see also wheel of fortune, turning cities borders/walls 38, 39–40, 42, 81–2, 141, 150, 285–6 ill-effects of 139, 150, 152, 198, 231 Plato’s ideal 83–4 Clark, William 272 Clavijo, Ruy González de 212–13, 220 climate changes 17, 33, 37–8, 55, 58–9, 81, 107–8, 151 cobalt oxide 192–3 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 188 ‘collective brain’ 302–3 Collinson, Peter 245, 246, 247 colonialism 25, 26, 238, 258–9, 267 Columbus, Christopher 239 comitatus 57, 97–8, 130, 138 compasses 240, 244, 258, 265 Constantine 109 Constantinople (Istanbul), Turkey 105–6, 116, 133, 231 Cook, Captain James 254–9 Cooper, Merian C. 287–8 Cooper-Schoedsack Productions 287–8 cost of progress 15–16, 84, 146, 148, 151, 254–9, 277–8, 290 Crazy Horse 280 Croesus 73, 87 crow symbol of wisdom 282 Crusades 168–9, 169–70, 170–1, 179, 186, 220 Ctesiphon, Iraq 132, 140 cultural exchange/transfer 54, 63–4, 73, 159, 192–5, 210 cuneiform 41–2 Cunliffe, Barry 47–8 Custer, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong 280–1 Cyrus the Great 73, 86–8, 117 Dadu (Beijing), China 158 Damascus, Syria 31–2, 134, 135, 138, 139, 186, 210, 214–21 Dance of Death, The (Wolgemut) 203 Darius I 74–5, 76, 88–92 Darwin, Charles 283 Daylam 151 de’ Mussi, Gabriele 199–200, 201 Decameron, The (Boccaccio) 201–2 Deleuze, Gilles 7, 46 Delhi, India 237 democracy 167, 194, 227 Descent of Man (Darwin) 283 Dharawal Aborigines 256–9 Dictionary of the English Language, A (Johnson) 249, 250–1 Diodorus Siculus 76 diversity 61, 73, 79, 83–4, 86, 102, 109, 128, 159, 303 dogs 24, 287 dopamine 29–30 DRD4-7R gene 28–31, 31, 304 Duby, Georges 194, 195 East India Company 241 Edeko 105–6, 112 Eden 15–16, 16–17, 138 Edfu, Egypt 60 education 59, 194, 247–8, 298 Edward I 179 Edward III 194 Egypt 26, 58–65, 61, 65, 138, 191, 193, 204–5, 214, 222, 306–7, 307–8 Einkorn wheat 33, 36 Eisenberg, Dan 29, 30, 31, 304 Elizabeth I 239 Elliot, Daniel Giraud 281 empires defining ‘empire’ 81–2 Macaulay’s speech on 265–6 ‘rise and fall’ cycle 130–1, 146–7, 151–2, 182, 197, 222–3, 228–9 see also specific empires Endeavour, HMS 255–9 Enkidu 43–6, 46 Enlightenment 239–44 Enoch, city of 35, 38 equine revolution see horses Eridu, Iraq 39 Esän Dawlat Begim 236 etymology of nomad 3–4 Euphrates river 15, 38–9, 140, 141, 148 extinctions 33–4 Faraj ibn Barquq, al-Nasir 214, 215 Ferdowsi 300–1 Fereydun 295–301, 304–10 Fergana Valley 101, 235–6 Fermor, Patrick Leigh 231–2 Fernández-Armesto, Felipe 24, 259 figurines and statues 18, 38, 54, 60–1, 133, 252–3 Flavius Orestes 105 Flecker, James Elroy 212 floral/vegetation ornaments/designs 17, 79, 149, 193, 221, 229, 233, 237, 238, 259, 309–10, 309 Florus 104 foxes/dogs 24, 287 Franklin, Benjamin 244–9, 267–8 Frankopan, Peter 103 freedom of conscience 109, 157–8, 169, 177–8, 187, 189, 193, 213, 221, 227, 298 freedom of movement 74, 86, 129, 141, 187, 189, 213–14, 221, 227, 297–8 Gabriel 134 Galileo Galilei 240, 243 Gama, Vasco da 239 Gan Ying 104 Ganges river 15 Gaozu 98–9 Garden of Eden 15–16, 16–17, 138 gardens of paradise 15–16 genetics 28–31, 304 Genghis Khan achievements 157 background and rise as Temujin 153–6 death 167 and Khwarazm 159–64 legal code 189 life on same level as people 166–7 religious beliefs 169 in Western memory 156–7, 161, 164 see also Mongol Empire genocide 277–8, 281 geography–history link 46–7, 58, 128 George II 278–9 Germany 286 Gibbon, Edward 110, 157–8, 208 Gila Monsters 284 Gilgamesh, Epic of 41–6, 285 Gindibu 129 goats 9 Göbekli Tepe, Turkey 17–24, 24, 25, 26, 32–4, 37 gods/goddesses Abrahamic faiths 32, 34–5, 132–3, 134–5 Aztec 152 Bedouin 133 Egyptian 59–61, 63 Greek 69, 71, 72, 84, 86 Hindu 55 Mesopotamian 39 Mongolian 156, 169 Nabataean 133 Persian 75 Scythian 80, 86 gold and silver articles 53, 66, 71, 87–8, 92, 103, 114, 116, 176, 177, 210 Golden Horde 189, 199 Goldsmith, Oliver 262 Goodwin, Jason 231 Goths 109–10 Grass (Cooper-Schoedsack Productions) 287–90 grave goods 7, 49, 54, 66–7, 71, 92, 103 Great Wall of China 96–7 Greece 65–71, 71–2, 82–3 greed 260 gunpowder 240, 258, 265 guns 268, 280 Gurganj, Turkmenistan 162–3 Guyuk Khan 169, 172 Hafez 211 Haider Khan 289 Han Empire, China envoy to Rome 104 Modu’s marriage proposal 99–100 trade 100–1, 101–2, 103–4 Xiongnu, conflict with 95–7, 98, 100 Xiongnu, peace with 98–9 Xiongnu, trade with 100–1 Zhang’s missions 101–2 Hangzhou, China 284 Hargreaves, James 261 Harrison, Marguerite 287–8 Harun al-Rashid 141–3, 147 Hatshepsut 63 Heracles 86 Heraclitus 151 Heraclius 133, 135 Herat, Afghanistan 221 Herder, Johann 46, 58 hero worship 69, 208 Herodotus background 72 customs 35, 301, 309 Egyptians 58 Mesopotamia’s agriculture 139 nomad–settler relationship 117 Olbia 92–3 Persian invasion of Scythia 86–8, 89–92 Persian Royal Road 74 Persians 73, 75, 78, 86–8, 89–92, 117 Scythians 85–8, 89–92, 93–4 Hisarlik, Turkey 67 Histories, The (Herodotus) 72, 94–5 see also Herodotus history–geography link 46–7, 58, 128 history, highway of 24–7, 116–17 History of the Art of Antiquity, The (Winckelmann) 252, 253 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The (Gibbon) 208 Homer 26, 55, 65, 66, 67–71, 285 Honoria 114–15 Hornaday, William 281 horses burials 49, 53, 91, 185 chariots, pulling 50, 62, 64 domestication 48 extending human mobility 49, 54 Fergana Valley 101–2, 236 humans riding 48–9 images of 50, 105, 170 Indus Valley, use in the 56 messenger systems, use in 74, 191 Mongols’ use of 153, 185, 207 Native Americans’ use of 272 redundancy during Industrial Revolution 283, 290 Scythians’ use of 80, 89, 97 trade in 54, 57, 93, 100, 101–2 Horus 60–1 House of Wisdom, Baghdad 144–5, 184 Hubal 133 Huitzilopochtli 152 Hulagu 178–9, 180–7, 187, 188 Hungary 49, 168, 171 Huns 106–7, 110–16, 116, 137–8 Hyacinth 114–15 Hyksos 62–4, 65, 65 Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, Muhammad 267 Ibn Abi al-Yusr 186 Ibn al-Ala, Abu Amr 149 Ibn al-Athir 164 Ibn Arabshah, Ahmad 210, 211, 215, 218, 219, 220 Ibn Barmak, Khalid 140–1 Ibn Battuta 32, 198–9, 200 Ibn Khaldun Arabs 128, 129, 135, 137, 145 asabiyya 130–1, 137 background 124 Barquq 205 Berbers, living among 124–5 Black Death 202–3 burial 229 change 119 in Damascus 215–18 Egypt, return to 219 Faraj 214–15 geographies 128 Harun 142 as historian 222 image of 132 as judge 222 Mongols 197 Muqaddimah, The 125–6, 126–7 nature–nomad relationship 129, 130 seer’s prophecy 203–4 settlement, ill-effects of 139, 145, 146–7, 151, 152 Timur 216–18, 219 wants of settlers/nomads 248 wheel of fortune of dynasties, turning 127, 146–7, 152, 197, 222–3, 228–9 Ibn Rushd (Averroes) 130 Ibn Salama castle, Algeria 123, 124, 126, 142, 203 Ibn Saud, Muhammad 267 Ibn Tumart 131 Idanthyrsus 89–91 identity 69, 137, 148, 155, 166, 232–3 idleness 245–6, 246–7 Iliad (Homer) 26, 66, 67–9 Imbrie, Major Robert 289 Inanna 39, 41 India 57, 102, 104, 237, 241, 267 Indian Notebooks (Thoreau) 271, 275 Indians see Native Americans Indo-European languages 3, 50–2, 54, 55–6, 80, 97, 262–3 Indo-European nomads, early 52–5, 56–8, 65, 66, 67, 72–3 Indra 55 Indus Valley 33, 54–8, 102 Industrial Revolution 259–65, 266, 285 Innocent IV, Pope 172 Iroquois 247–8, 249 Isfahan, Iran 234–5 Isis 60 Islam 134–5, 137, 193, 230, 299–300 see also Arab Empire Istanbul, Turkey 231 see also Constantinople (Istanbul), Turkey Italy 190, 198–9, 201–2, 214, 252 Iyrcae 93 Jackson, Andrew 273 Jani Beg 199 Jefferson, Thomas 272 Jehan, Shah 237–8 jewellery and ornaments 53, 66, 71, 80, 85, 105, 177, 212, 229, 253, 298 John Sigismund 232–3 Johnson, Dr Samuel 249–51, 251 Jones, William 50–1, 262–3 Jordanes 115 Josephus 15 journeys 2, 27–8, 69–70, 303–4 Juvaini, Ala-ad-Din Ata-Malik 180, 186 Kaaba, Mecca 133 Kabul, Afghanistan 237 al-Kafa (Feodosia), Crimea 198–200, 200–1 Kant, Immanuel 46 Karakorum, Mongolia 165–7, 167–8, 169–70, 174–7, 180 Karsakpay inscription, Kazakhstan 209 Kashan, Iran 178 Keynes, John Maynard 125 Khadija 134 Khalid ibn al-Walid 136, 138 Khanbaliq (Beijing), China 188, 192 Khosrow II 132–3, 135 Khwarazmid Empire 159–64 Kitab Na’t al-Hayawan 170 Kitchener, General Horatio Herbert 308 Kubilai Khan 178, 187, 188, 193, 195, 196, 282 Kubla Khan (Coleridge) 188 Kubra, Shaykh Najm al-Din 164 Kuh-e-Mehr (Mountain of Mercy/Mithra), Iran 75 Kurds 19, 232 kurgans 52–3, 91, 92 Laffer Curve 125 Lakota Sioux 273, 279–81 Laws (Plato) 83–4 Layard, Austen 300–1 Lewis, Meriwether 272 Li Ling, General 95–6 Lichfield, Staffordshire 249, 250 Life of Timur (Ibn Arabshah) 210 Linnaeus, Carl 245 Liu Cong 108 lotus flower 79 Louis IX 172 Lü 99–100 Lubana 144 Lucian 57, 72 Luri tree of life carpet, Iran 17 Lydians 73, 87 al-Ma’arri 146 Macaulay, Thomas 265–6 Mackintosh-Smith, Tim 123–4, 225 Madrassa al-Adili, Damascus 215–16, 218–19 Maikop mound, Russia 53–4, 54 Mamluks 169, 186, 187, 214–15, 222 al-Mamun 142, 144, 147 Manafi’ al-Hayawan (Ibn Bakhtishu) 158 Manetho 62 manifest destiny 267, 274, 279–80, 288 al-Mansur 139–40, 141, 143, 147 al-Maqrizi 204 Maragheh, Iran 181 Marco Polo 167, 187–8, 190, 191, 195–6, 198 Marlowe, Christopher 207, 208, 216, 218 Mashad, Iran 221 Massagetae 72, 80 al-Masudi 127 Maximinus 105–6, 111–12 May, Timothy 251 Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems (al-Masudi) 127 Mecca, Saudi Arabia 133–4, 139 Medes 73, 85, 86, 88 memory, ambition to live in 56, 65, 69, 208–9, 236, 237 Mesopotamia 38–9 see also specific places messenger systems 74, 103, 191 Messiaen, Olivier 285 Mexica 152 Mexico 272, 274 Mighty Dead, The (Nicolson) 67–8 Mihal, Köse 230 Mirbad, Iraq 148 mobility see freedom of movement Modu 97–8, 98–100, 102–3 money, paper 194 Mongke Khan 173–6, 178–9, 187 Mongol Empire arts and sciences 165, 176, 177, 211–12, 221, 222, 222, 229 Black Death 199–201, 205 conquests and spread 158, 162–4, 165, 179, 180–7 cultural exchanges 192–5, 210 decline 197–8, 205–6, 214, 229 democracy 167, 194, 227 diversity 177, 189, 198–9 education 194 Europe, expansion into 168, 171 European embassies to 168–75, 212–13 extent 165, 188–9 freedom of conscience 157–8, 169, 177–8, 187, 189, 193, 199, 213, 221, 227 freedom of movement 187, 189, 213–14, 221, 227 freedom to trade 189–90, 221 gods 52, 169, 172, 178, 193 horses, importance of 158 identity 155 Karsakpay inscription 209 and Khwarazm 159–65 laws 189, 194 Marco Polo’s visit to 187–8 merchant navy 195–6 meritocracy 194 Neo-Mongols 235–8 paper 194 peace 190, 213–14 post-houses 191–2 quriltai of 1206 155 taxes 175–6, 190–1 tombs 211 trade 159–60, 189–92, 195–6, 199, 211–12, 213–14, 227 travel, ease of 191–2 Uighurs, alliance with the 159 viceroys 188–9 wealth 196, 221–2 in Western memory 156–7, 161, 164, 168, 180–1, 207–8 written records 161, 209–10 see also specific people; specific places Morteza Quli Khan 289 motor cars 283, 290 mountains as sacred places 74–5 Mughal Empire 237–8, 238 Muhammad II, Shah 159–60, 160–4 Muhammad, the Prophet 26, 132–3, 134–7, 137 Muqaddimah, The (Ibn Khaldun) 125–32, 202–3 see also Ibn Khaldun Muslim ibn Walid 142 al-Mustasim 181–3, 184–5 Mycenae, Greece 66–7, 71 Naissus (Niš), Serbia 106 Native Americans battles with European settlers 273, 277–8, 279–81 bison 271–2, 274 disappearance 281–2 Franklin’s views 246–8 George II, audience with 278–9 horses, use of 272 pre-colonial presence 241, 269, 271 pushed out by European settlers 268, 270–2, 273 symbols 249, 277, 282, 284 Thoreau’s views 270–1, 275–6 uniting against European settlers 269 nature–nomad relationship 3, 8, 15–16, 23, 129, 228, 258–9, 277, 282, 299 nature–settler relationship 42–6, 241–4, 253, 269–70, 272, 275–6, 281, 283, 285, 286 navies 195–6, 239, 240 Neo-Mongol Empire 235–8 Neolithic Evolution 32–5 Neolithic Revolution 23–4 Nevali Cori, Turkey 18 Newsom, Gavin 277–8 Nicolson, Adam 67–8 Nicolson, Harold 291–2, 293 Nile river 15, 58–65 Nineveh, Iraq 41–2, 81 nomad–nomad conflict 87–8, 89–91 nomad–settler conflict 225 Arabs 135–7 Beja 308 Goths 110 Huns 106, 111–12 Hyksos 62–4 Mongols 158, 160–5, 180–6, 214–20, 237, 251 Native Americans 268, 270–1, 273–4, 275–6, 279–81 Ottomans 231 Persians 145 Visigoths 111 Xiongnu 95, 96–7 nomad–settler cooperation 61, 65, 83–4, 107, 117, 123–4, 303–4 see also trade nomad–settler relationship stories Cain and Abel 32, 34–5, 61, 123, 243 Gilgamesh and Enkidu 42–6 Osiris and Seth 59–61 nomad, defining 3–4 nomad, exclusion/inclusion in dictionaries 250 Nomadic Alternative, The (Chatwin) 302 ‘nomadic gene’ (DRD4-7R) 28–31, 31, 304 Northwestern University, Illinois 28–31 Novgorod Chronicler 171 Novum Organum (Bacon) 239, 240 Nowruz festival 75, 294 oak leaves and acorns 309 octopus brooch 71 Odoacer 115–16 Odysseus 67–8, 69–71 Odyssey (Homer) 26, 67, 69–71 Og, son of Anak 127 Ogodei Khan 167–8, 169, 187 Olbia, Ukraine 92–3 Olympic Games, ancient 71–2 oral tradition 25–6, 27, 82, 86, 258, 282 Ordos culture 105 Origin of Human Races, The (Wallace) 283 Orkhon Valley, Mongolia 165–8 ornaments see jewellery and ornaments Osiris 59–60, 61 Osman 230–1 O’Sullivan, John 267, 268, 274 Otrar, Kazakhstan 160, 220–1 Ottomans 207–8, 220, 230–3, 233, 238, 266–7 overhunting 33–4, 281 ox figurine 54 Pan 84 paper 145, 194 paradise 15–17, 22 Parthians 101, 102, 104, 140 Pascal, Blaise 240–1 In Patagonia (Chatwin) 301 peacock motif 290 Pegolotti, Francesco Balducci 190 Persepolis, Iran 75–9, 79, 88–9 Persian Gulf 141, 148 Persians Abbasids see Abbasid Empire Achaemenids see Achaemenid Empire administration of Arab Empire 146, 148 Afshar goat image 9 Alexander the Great, conquest by 77 Arabs, conquest by 136–7 art 235 Bakhtiari see Bakhtiari Bisotun inscription 74–5, 88, 92 books 158, 170 Byzantines, conflict with 134, 136 cobalt oxide 192–3 Ctesiphon 132, 140 cultural exchanges 73, 210 Greece, relations with 71–2 Manafi’ al-Hayawan (Ibn Bakhtishu) 158 Mongols, conquests by 179–86, 206, 210 nomadic character 73–4, 117, 266, 291–4 nomadic tribes 72–3 paradise garden 16 Pars/Fars 73 Parthians 94, 101, 102, 104, 140 Persepolis 75–9, 79, 88–9 Persian plateau 72–3 Reza Shah 290–1 Royal Road 141 Sackville-West’s time in 291–4 sacredness of mountains 74–5 Safavids 233–5, 235 Sasanian 74, 132–3, 141 Scythians, inability to conquer the 86–92, 150–1 Shahnameh (Ferdowsi) 300–1 Simurgh (Phoenix) 158 trade 192–3 written records, paucity of 26, 71 Petrarch 202 Philip, Master 170 Pir Muhammad 229 Plato 82–5, 129–30 Pliny the Elder 103–4 Plymouth, Massachusetts, USA 241 Polk, James K. 274 Pontic–Caspian steppe 48, 49, 52–3, 109 population growth 17, 33, 59, 261–2, 263, 274, 284, 286, 294 Potbelly Hill, Turkey 17–24 pottery see ceramics prejudices, Western history’s 7–8, 8–9, 24–6, 110–11, 156–7, 161, 180–1, 207–8, 210, 252–4 Prester John 169, 171 printing 238, 240, 265 Priscus 106, 107, 111–14, 138 Proto-Indo-European (PIE) languages 52 Qara Qorum see Karakorum, Mongolia Qashqai 77–8 Qazvin, Iran 179–80 Quran 15, 26, 134–5 railways 274–5, 276–7 ram’s head and horns 11 Ramses III, Pharaoh 60–1 Rashid al-Din 196 Reagan, Ronald 125 religious tolerance see freedom of conscience Renaissance 253 Rendille 28 Report on King David 170 Reza Shah 290–1 Rig Veda 52, 55 Rimbaud, Arthur 303–4 Roerich, Nicholas 53 Roman Empire 102, 103–4, 105–7, 109–16, 136, 284 Roth, Joseph 286 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 260, 278–9 Rukn al-Din Khurshah 180, 185 Rumi 164–5 Saadi 181, 294 Sacha the dog 287 Sackville-West, Vita 291–3 Safavid Empire 233–5, 235, 238 Safi ad Din, Sheikh 233–4 Sahlins, Marshall 16 Salisbury, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess 283 Samarkand, Uzbekistan 108, 145, 162, 211, 212–13, 220–1, 237 Samburu 28 Sanskrit 50–1, 55–6 Sarmatians 72, 80, 104, 107 Sasanian Empire 132–3 Schliemann, Heinrich 66–7 Schmidt, Klaus 18, 19–22, 23, 25, 34 Schoedsack, Ernest B. 287–8, 289 science 127, 181, 222, 222, 243–4, 245, 254, 255, 283 scorpion symbol 126 Scythes 86 Scythians archery 80, 88, 89 art and ornaments 85, 92, 103, 105, 253 burials/tombs 91 customs 80–1 gods/goddesses 80, 86 Herodotus’ descriptions 85–8, 89–91, 93–4 horses, importance of 80, 89, 97 nomadic character 80, 89, 90, 97, 150–1 Persia’s inability to conquer 86–92, 150–1 rise of 79–80, 81 trade 105 Xiongnu, similarities to the 97, 98, 103 Secret History of the Mongols, The (Rachewiltz) 161 seed planters 260–1 Seljuqs 151–2 Serdica (Sofia), Bulgaria 105–6, 106–7 Seth 59–61, 61, 63 settlement beginnings of 22, 23–4, 32–3 benefits 35–6, 59, 309 detriments 30–1, 45–6, 139, 147, 152, 197, 285–6, 299 Franklin’s views 246, 247–9 and monumental architecture 25 see also cities settlers’ views of nomads Franklin’s 245, 246–8 nostalgia and romanticism 258–9, 287–90, 291–3 scorn and superiority 40, 84–5, 110–11, 265–6, 273–4, 275–6, 279–80, 282–3 Shahnameh (Ferdowsi) 300–1 Shalamzar Palace, Iran 289 Shamhat 43–4 Shami, Nizam al-Din 209–10 Shang-Tu, China 188 Shatt al-Arab 148 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 149–50 Shih Chi (Sima Qian) 94–5 ships 195–6, 200, 205, 206, 239, 240, 241, 254–7 Sidonius, Saint 117 silk 94, 101, 103, 191, 192, 234 Silk Roads 100–1, 103–4, 190–1, 192, 196, 200, 221 silver articles see gold and silver articles Sima Chi 108–9 Sima Qian 80, 92, 94–6, 98, 101 Sinauli, India 57 Sitting Bull 280 Siyavash and family, Iran 1, 2 Sky Father 39, 52, 71, 75, 92, 156, 169 slavery 172, 199, 210, 220, 267–8 Sloane, Sir Hans 254 Smith, George 41–2 Smyrna, Turkey 220 social hierarchies 40–1, 59 social order 40, 59, 63, 82, 83, 84 Socrates 83, 84 Sogdians 101 ‘Song of the Acorn’ (Bakhtiari tribe) 295 Songlines, The (Chatwin) 4, 302 Spain 22, 124, 125, 212, 272 Spargapises 87 specialisation, rise of 40, 59 spinning 259–61 Spinning Jenny 261 stag ornament 85 statues see figurines and statues Steppe, Great Eurasian cultural memories 57, 67, 69, 114, 138 customs/beliefs/rituals 80e–1 Herodotus’ descriptions 93–4 horses, importance of 46–50, 80, 98 Indo-European languages 50–4 kurgans 52–3, 91, 92 migration from 56–8, 67, 81, 108–9, 109–10, 151–2, 230 people of see specific tribes trade 53–4, 92, 105 Stewart, John 11 stories see oral tradition Suleiman the Magnificent 232–3, 235, 237 Susa, Iran 76, 77 al-Tabari 132 Tahiti 256, 259 Talas, Kyrgyzstan 145 Tamburlaine the Great (Marlowe) 207 Tatar Tonga 159 taxes 112, 123, 125, 134, 162, 175–6, 190–1, 232 technology 8, 241–2, 259–61, 274–5, 276–7, 285, 290 Tehran, Iran 289, 290–1, 294 Temujin 153–6 see also Genghis Khan Tengri see Sky Father Tepe Hesar ram’s head and horns, Iran 11 Theodosius II 106–7 Thesiger, Wilfred 130 Thoreau, Henry David 269–71, 274–7 Thousand and One Nights, The 51, 142 Tigris river 15, 38–9, 139–40, 141, 148, 183 Timaeus (Plato) 129–30 Timbuktu, Mali 123 Timur (Tamburlaine) ambitions 208–9 ancestor of Mughals 237–8 background 206–7 Damascus, conquest of 214–19 death 220–1, 222 eye-witness accounts 209–10, 212–13, 216–18 Ibn Khaldun’s meetings with 216–18 Karsakpay inscription 209 luxury 210, 212–13 Samarkand 210–12, 220–1 titles 206 trade 211–12, 213–14 in Western memory 207–8 Tiresias, prophet 69–70 Todd, H.

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In 313 CE, the year the Xiongnu killed the Jin emperor, Constantine, the Roman emperor, newly converted to Christianity, declared that ‘it was proper that the Christians and all others should have liberty to follow that mode of religion which to each of them appeared best.’81 But freedom of conscience was challenged by the huge influx of what most in the Roman Empire considered barbarians. As has happened in our own time with refugees and migrants moving north and west into Europe and the United States, there was a conservative backlash. Freedom of conscience, like freedom of movement, began to be seen as a weakness, paganism was banned, pagan temples closed and their revenues appropriated by the state. But there were other more immediately damaging consequences. In 376 CE, 200,000 Goths were forced to cross the eastern Roman border at the River Danube. Goths had probably originally come from the Baltic region, but for the past couple of centuries they had been migrating around the Pontic–Caspian steppe, which might explain why some Roman writers confusingly refer to them as Scythians – to many of those writers, they were all barbarians.

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

If the underlying purpose of the refugee regime is a duty of rescue and a pathway to autonomy, then the collective challenge should be how we can effectively and efficiently provide those rights to all refugees, rather than a different (and inapt) set of rights for an arbitrarily privileged few. The right to seek asylum is not the same thing as an absolute right to freedom of movement. Although it has become popular among advocacy organizations and within the liberal filter bubble to see being a refugee as necessarily conferring an unimpeded right to travel, this is neither ethically nor legally credible. Aside from going down a general ‘open borders’ route, the only refugee-specific argument one could use to justify an exceptional, absolute right to migrate is that because refugees have generally had such a difficult time we might wish to just let them have a ‘free pass’ in terms of migration.

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Center-Right Parties and the Immigration Issue’, The Journal of Politics, 77/2 (2015): 352–67. Brian Barry, ‘The Quest for Consistency: A Sceptical View’, in B. Barry and R. Goodin (eds.), Free Movement: Ethical Issues in the Transnational Migration of People and of Money (Hemel Hempstead, 1992: Harvester Wheatsheaf). See Paul Collier, World Development (on AIDS) (2017). Peter Singer and Renata Singer, ‘The Ethics of Refugee Policy’, in Mark Gibney (ed.), Open Borders? Closed Societies? The Ethical and Political Issues (Westport, 1988: Greenwood Press). Ruben Atoyan et al., ‘Emigration and Its Economic Impact on Eastern Europe’, IMF Staff Discussion Note, July 2016, https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2016/sdn1607.pdf.

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The international community provided seemingly indefinite humanitarian assistance, which was inevitably inadequate. A funding model based on a short-term emergency response is being used to pay for permanent needs. Dadaab is illustrative of so-called protracted refugee situations, in which refugees have been in exile for at least five years, and are often denied access to the right to work or to freedom of movement. Today, 54 per cent of the world’s 21.3 million refugees are in such situations. UNHCR is responsible for refugees in thirty-two separate protracted refugee situations around the world, with an average length of exile of twenty-six years. Twenty-three of these have lasted more than two decades.

Brexit and Ireland: The Dangers, the Opportunities, and the Inside Story of the Irish Response by Tony Connelly

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, centre right, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, electricity market, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Jeremy Corbyn, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, land bank, LNG terminal, low skilled workers, non-tariff barriers, open borders, personalized medicine, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, tech worker, éminence grise

Ireland will effectively have to operate two parallel freedom-of-movement regimes – the European Union system and the Common Travel Area. One scenario posed by an Irish diplomat in the weeks immediately following the referendum was as follows: post-Brexit, Britain has ended free movement of people from the EU. A Bulgarian travels to Britain on a tourist visa, but then starts working on a fruit farm. The Bulgarian is caught by British immigration officials and then deported. What if that Bulgarian then flies to Dublin, asserting his EU free-movement rights? Will Ireland be entitled to deport him because he is on a British watch list?

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Chancellor Merkel made it clear in the room that there should be a specific line regarding the four freedoms – free movement of goods, services, capital and people – included in the final communiqué. If Britain wanted access to the single market, they would have to accept all four freedoms – including free movement of EU workers, a clear red line for Brexiteers. ‘Nobody stood up and said, “No, we don’t support the four freedoms,” ’ says one senior Irish official. According to one source, later appointed as one of the EU’s senior negotiators, there was no wobbling on the Irish side at the summit. ‘The freedom of movement line was agreed by Kenny, and repeated in his press conference afterwards.

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Around the time of Kenny’s CBI speech, Cameron wrote to his EU counterparts about the possibility of reducing EU migration to the UK. There was immediate resistance, not just from the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, but also from Cameron’s own officials, who knew that blocking EU citizens from living and working in the UK breached the EU’s fundamental rules on freedom of movement. ‘Cameron didn’t go as far in his demands on migration as he would have wished,’ recalls a senior Irish diplomat closely involved in the negotiations. ‘It didn’t help him later on.’ As 2015 drew to a close, EU officials were assessing which member states were more sympathetic to London’s position, even drawing up a league table of British-friendly member states in order to assess how the negotiations might go.

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

In absolute terms, the non-European origin population more than doubled in size, from 3 to 8 million.40 This was partly due to higher rates of natural increase among the British minorities – South Asians more so than Afro-Caribbeans – but also because in the 2000s non-European immigration matched or exceeded European inflows. In 2016, for instance, net migration from the EU was running at 189,000 compared to 196,000 from outside Europe. Despite criticism of the EU’s freedom-of-movement provisions, which gave East Europeans the right to live and work in Britain, the quieter increase in non-Europeans through immigration and natural increase arguably had a larger impact on majority perceptions. A 2017 YouGov–LSE (London School of Economics) survey of 3,600 people I was involved in showed that, despite Brexit, the average Briton was prepared to accept an annual inflow of 76,000 from the EU but just 61,000 from Asia, Africa and the Middle East.41 Other surveys found a near-majority of Britons in favour of banning immigration from Muslim countries.42 THE RISE OF THE BNP Politically, the first beneficiary of rising disquiet over immigration was the British National Party (BNP).

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But Cameron couldn’t reduce the number of legal immigrants: in late 2015, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) announced net migration had reached a record 336,000. One of the Prime Minister’s manifesto promises was to renegotiate the terms of Britain’s membership of the EU to gain better control of immigration. He hoped to persuade Brussels to offer Britain concessions on freedom of movement, one of the ‘four freedoms’ Brussels viewed as fundamental to EU membership. He didn’t succeed. In February, Cameron returned from Brussels having secured a package of changes that included Britain gaining an opt-out of the symbolic ‘ever closer union’ clause and winning a qualified right to restrict benefits to new EU immigrants for a four-year period.

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Refugee inflows began to rise in the 1980s, first from the wars in the former Yugoslavia, then from conflict hotspots like Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia. In 2004, the European Union expanded to include eight relatively poor Eastern European countries, mainly Central European and Baltic states. In 2007, two more, Romania and Bulgaria, joined. With freedom of movement inside the EU, this resulted in an increase in the number of residents from the ten accession countries residing in Western Europe: from 1 million in 1997 to nearly 5 million by 2009.29 Residents were concentrated in the more prosperous countries, with over a million moving to Britain alone.

The European Union by John Pinder, Simon Usherwood

Berlin Wall, BRICs, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, Doha Development Round, eurozone crisis, failed state, illegal immigration, labour market flexibility, mass immigration, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, non-tariff barriers, open borders, price stability, trade liberalization, zero-sum game

While conditions in the Union are, in a general sense, notably free, secure, and just when compared with almost all other parts of the world, the words are used in the treaty in a more specific sense: freedom refers to free movement across internal borders; security, to protection against cross-border crime; and justice, mainly to judicial cooperation in civil as well as criminal matters. It still remains to be seen whether it was wise to appropriate words that have such wide and noble significance for such particular ends. The answer may depend on how far and how soon they are achieved. As regards freedom of movement, almost all the Schengen acquis has already been transferred into the Union. Thus the right of people to move freely throughout Schengenland is guaranteed by the institutions, though some member states have had to restore border checks temporarily in order to deal with influxes from other member states of non-EU nationals with false visas.

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Thus the right of people to move freely throughout Schengenland is guaranteed by the institutions, though some member states have had to restore border checks temporarily in order to deal with influxes from other member states of non-EU nationals with false visas. The external border controls are not yet satisfactory. Nor is the common policy on immigration and asylum complete. Nor will there be freedom of movement without border checks throughout the Union while Britain, Denmark, and Ireland retain their controls. Determined to keep its border controls, Britain opted out of the Amsterdam Treaty’s provisions on freedom of movement; and Ireland, enjoying open frontiers with the UK, had to do the same. But both have the right to opt into specific measures, provided the other governments agree unanimously in each case.

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The role of the European Parliament was enhanced through a ‘co-decision’ procedure that required its approval as well as that of the Council for laws in a number of fields; and it secured the right to approve—or not—the appointment of each new Commission. Two new ‘pillars’ were set up alongside the Community: one for a ‘common foreign and security policy’; the other, relating to freedom of movement and internal security, for what was called ‘cooperation in justice and home affairs’—renamed in the Amsterdam Treaty as ‘police and judicial cooperation in criminal matters’. The basis for both was intergovernmental, though they were related to the Community institutions. The whole unwieldy structure was named the European Union, with the first, central, Community pillar as well as the other two.

Behind the Berlin Wall: East Germany and the Frontiers of Power by Patrick Major

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, centre right, disinformation, Easter island, falling living standards, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, open borders, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-materialism, Prenzlauer Berg, refrigerator car, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Sinatra Doctrine

In monopolistic systems, however, ‘management’—in this case the communist state—would have less interest in recuperation, especially where a limited outlet existed. We might reasonably ask whether, with the open border, East German communists were indeed happy to see the back of troublemakers. The availability of West Germany as a dumping ground may have encouraged the Stalinist excesses of the 1950s. Equally plausibly, the open frontier before 1961 may have acted as a safety valve for popular discontent and a brake on authoritarianism. This is an important ambiguity and one to which I shall return, although there is no clear answer to this paradox. Freedom of movement has, nevertheless, generally been seen to increase the room for manoeuvre of those left behind and to encourage reform.

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From 1919 Soviet travel abroad required police permission, and during the 1920s a stringent border regime operated under secret police control.¹² Border violators faced up to three years’ imprisonment, or treason charges if heading for capitalist states. In 1932 the USSR even introduced an internal passport system. It was little surprise, therefore, when in 1948 Russia voted against freedom of movement as an automatic human right under the United Nations’ convention.¹³ Nor was the United States immune from temptations to control citizens’ movements, albeit more selectively, for instance in the Internal Security Act of 1950. But it was East Germany that attacked freedom of movement most systematically. The 1963 UN special report on emigration singled out the ‘Chinese wall’ in Berlin as the worst offender in modern-day history: ‘whereas Governments once erected walls to keep foreigners from entering a country, today walls are built—both figuratively and literally—to keep nationals hemmed in’.¹⁴ Indeed, the GDR’s 1968 constitution abolished Article 10’s previous right of emigration, guaranteeing freedom of travel only ‘within the state territory’.¹⁵ The Berlin Wall had become the wall of walls, a reductio ad absurdam of the modern state’s obsessive desire to regulate its interior.

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See also Patrick Wright, Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 34–50. ⁶ Isabel Kershner, Barrier: The Seam of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Ray Dolphin, The West Bank Wall: Unmaking Palestine (London: Pluto, 2006). ⁷ Plato, The Laws, trans. Trevor J. Saunders (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 500–1. ⁸ Alan Dowty, Closed Borders: The Contemporary Assault on Freedom of Movement (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987), 9. Introduction 3 for gatekeepers. The dying Roman Empire tried to tackle it by tying peasants to the land by serfdom. Later, in the age of mercantilism and absolutism, as the New World threatened to drain the Old, states further regulated subjects’ movements, legislating against the emigration of skilled artisans.

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

bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Corn Laws, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Fellow of the Royal Society, fixed income, garden city movement, George Akerlof, housing crisis, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, mass immigration, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, old-boy network, open borders, payday loans, Peace of Westphalia, sceptred isle, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, web of trust

The philosopher Leszek Kołakowski once half humorously summarized the differences among legal cultures as follows: in England everything is permitted unless it is forbidden; in Germany everything is forbidden unless it is permitted; in France everything is permitted, even if it is forbidden; and in Russia everything is forbidden, even if it is permitted.9 The differences here are real, and part of what has made membership of the European Union so difficult for us. Precisely because law is the property of the citizen and not of the state, we interpret law strictly and apply it to the letter. Freedom of movement, therefore, really means freedom of movement. In France, Belgium and Germany freedom of movement is nominally permitted under the treaties; but everything is done to avoid the law, by imposing conditions on employment and residence designed to protect the local labour market from incoming competition. This last point touches on a vital distinction, between states that do and those that don’t issue identity cards to their citizens.

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It is this that added zest to the Brexit vote which, while largely a protest against undemocratic forms of government, was also in part a protest against the provisions in the treaties that have radically changed the aspect of many of our towns and cities – the clauses permitting freedom of movement of all people within the European Union. I commented in Chapter Two on the effect of the ‘freedom of movement’ provisions, as creatively interpreted by the European Court of Justice following the Maastricht Treaty. These provisions have inevitably resulted in British people in working-class communities competing with foreigners for housing, jobs and healthcare, and sending their children to schools where English is the second language.

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Education, imagination and skills will endow people with this ‘anywhere’ character, whereas those who lack such advantages will be more tenacious of the habits that they know. In Britain, where a half of adolescents attend university, and university generally involves a move away from home, the young increasingly acquire an ‘anywhere’ identity: hence their shift to the left in recent elections. The European Union, with its commitment to freedom of movement and its hostility to the ‘nationalist’ sentiments of ordinary people, is likewise an ‘anywhere’ project, which confers benefits on the mobile and costs on the settled communities that must make room for them. But both kinds of person can in the course of time develop attachments. Oikophilia is the common property of all who wish to settle down, and the anywheres will, in time, give in to it.

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

The Migration of Arguments and Votes A decade ago, the Hungarian philosopher and former dissident Gaspar Miklos Tamas observed that the Enlightenment, in which the idea of the European Union is intellectually rooted, demands universal citizenship.12 But universal citizenship requires one of two things to happen: people either enjoy absolute freedom of movement in search of jobs and higher standards of living or the huge economic and political disparities among countries will need to disappear, allowing people to enjoy their universal rights equally in every place. But neither of these is going to happen soon, if ever. (In 2014, The Economist estimated on the basis of IMF data that emerging economies might have to wait for three centuries in order to catch up to living standards in the West.)

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(In 2014, The Economist estimated on the basis of IMF data that emerging economies might have to wait for three centuries in order to catch up to living standards in the West.) The world today is populated by many failed or failing states in which nobody wants to live and work; moreover, Europe has neither the capacity nor the willingness to allow open borders. The migration crisis confronts liberalism with a contradiction that is central to its philosophy. How can our universal rights be reconciled with the fact that we exercise them as citizens of unequally free and prosperous societies? The factor that best explains an individual’s lifetime income is neither one’s education nor the education of one’s parents but one’s place of birth.

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Governments and publics alike argue that their moral responsibility can’t be divorced from their capacity to help and from the risks that newcomers present to their societies. The perverse effect of this turn of the argument is that Europeans have started to question what they formerly embraced. Open borders are no longer a sign of freedom but are now a symbol of insecurity. As Kelly Grennhill observed, Europeans have been shocked to learn that since 1951 when the Refugee Convention came into force, there have been at least 75 attempts globally by state and non-state actors to use displaced people as political weapons.

Brexit Unfolded: How No One Got What They Want (And Why They Were Never Going To) by Chris Grey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, game design, global pandemic, imperial preference, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, lockdown, non-tariff barriers, open borders, post-truth, reserve currency, Robert Mercer

The EU was depicted as a neo-liberal agent of globalisation which cared nothing for the nation state but was solely concerned with satisfying the interests of the business elite, including for the supposedly cheap labour that freedom of movement of people supplied. However, the EU was also derided as a ‘protectionist racket’, inhibiting free trade and preventing Britain from being globally competitive. This has inflected the Brexit process in several ways. As regards immigration, it partly explains the shift away from soft Brexit, since this would have entailed freedom of movement of people within the single market, including the UK, and hence would not fulfil the ‘nativist’ strand. At the same time, it has led to a far greater emphasis on the globalist agenda of independent trade deals (which entail not being in a customs union with the EU) than was the case during the referendum.

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Thus, immediately, it conflicts with the ideas of (some) Brexiters about sovereignty, which they take to mean complete national control over the creation and enforcement of regulations and laws (though, arguably, such a definition of sovereignty also conflicts with any form of trade agreement). The single market’s set of four freedoms of movement is not a matter of political ideology or even, as some suggest, a dogmatic ‘theology’, but an economic necessity for creating such a market. For, as regards the most contentious of them in the Brexit context, a fully functioning market cannot operate without freedom of movement of people. That would create segmented labour markets, so would be like trying to have a national British single market whilst enforcing restrictions on people’s movement between counties like Yorkshire and Lancashire.

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And even without those flaws, Brexit welded together two broad but incompatible ideas. One was nationalist, or nativist, and was most obvious in seeing Brexit as a way, via ending freedom of movement of people, of reducing immigration. The other was globalist, and was most obvious in seeing Brexit as a way of developing an independent and global free trade policy. These were incompatible not least because ending freedom of movement of people meant leaving the single market which, in turn, meant erecting new barriers to free trade between the UK and its largest market. Moreover, as noted in Chapter One, the bigger problem was that both nationalism and globalism contained a failure to understand the regionalisation of economics and the multipolar nature of international relations.

The New Snobbery by David Skelton

assortative mating, banking crisis, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, centre right, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, critical race theory, David Brooks, defund the police, deindustrialization, Etonian, Extinction Rebellion, financial deregulation, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, knowledge economy, lockdown, low skilled workers, market fundamentalism, meritocracy, microaggression, new economy, Northern Rock, open borders, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, rising living standards, shareholder value, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, TED Talk, TikTok, wealth creators, women in the workforce

The political class continues to be dominated by high-status, professional graduates with the views and values generally representative of that group. Some combination of freedom of movement, freedom of capital, unfettered free trade and various elements of economic and social liberalism are common currency amongst them. Often vapid TED Talks are venerated, and counterculture imagery is used to obscure the fact that priority is given to policies that benefit the professional class, such as open borders and the abolition of tuition fees, rather than policies that would benefit the wider population, such as building dignity at work or tackling the housing crisis.

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Perhaps its clearest moment of class hatred came when it transformed Skegness’s ‘Jolly Fisherman’ symbol into a vulgar caricature, flashing the V-sign and wearing a jumper that merely read ‘Go Away’. According to the magazine, this caricature was ‘so Brexit’.11 For great chunks of the Remain campaign, the ability for middle-class professionals to freely travel was more important than the impact of unlimited freedom of movement on the wages of those at the bottom. This emphasised how much of the Remain campaign was aimed squarely at the interests of middle-class professionals. The Erasmus university exchange scheme (which had only 14 per cent of participants from below average income backgrounds) was portrayed as a major issue, as were second homes on the continent.

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A 2018 report into the lack of socio-economic diversity in culture was stark and honest when it argued that ‘cultural workers have attitudes, values and tastes that are very different from the rest of the population’.26 People who work in culture are highly likely to be middle class, to live, work and socialise amongst the metropolitan ‘creative class’ and to have liberal political views. They are extremely likely to have voted Remain and to favour an open borders approach to immigration. The creative class represent what David Brooks memorably described as the ‘bobos’ – bourgeois bohemians – and they generally have views and values to match. Analysis of the 2020 British Social Attitudes Survey found that on social issues, people who work in culture are the most liberal of all professionals; water and electricity workers were the least liberal.

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

Globalization is incompatible with social democracy in Europe or with New Deal liberalism in the United States.”33 The national economy should serve the national working-class majority, and the global economy should serve national economies. Every democratic nation-state should tailor both its immigration policy and its trade policy to promote the interests of the members of its working-class majority, native-born and foreign-born alike. In the era that succeeds neoliberalism, the “four freedoms” of neoliberalism—freedom of movement for people, goods, services, and capital—should be replaced by the “four regulations.” Epilogue TECHNOCRATIC NEOLIBERALISM HAS BEEN the governing philosophy of the Western democracies since the late twentieth century. But it is not the natural or inevitable ideology of the managerial elite.

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Because “modern America is a welfare state” and “low-skill immigrants don’t pay enough taxes to cover the cost of the benefits they receive,” Krugman observes that the “political threat that low-skill immigration poses to the welfare state is more serious” than its other consequences.17 The new open-borders left might reply that unlimited immigration would not be a problem if all workers in a country were unionized, including immigrants who joined unions on arrival. In addition, the open-borders left could speculate that voters who were not racist or otherwise bigoted against particular groups of immigrants for noneconomic reasons would not begrudge the use of the welfare system by wave after wave of poor people from other nations. Perhaps the open-borders left is correct. But shouldn’t such a radical proposition be tested first in one or two countries, before other democratic nations take a chance on it?

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Let a small democratic nation-state known for the antiracist attitudes of its population, its high levels of unionization and its generous welfare state adopt an open borders policy, allowing anyone on the planet to move there and immediately use welfare benefits on the same terms as citizens, without having previously paid into the system through taxes and with no waiting period for eligibility. After a generation or two, the results of the experiment of a highly unionized welfare state with an open borders immigration policy can be examined—assuming, of course, that the experiment does not quickly trigger an anti-immigration revolt that brings demagogic populists to power and the experiment in open-borders leftism to a swift and unpleasant stop

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

Those like the Hungarian government who object to this Euro-imposition can then be condemned as racists and neo-fascists. Once upon a time, the aim of liberal supporters of more open borders was to defend the human aspiration for freedom of movement and social mobility. By contrast in EU circles today borders are seen as problems, not because they control the movement of people but because they are under the control of a nation state. Juncker and Co don’t celebrate migration because of any liberal conception of open borders being good for people. They do so because they believe national sovereignty is a bad thing that allows a people too much say in what happens in their nation.

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That 1644 clash between the forces of the King and Parliament was a decisive battle in the English revolution. We might say that, regardless of how anybody voted in the EU referendum, which side you take now in the battle over the future of democracy is a defining political issue of our time. Open borders, closed minds One issue that somehow still sustains the nonsensical notion of the EU as a progressive, open-minded body is that of migration. The notion that being pro-EU meant being for open borders, while voting Leave meant hating refugees, was one of the main myths peddled by liberal Remainers during and after the UK referendum. This idea was underlined shortly after the Brexit vote, when EC president Jean-Claude Juncker declared that ‘borders are the worst invention ever made by politicians’ and called on Europe to support migrants.

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The only thing running wild here was not a racist mob but the dark imaginations of political elitists. The belief that voting to Remain was an anti-racist decision while Leavers must have been anti-immigrant reveals more about the one-eyed view of the anti-Brexit lobby. What do they imagine is so staunchly pro-migrant about the EU? If the European Union is such an open-borders institution as its officials insist, why are so many migrants barred from entering it drowning in the Mediterranean Sea? Immigration was an important factor for many Leave voters, though hardly the obsession it has been made out to be; a post-referendum ComRes poll found that 34 per cent said immigration was their main concern, with 53 per cent instead prioritising the ‘ability of Britain to make its own laws’.45 Most of those concerned about immigration, however, did not see the issue in the crudely racist, send-’em-back style of the 1970s.

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

Ratna Omidvar, an independent Canadian senator, thinks one of the reasons why Canada has been so successful in immigration, both in outcomes and public acceptance, is because of a willingness to try out new policy ideas. As well as experimenting, governments should emulate what works well in other countries. Freedom of movement works well within the EU, as well as between Australia and New Zealand. Sweden’s flexible and non-discriminatory work-visa system is a model for countries that are not ready to embrace freedom of movement. Like Canada, other governments ought to have an independent immigration ministry with its own budget, instead of including it in a home affairs or interior ministry charged primarily with domestic security.

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But with Brexit, the citizens of those countries will lose their right to move freely to the UK. Many may then go elsewhere. ‘My thinking was as simple as, “Where in Europe can I go that has the biggest potential for me?”’ explains Joshua Wohle, the Dutch co-founder of SuperAwesome, a company that makes the internet safer for children. ‘At the time, this was London, because of freedom of movement. Without that, London wouldn’t have even been part of my decision matrix and I would probably have ended up in Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin or Madrid.’13 Across the economy as a whole, migrants are much more likely to start a business than locals. Some 12.5 percent of migrants were starting a business or running a young firm in 2017, compared to 8.2 percent of UK-born lifelong residents.14 Non-whites were nearly twice as likely – 14.5 percent – to be starting a business as whites: 7.9 percent.15 Contrary to the belief that migrants tend to become entrepreneurs out of necessity – because they can’t find a suitable job – almost all say they do so to seize opportunities that they spy.

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International Monetary Fund (IMF), ‘World Economic Outlook database’, October 2019. 7 McKinsey Global Institute, ‘Global migration’s impact and opportunity’, November 2016. https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/employment-and-growth/global-migrations-impact-and-opportunity 8 Bryan Caplan, ‘Open Borders Are a Trillion-Dollar Idea’, Foreign Policy, 1 November 2019. https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/01/immigration-wall-open-borders-trillion-dollar-idea/ 9 Michael Clemens, ‘Measuring the Spatial Misallocation of Labor: The Returns to India-Gulf Guest Work in a Natural Experiment’, Center for Global Development Working Paper 501, January 2019. https://www.cgdev.org/publication/measuring-spatial-misallocation-labor-returns-india-gulf-guest-work-natural-experiment 10 John Gibson, David McKenzie, Halahingao Rohorua and Steven Stillman, ‘International migration’s long-term impact: Evidence from a lottery’, VoxDev, 5 February 2018. https://voxdev.org/topic/labour-markets-migration/international-migrations-long-term-impact-evidence-lottery 11 Michael Clemens, ‘Why Do Programmers Earn More in Houston Than Hyderabad?

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

We may very well ask a similar question on a global scale in relation to human migration: should the privileges and economic advantages of the industrialized nations be available only by accident of birth? It may be argued further that the wealth of the Western world has been achieved through continuing exploitation of the resources of developing countries. Should there be open borders and freedom of movement on a global scale in the twenty-first century or will the rich nations become fortresses? The latter is not inconceivable: some already advocate building a new Berlin type wall on the Southwestern border of the United States. Would liberalizing immigration controls create a global redistribution of wealth?

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Because of the tendency for economic migrants from Zimbabwe to temporarily and repeatedly cross the long border with Botswana to engage in petty trade or make purchases, many economic migrants resist classification as refugees since this would likely mean limitations on the freedom of movement. The difference in treatment between Burundian refugees in Tanzania fleeing violence or political persecution at home and a properly documented migrant with a visa, passport, or residency permit is respect for the displaced person’s freedom of movement. Refugees are obligated to live in refugee camps in which their freedom of movement is heavily restricted, while documented migrants can move about the country freely for the duration of their visa (Joint Commission for Refugees of the Burundi and Tanzania Episcopal Conference, 2008: 55). 433 Current Controversies in African Refugee Policy Refugee flows are inevitably tied to illicit trade in arms and other contraband, as well as to the spread of disease.

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Another case of deportation order by the Court happened when the Court sentenced an Afghan national to imprisonment for the period he had spent in jail after he had been arrested by the Border Security 118 Nations with Large Immigrant Populations Force for entering the country without any valid document notwithstanding his plea that he had entered the country to save his life, and then ordered his deportation back to Afghanistan (unreported, State v Akhtar Muhammad, AF/ 6433, CJM, Amritsar, Punjab, 1997). Could the refugees have freedom of movement? A Sri Lankan who had been granted refugee status and was staying in Chennai was arrested in Delhi for being unable to produce any valid travel document, and detained under relevant provisions of the FA. The Court observed that refugee status did not entitle a person to move about freely, held him guilty, and sentenced him to 6 months of rigorous imprisonment (Unreported, State v Hudson Vilvaraj, FIR No 583/97, MM, Delhi, 1998).

Three Years in Hell: The Brexit Chronicles by Fintan O'Toole

airport security, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, blockchain, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, deindustrialization, deliberate practice, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Downton Abbey, Etonian, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, full employment, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, l'esprit de l'escalier, labour mobility, late capitalism, open borders, rewilding, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, technoutopianism, zero-sum game

If we are out of the European Union with tariffs on exporting goods into the EU, there’d have to be something to recognise that, between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. And if you pulled out of the EU and came out of free movement, then how could you have a situation where there was an open border with a country that was in the EU and has access to free movement?’ So she knew full well that a Brexit that involved leaving the customs union would create a hard border. And then, as prime minister, she insisted on the opposite: that a hard Brexit was perfectly compatible with no return of a hard border.

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For there can be no illusion that if only May can pull off the near-impossible trick of getting a withdrawal deal through parliament in January, all the rest of the way will be clear. Consider the issue that, for May herself, is the single defining purpose of Brexit: control of immigration. She believes – and Jeremy Corbyn is in uncomfortable agreement with her on this – that ending freedom of movement is what Leave voters most desire and that if it is delivered, all the pain of Brexit will be justified. So where is the British government’s post-Brexit immigration policy? On 17 October 2017, the then home secretary, Amber Rudd, told the home affairs committee at Westminster: ‘We have our White Paper coming out on immigration by the end of the year [i.e. 2017].’

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It was under May’s Home Office regime that the disastrous doctrine of reducing annual net migration to the ‘tens of thousands’ was promulgated. It should not be forgotten that this unattainable goal was a big factor in Brexit – it created a false narrative that immigration could be slashed and the only reason it was rising was because of freedom of movement in the EU. It also created the sense among voters that everything was out of control. May did not actually support Brexit but in this regard she did much to create the conditions for it. Just as importantly, when she became prime minister she prioritised immigration over everything else. It was the deepest crimson of all her red lines and it shaped the withdrawal agreement more than any other factor.

The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961-1989 by Frederick Taylor

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, cuban missile crisis, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, German hyperinflation, Kickstarter, land reform, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, oil shock, open borders, plutocrats, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, the market place, young professional, éminence grise

Familiar streets, parks, even individual buildings, were turned into perilous human traps, in which the squirming, helpless captives were often the westerners’ own friends and relatives. West Berliners were forced to stand by and watch—often literally—as their fellow citizens in the East, seeking to exercise a freedom of movement that most of us take for granted, risked their safety, their liberty, and in some cases their lives, to cross the Wall in search of economic and political rights that were not available to them on their own side. Some of those imprisoned by the Wall managed to escape. Many died in the attempt.

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For three years the Allied Control Commission, based there, was supposed to have been the ruling body for the whole country, pending a peace treaty with a reunited Germany. The ACC was now a dead letter. And within a year there would be two German states. Even now, with that decisive development still to come and relative freedom of movement remaining between Eastern and Western sectors, there was no longer any point in pretending that Berlin was still the capital of Germany. It wasn’t even one city any more, though it wasn’t yet clearly two. BLOOD 5 ‘DISSOLVE THE PEOPLE AND ELECT ANOTHER’ FEW DRAWN-OUT HISTORICAL events or processes came to their ends on the conveniently precise dates cited in the history books.

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In the past two or three years, the number of people in Eastern Germany who decided to leave everything behind and head westward had increased dramatically. In 1947, around 165,000 people had been detained for ‘illegal’ crossing of the zone border in Thuringia alone, though many of these did not intend to leave, but were merely exercising a casual freedom of movement that before 1945 was taken for granted.10 Three years later, permanent resettlement had become the aim of many ‘illegal’ border-crossers. In 1950, 197,788 headed for the West. The following year saw a slight drop to 165,648. The number of those who chose exile in 1952, including those who left after the border was fortified, increased again to 182,393.

Exodus: How Migration Is Changing Our World by Paul Collier

Ayatollah Khomeini, Boris Johnson, charter city, classic study, Edward Glaeser, experimental economics, first-past-the-post, full employment, game design, George Akerlof, global village, guest worker program, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, language acquisition, mass immigration, mirror neurons, moral hazard, open borders, radical decentralization, risk/return, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, white flight, zero-sum game

Yet the obligation to help the poor cannot imply a generalized obligation to permit free movement of people across borders. Indeed, the people who believe that poor people should be free to move to rich countries would likely be the first to oppose the right of rich people to move to poor countries: that has uncomfortable echoes of colonialism. Arguing that because people are poor they have a right of migration confuses two issues that are better kept distinct: the obligation of the rich to help the poor, and the rights of freedom of movement between countries. We don’t need to assert the latter to endorse the former.

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The contribution of patriotism and a sense of common identity cannot be quantified, but is surely there. While the responsibility to the poor and fear of nationalism may both have contributed to confusion over whether societies should have the right to restrict immigration, by far the most potent spillover to support for freedom of movement between countries as a natural right comes from opposition to racism. Given the histories of racism in both Europe and America it is both unsurprising and fully warranted that opposition to racism is so impassioned. Most migrants from poor countries are racially distinct from the indigenous populations of rich host countries, and so opposition to immigration skates precariously close to racism.

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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. A related argument is that all indigenous populations are themselves mongrels, the result of previous waves of immigration. The extent to which this is the case varies considerably between societies. It is most obviously the case in the countries of nineteenth-century immigration: North America and Australasia.

Reaching for Utopia: Making Sense of an Age of Upheaval by Jason Cowley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, coherent worldview, Corn Laws, corporate governance, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, illegal immigration, Jeremy Corbyn, liberal world order, Neil Kinnock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, open borders, open immigration, plutocrats, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Right to Buy, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, technological determinism, University of East Anglia

Is the SNP a party of nativists? ‘To some extent. They are also very broad. And like all national movements, become very contradictory.’ Even after the vote for Brexit, Corbyn supports freedom of movement within the EU and strongly favours immigration. He is a cultural liberal but an economic protectionist. You might say that he is left-liberal on culture and left-liberal on the economy. He favours open borders, at least within Europe, but less open and much more tightly regulated markets. I asked him about the failures more generally of liberalism and of the post-liberal turn, but he didn’t quite understand what I meant.

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Her aides say that she is anything but indecisive, but she is deliberative: from the beginning, she understood that the referendum result was a mandate not merely to leave the EU but to reshape the economy and society. And she knew what she wanted from Brexit and that it would require Britain leaving the single market and ending freedom of movement. May has a nuanced sense of the British national interest and accepts that she can’t simply have a narrow, trade-based, mercantilist approach to foreign policy. Values also matter, as her campaign against modern slavery demonstrated. In Philadelphia, she appealed directly to the better instincts of the Republican Party because, although she won’t say so, she understands how erratic and unpredictable the Trump White House has become as it turns towards authoritarianism.

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Farage sensed an opportunity to reopen the debate with the enlargement of the EU in 2004, when ten new countries joined, eight of which had been part of the former communist Eastern Bloc. Of the existing member states in 2004, only the United Kingdom, Sweden and Ireland had not imposed ‘transitional controls’ restricting the freedom of movement of migrants from the new accession states, a fateful decision as it turned out. The New Labour government forecast that only thirteen thousand migrants would arrive from Poland and other eastern European countries; in the event, more than a million came to live and work in Britain as annual net migration, year after year, rose inexorably.

Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy by Philippe van Parijs, Yannick Vanderborght

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, declining real wages, degrowth, diversified portfolio, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income per capita, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, open borders, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, price mechanism, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, selection bias, sharing economy, sovereign wealth fund, systematic bias, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor

According to this ruling, each member state must “have the possibility of refusing to grant social benefits to ecoÂ�nomÂ�ically inactive Union citizens who exercise their right to freedom of movement solely in order to obtain another Member State’s social assistance although they do not have sufficient resources to claim a right of residence” (Court of Justice of the EuÂ�roÂ�pean Union, press release 146/14). If the condition “solely in order to” is presumed not to be met whenever ecoÂ� nomÂ�ically inactive Union citizens are exercising their right to freedom of movement by Â�returning to the member state of which they are citizens, this ruling can be interpreted as allowing member states to grant more social rights to some of their own citizens than to similarly situated citizens of other member states. 317 NO TES TO PAGES 223–227 22.

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The first reason has to do with the very survival of the so-Â�called EuÂ�roÂ�pean social model. A transfer Â�union is needed to address the challenge of selective immigration and emigration in a region of the world in which it is particu230 Vi able i n the G lo bal Era? M ulti -L evel Basi c Income larly intense, owing to the fourfold freedom of movement—of capital, goods, serÂ�vices, and Â�people—Â�enshrined in the EuÂ�roÂ�pean Treaties. Â�Under the pressure of this intra-Â�European mobility, EuÂ�roÂ�pean member states are increasingly forced to lift their competitiveness above all other concerns and are therefore less and less able to orÂ�gaÂ�nize at the national level the genuine reÂ�distribution required by social justice.

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Such an analy�sis neglects the negative externalities created both in the communities of origin, thereby deprived of some of their more enterprising members, and in the communities of destination, which have to cope with the educational and cultural integration of mi�grant families. But �whether or not the current level of migration is deemed optimal from the standpoint of economic efficiency, it puts strong po�liti�cal pressure on the freedom of movement, as witnessed not only by the Brexit vote but also by converging opinion surveys in other countries. The freedom-�unfriendly response now advocated by many consists of restoring or rethickening the internal borders of the Eu�ro�pean Union. But �there is also a freedom-�friendly response, which consists of enabling, say, Romanian or Bulgarian families to remain more easily close to their roots thanks to an EU-�wide transfer system.

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

But devaluations were now impossible and tariffs forbidden. As a result, the dominant center-left or center-right parties found themselves hamstrung in the face of economic downturns and open to challenge from the populist right and left. In its founding, the EU also adopted a principle of freedom of movement for people and businesses (“freedom of establishment”) among its member nations. That reflected a desire to establish a common identity among the nations that had been at war with each other. But it also reflected business priorities. As the EU expanded eastward, European businesses in the West liked the idea of being able to import lower-wage labor from the East for restaurants, hotels, and construction without having to file papers.

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Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich titles a column, “Donald Trump: American Fascist.” “Yes, Donald Trump is a fascist,” Jamil Smith declares in The New Republic. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble described the National Front as “not a right-wing party but . . . a fascist, extremist party.” Dutch philosopher Rob Rieman accused Geert Wilders’s Freedom Party of being a “fascist movement.” The British Spectator described Beppe Grillo as “Italy’s New Mussolini.” Examples abound. The term “fascism” is like the term “populism.” It is hard to pick out a collection of characteristics that exclusively define a fascist movement or party. The Nazi Party scapegoated an out group—the Jews.

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Labor unions grumbled at the freedom of establishment, while the rightwing populists took aim at the policy of open borders, which had the effect of undermining member countries’ efforts to control immigration and asylum-seeking. Open borders meant, for instance, that legal or illegal immigrants or asylum seekers from North Africa could migrate from France or Italy to the Netherlands or Denmark. During the debate in Denmark in 1998 over the ratification of the Treaty of Amsterdam, which affirmed the EU’s acceptance of open borders, the “no” vote ran a campaign headlined, “Welcome to 40 million Poles.” But the EU’s administration was insulated from these protests.

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 demanding contest with Soviet communism guided how Americans thought about the core principles underlying their basic institutions. For American liberalism was, or appeared to be, Soviet totalitarianism turned inside out. Freedom of speech and the press as well as freedom of conscience were idealized precisely because they were cruelly repressed under Moscow’s sway. In the same spirit, Americans underscored the freedom of movement, the right to form private associations, the right to a fair trial, and the right to vote in competitive elections where incumbents might be toppled from power. Likewise emphasized was the latitude to accumulate private wealth, on the assumption that a decentralized and unplanned economy alone could provide the basis of both prosperity and political freedom.

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We examine how an anti-Western counter-elite, with predominantly provincial origins, began to emerge in the region and to attract considerable popular support, especially outside the globally networked metropolitan centres, by monopolizing the symbols of national identity that had been neglected or devalued in the process of ‘harmonization’ with the European Union’s post-national standards and regulations. And we aim to show how the process of depopulation in Central and Eastern Europe that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall33 helped populist counter-elites capture their public’s imagination by denouncing the universalism of human rights and open-border liberalism as expressions of the West’s lofty indifference to their countries’ national traditions and heritage.34 We do not contend that the Central European populists are blameless victims of the West, or that resisting what they experienced as an Imitation Imperative is their sole agenda, or that their illiberalism was the only possible response to 2008 and other crises in the West.

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Every day, the country was losing 164 people: over a thousand a week, over 50,000 a year.’33 More Central and East Europeans left their countries for Western Europe as a result of the 2008–9 financial crises than all the refugees that came there as the result of the war in Syria. In a world of open borders where European cultures are in constant dialogue and where the new media environment permits citizens to live abroad without losing touch with events taking place at home, the threat that Central and East Europeans confront is similar to the one that the GDR faced before the Berlin Wall was erected.

Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism by Pippa Norris, Ronald Inglehart

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cass Sunstein, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, declining real wages, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, liberal world order, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, machine readable, mass immigration, meta-analysis, obamacare, open borders, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, post-industrial society, post-materialism, precariat, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Bannon, War on Poverty, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Mainstream parties in this group, include many Christian Dem­ ocrat, Social Democrat, Conservative, Liberal, and Green Parties, sharing a liberal consensus concerning the value of cooperation and engagement in international affairs, generally supporting multilateral institutions of global governance, cooperation, development assistance, and humanitarian engagement, and the benefits of open borders for the free movement of capital, trade, goods, and labor. On the cultural dimension, Libertarian-­ Pluralist parties endorse socially liberal policy positions, reflecting the expansion of personal freedoms and individual rights on moral issues, tolerance of pluralistic diversity, supported by liberal democratic institutions and norms of governance.

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Responding to Cultural Anxieties But insofar as the authoritarian reaction is motivated by a cultural backlash against growing ethnic diversity in multicultural Western societies, however, it requires another set of policy responses responding to issues such as Islamophobia, Euroscepticism, xenophobia, racial resentment, and fears from terrorist incidents. These are complex issues and the most obvious political response concerns immigration policies. European Union rules guarantee freedom of movement for EU citizens across national borders. But a number of governments have refused to follow these rules, in part due to electoral threats from authoritarian-populist rivals.41 For example, in reaction to the Wilders’ PVV, the Netherlands has toughened its immigration policies in recent years, making family reunification more difficult, criminalizing illegal residence, and moving to stricter curbs on dual nationality.

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As Chapter 4 demonstrates, in the US, younger generations hold attitudes that are far more liberal than their elders on a wide range of contemporary social issues – from opinions about the role of women and men to the scope of government, religiosity, homosexuality, race, drugs, guns, and pornography.6 Similar generation gaps on moral and social issues are evident in Britain.7 In the 2016 Brexit referendum, for example, age and education divided the UK public more than social class.8 The Brexit result in 2016 reflects the views of older voters who feared the cultural threat of open borders and migration from Europe.9 Inter-generational differences arise from the historical experiences of given birth cohorts which anchor their attitudes and values. The composition of society is gradually transformed through long-­term processes of population replacement; each day marks the exit of some older citizens and the entry of new ones.

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, antiwork, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liberation theology, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, post-industrial society, precariat, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey

For example, the global aircraft engine industry is now dominated by three firms (Rolls-Royce, Pratt & Whitney and Fairfield, a GE (General Electric) subsidiary). Immigration and Remittances Open borders – except for people? Free-market economists wax lyrical about the benefits of open borders. They argue that open borders have allowed companies to source the cheapest things from across the globe and offer the best deals to consumers. Open borders, they point out, have increased competition among producers (of material goods and services), forcing them to cut their costs and/or improve their technologies. Any restriction on the cross-border movement of any potential object of economic transaction – goods, services, capital, you name it – would be harmful, they say.

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The WTO covers many more areas (e.g., intellectual property rights, such as patents and trademarks, and trade in services) and has more sanctioning power than the GATT did. Economic integration progressed further in the EU, with the completion of the ‘Single Market’ project (with the so-called ‘four freedoms of movement’ – of goods, services, people and money) in 1993 and with the 1995 accession of Sweden, Finland and Austria.* The combined result was the creation of an international trading system that was much more geared towards freer (although not entirely free) trade. Also the idea of globalization emerged as the defining concept of the time.

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But there is an economic transaction that they don’t talk about in the same way – immigration, or cross-border movement of people. There are very few free-market economists who advocate free immigration in the way they advocate free trade.27 Many free-market economists do not even seem to realize that they are being inconsistent when they advocate free movement of everything except for people. Others seem to instinctively keep away from the topic, deep down knowing that free immigration would be economically unfeasible and politically unacceptable. Immigration reveals the political and the ethical nature of markets What makes immigration – namely, the cross-border movement of people as providers of labour services – different from cross-border movements of other things (goods, financial services or capital) is that labour services cannot be imported without bringing their providers physically into the country as well.

Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth by Frederick Kempe

Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, index card, Kitchen Debate, Mikhail Gorbachev, open borders, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Ted Sorensen, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, zero-sum game

“Next week, if they chose to close their borders, they could, without violating any treaty. I don’t understand why the East Germans don’t close their border because I think they have a right to close it.” Fulbright’s interpretation of the treaty was wrong, and he corrected himself in a statement to the Senate on August 4, saying that freedom of movement across Berlin was guaranteed by postwar agreements and that his TV interview had given “an unfortunate and erroneous impression.” That said, Kennedy never repudiated him, and McGeorge Bundy reported favorably to the president on Fulbright’s TV appearance by writing about “a variety of comment from Bonn and Berlin, including reference to the helpful impact of Senator Fulbright’s remarks.”

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Under orders to ascertain the tanks’ origin, Pike and his driver Sam McCart climbed into an Army sedan and weaved through the barricades and down a side street well past the tanks, where they parked and then walked back. It was part of the surreal nature of the showdown that both sides continued to respect military freedom of movement at the border, so Pike could drive through without impediment. Pike was surprised at the tanks’ illogical two-three-two formation, which made it impossible for the rear tanks to fire upon the enemy. Beyond that, they also were making themselves easy targets. Pike walked up to the rear tank and saw nothing to help his investigation: “no Russians, no East Germans, no one.”

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She offered to conceal him, but after a short conversation Brandt decided to make his way west before the border posts had his description or police began checking the homes of his relatives the next morning. The odds were good that Brandt would be spared any identity check, along with the tens of thousands of others who safely crossed the open border each day for work, shopping, and social visits. After she heard the next day from her sister about her husband’s decision, Brandt’s wife decided to flee as well, along with her son. With their farm lost and her husband likely to be already safely in the West, it was an easy decision. Her sister, with whom she shared a resemblance, provided her with identity papers with which she could travel.

The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality by Branko Milanovic

Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, colonial rule, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, endogenous growth, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, full employment, Gini coefficient, high net worth, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, Joseph Schumpeter, means of production, open borders, Pareto efficiency, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, Simon Kuznets, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Moreover, it precipitated the relaxation of the rules on soccer players from non-EU countries (mostly from Latin America and Africa), as league after league relaxed or abandoned the limits altogether. Thus, the situation described in the opening paragraph came to be: an unfettered capitalism with full freedom of movement of labor (players and coaches) and capital. The latter is reflected in several famous club acquisitions: Italy’s Prime Minister and media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi’s ownership of top Italian club AC Milan, Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich’s purchase of London Chelsea, former Thai prime minister Thanksin Shriniwatra’s investment in Manchester City (subsequently bought out by a conglomerate of rich Arab investors), American billionaires George Gillet and Tom Hicks’s acquisition of Liverpool FC, Indian steel magnate Lakshmi Mittel’s purchase of the Bulgarian Levski Club—the list could go on and on.

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In a recent World Bank study, people from seven countries were asked whether they would move to another country (permanently, temporarily, or “just to try it out”) if it were legally possible.3 A whopping 62 percent of Albanians expressed interest in moving permanently or temporarily out of their country; for Romanians, the percentages were 79 percent for males and 69 percent for females; for Bangladeshi, 73 percent for males and 47 percent for females. In this small sample, we see that countries that have done economically poorly would, if free migration were allowed, remain perhaps without half or more of their populations. With fully open borders, we would witness enormous migration flows that would almost empty out some parts of the globe. There is little doubt that a large share of the African population, particularly the youth, would inundate West Europe, the part of the world that is colloquially known in some Congolese languages as “the heaven.”

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Yet some form of advanced political and economic partnership between the EU and sub-Saharan Africa could be envisaged, were it not for the so obvious “enlargement fatigue” evinced by the European Union, lack of vision among its leaders, and fundamental doubts among Europeans about their own ability to face and prosper in a globalized world that would embrace free movement of not only capital and goods but people as well (see Vignettes 2.4 and 2.5). Thus, Africa will have to prosper or fail by its own devices—which, were the former to happen, would be a good thing, since one’s own generated success is probably more difficult to overturn. However, proponents of the view that Africa is set back by aid and too much ostensible concern of outsiders, and would be better off if left alone, must acknowledge the fact that the successes of West Europe, East Asia, and South Europe were grounded in the political willingness of other countries to help them develop. 5 In the former two cases, it was U.S. encouragement of open trade and the emphasis on economic recovery that was to serve as a bulwark against communism that helped countries like Japan and South Korea, as well as West Europe, to become rich.6 In the latter case (South Europe, and very likely East Europe, too) it was the integration into the rich club of the EU.

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire by Jeff Berwick, Charlie Robinson

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, airport security, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crisis actor, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy transition, epigenetics, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, information security, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, microapartment, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, private military company, Project for a New American Century, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, South China Sea, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, too big to fail, unpaid internship, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working poor

Suddenly they had no freedom of movement and were not allowed to leave their homes. They are forbidden to meet with family or get together with friends. They are not permitted to spend their money as they wish. They are forbidden to work and earn the money they need to survive. They are told their job is not essential. They may not assemble; they may not share the truth about what is really happening on mainstream social media and criticism will soon be forbidden and punished. Suddenly, without any violent struggle or contest, they have given up their fundamental human rights to freedom of movement, opinion, expression, and assembly.

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A few things, and none of them are good: • Banks will close. • Money will be worthless. • Stocks will be a mess. • Will lose most of their mutual funds. • Exchange Traded Funds will be gone (including gold & silver ETFs). They have taken people’s jobs, their businesses, their freedom of speech, and freedom of movement. Now they are coming for their social security, their pension, and their house. It is up to the people whether they let them. Sounding the Alarm For the Death of the Dollar No country on earth has the kind of massive printing press that the Federal Reserve and the Treasury of the United States have to manufacture United States dollars either physically through the printing of sheets of currency that is sliced into rectangles in order to fit nicely in everyone’s wallet or to digitally print currency in online ledgers that the Fed then loans into existence with the attachment of interest in order to perpetuate the Ponzi scheme that is the American monetary policy.

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They claim to run a democratic government but they privatize portions of the economy for themselves and those closest to them to control and pillage, they rig the financial markets for their own benefit, and then lie about the health of the economy and the infallibility of the marketplace. Spot anything familiar? Everyone should, because these are the governments that have taken their jobs, their businesses, their freedom of speech, and freedom of movement – all in the name of “saving lives”. They are the politicians and the banksters and the Military-Information-Terror cabal. They are the people who give the public no choice. They are the ones who steal the people’s money in the name of “Tax”; who force them to inject their children with poison as a smokescreen for population control and mass surveillance; and who would not stop at creating a virus, or a terror attack, or a martyr, or an organized riot – all in the name of domination.

Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem by Tim Shipman

banking crisis, Beeching cuts, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, centre right, Clapham omnibus, Corn Laws, corporate governance, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, drone strike, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fake news, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, iterative process, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, Kickstarter, kremlinology, land value tax, low interest rates, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open borders, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, working poor

At first it looked as if this might be the same mess as previous announcements. On the evening of 9 January, a week before Theresa May’s Lancaster House speech, Milne’s team briefed extracts from a speech the following morning in which Corbyn, who had always been a passionate defender of open borders, would say, ‘Labour is not wedded to freedom of movement for EU citizens as a point of principle.’ This created a raft of headlines about Corbyn taking a much tougher line on immigration, which spooked the leader. The speech was tweaked to clarify that Labour wanted to prioritise market access rather than a cap on numbers.

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Johnson compared the customs union to the Zollverein, the nineteenth-century arrangement which broke down tariff barriers between German states while maintaining tariffs with the outside world. He wanted Britain to ‘come out of the Zollverein’ as it related to the rest of the world, but retain free movement of goods between the UK and the rest of the zone. The foreign secretary was unable to keep his views private. On a trip to Prague on 15 November he told a Czech newspaper, ‘Probably, we will need to leave the customs union.’ He also dismissed the notion that freedom of movement was a founding principle of the EU, with customary relish, as ‘bollocks’. May was not amused. Her official spokeswoman Helen Bower told journalists, ‘The foreign secretary reflected the government’s position which is that a decision hasn’t been taken.’

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Showing an uncharacteristic flair for making news, he told the Today programme on 28 July that ‘many things will look similar’ in Britain’s relationship with the EU during the transition, with free movement, access to the single market and an inability to strike separate trade deals remaining in place. ‘People have talked about a year, two years, maybe three years,’ he said. Even Hammond acknowledged that the transition would have to end before the 2022 general election, but his move was seen by the Brexiteers as a provocation. Hammond’s claim that there was ‘broad acceptance’ of his views in cabinet was swiftly disproved. Two days later, Liam Fox told the Sunday Times that cabinet had not agreed that freedom of movement would continue for three years and that such a move would ‘not keep faith’ with the referendum result: ‘I have not been involved in any discussions on that.’

Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order by Colin Kahl, Thomas Wright

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circular economy, citizen journalism, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, deglobalization, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, future of work, George Floyd, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, job automation, junk bonds, Kibera, lab leak, liberal world order, lockdown, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, mobile money, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, one-China policy, open borders, open economy, Paris climate accords, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, spice trade, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, W. E. B. Du Bois, World Values Survey, zoonotic diseases

As states issued stay-at-home orders, Bolsonaro excoriated them as “scorched-earth” policies that would crush an economy still recovering from the country’s 2015–16 financial crisis. Throughout March and April, Bolsonaro’s efforts to undermine the pandemic response were seemingly endless. He issued a (failed) executive order stripping states of the right to restrict freedom of movement. He decapitated the Health Ministry by firing Mandetta for critiquing his lack of response. By late March, people in Brazil’s cities began protesting the Bolsonaro administration’s inept pandemic response by banging pots outside their window every night around 8:30 p.m. This would last for months as Brazil’s death toll soared.53 Brazil soon emerged as a regional pandemic epicenter.

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And as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates increasingly turned inward to confront the virus at home and deal with the economic fallout from plunging oil prices (and, for the Saudis, the forced cancellation of the lucrative annual hajj, the pilgrimage of millions of Muslims to Mecca), the alliance of Yemeni factions they backed on the ground to oppose the Houthis blew apart. Southern separatists backed by the UAE displaced the Saudi-backed (and internationally recognized) government of Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi in the port city of Aden, creating a new “war-within-a-war.” Warring parties exploited COVID-19 public health measures, such as restrictions on freedom of movement, to vie for territorial control and block the delivery of humanitarian aid.59 As Yemen’s war raged on, the country reported its first confirmed COVID-19 case in April, although the lack of testing made it impossible to know how far the virus had—or eventually would—spread. In Houthi-controlled areas of the country, medical teams were also pressured to suppress information about the extent of the outbreak.60 But it was clear that, in a country already suffering from the worst human-made humanitarian emergency in the world, the consequences were potentially dire.

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On September 1, the daily new case rate was still lower than it had been during the spring peak (slightly over 20,000 new COVID-19 cases per day on September 1 compared to almost 30,000 on April 1), and the pace of increase was far less dramatic than it had been in late March.25 Meanwhile, compared to the peak daily death rate of almost 3,000 in early to mid-April, from the end of June to mid-September the daily deaths did not exceed 200.26 Europeans remained convinced that they had learned the lessons from the spring. The scramble for precious medical supplies was behind them. They would coordinate more closely at the EU level. The situation looked to be under control. Above all, leaders wanted to keep internal borders within the EU open. Freedom of movement is a cornerstone of the single European market. In early September, a confidential EU briefing paper observed that while “it remains the responsibility of each member state to enact the measures it sees fit … a coherent response is critical to avoid a fragmented approach as seen earlier in the year as well as to preserve the integrity of the Schengen area.”27 Throughout the next few months, even as the EU reeled from a second wave, borders remained open.

Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right by Michael Brooks

4chan, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Bernie Sanders, capitalist realism, centre right, Community Supported Agriculture, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drone strike, Flynn Effect, gun show loophole, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, public intellectual, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, trolley problem, universal basic income, upwardly mobile

In 1955, the ANC’s Freedom Charter articulated the goals and aspirations of a liberated South Africa in a strikingly international socialist idiom: 1: We, the People of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know: that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people; that our people have been robbed of their birthright to land, liberty and peace by a form of government founded on injustice and inequality; that our country will never be prosperous or free until all our people live in brotherhood, enjoying equal rights and opportunities; that only a democratic state, based on the will of all the people, can secure to all their birthright without distinction of color, race, sex or belief; 2: All people shall have equal right to use their own languages, and to develop their own folk culture and customs; 3: The national wealth of our country, the heritage of all South Africans, shall be restored to the people; The mineral wealth beneath the soil, the banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole; 4: Restrictions of land ownership on a racial basis shall be ended, and all the land redivided amongst those who work it, to banish famine and land hunger; The state shall help the peasants with implements, seed, tractors and dams to save the soil and assist the tillers; Freedom of movement shall be guaranteed to all who work on the land. The ANC would go on to form its armed wing—the Umkhonto we Sizwe (UWS, “the spear of the nation”) in partnership with the South African Communist Party (SACP). The UWS’s founding was itself internationalist; members included Mandela as well as Jewish Communist revolutionary Ronnie Kasrils, who after apartheid would serve in the cabinets of Mandela and Thabo Mbeki.

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(In the video, entitled “Ben Shapiro: Why Jews Vote Leftist,” a young Shapiro expresses amazement and disgust that most American Jews don’t share this belief.) Like any good fundamentalist, Shapiro is firmly opposed to letting women control their own bodies. He invariably refers to abortion as “killing babies.” He regularly speaks out against “open borders,” gun control, socialism, and even redistributive taxation. In 2003, 2 years after a teenaged Shapiro began writing a nationally syndicated column (the conservative obsession with teen “prodigies” never ceases to amaze), he used it to cheer on the invasion of Iraq. Shapiro could be grouped together with Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity as naturally as he is with his IDW comrades-in-arms Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson.

Transcending the Cold War: Summits, Statecraft, and the Dissolution of Bipolarity in Europe, 1970–1990 by Kristina Spohr, David Reynolds

anti-communist, bank run, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, computer age, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, guns versus butter model, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, liberal capitalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nixon shock, oil shock, open borders, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, shared worldview, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas L Friedman, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Nevertheless, Helsinki built on the personal summitry of the early 1970s, in particular confirming the borders of 1945 and thus the position of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe. Hence the elation in Moscow. But the Helsinki accords presaged change as well as stabilization: the Western states insisted on provisions that promoted human rights and freedom of movement. And in the years to come, these human features of the Helsinki Final Act would help to erode the Soviet bloc. By the end of the 1970s, however, competition was again more evident than cooperation, generating renewed international instability. The triangularity espoused by Nixon and Kissinger had failed to provide a secure foundation for a multipolar world: Washington and Beijing did not establish full diplomatic relations until 1979 and by then China and Russia were engaged in a proxy war in Indochina.

…

Although trade should have been the most tractable subject at the CSCE, here, too, work ground to a halt in early 1975. The most violent arguments in Geneva erupted over the West’s proposals on societal openness and military transparency, which targeted the mechanisms of communist control. The first issue was freedom of information and freer movement of people (Basket III). NATO countries sought to promote wider access to Western books and newspapers, an end to the jamming of radio broadcasts, and the elimination of barriers to travel and emigration. In the best-case scenario, if the communists cooperated, these steps would loosen the regimes’ grip on their societies.

…

Ford’s remarks manifested not only the paradoxes inherent within the Final Act but also the tensions that had from the outset bedevilled US policy towards the CSCE. The initial draft of the president’s speech, prepared by the State Department, was cautious, even deferential when it came to Soviet bugbears like freedom of movement and human rights. Unwilling to acquiesce in a Soviet concept of détente and concerned about ‘how his words would sound at home’, Ford decided to take a tougher rhetorical stand. He asked his counsellor and speechwriter Robert Hartmann to devise an alternative to the State Department’s ‘diplomatic gobbledygook’.90 Hartman did so, with considerable presidential input.

Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe by Antony Loewenstein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, benefit corporation, British Empire, business logic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chelsea Manning, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, Corrections Corporation of America, do well by doing good, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, failed state, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, full employment, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open borders, private military company, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, Scramble for Africa, Slavoj Žižek, stem cell, the medium is the message, trade liberalization, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, work culture

While being driven around the city, I saw shops selling all forms of women’s clothing, including Western-style garments, and girls in white hijabs, rather than burqas, walking to school. But, as has regularly been detailed by Human Rights Watch, the vast majority of the country’s women remains mired in repression when it comes to education, birth control, freedom of movement, and justice.60 I had an opportunity to raise some of these issues when I visited a suburb of Kabul that was crowded with Soviet-style concrete apartment blocks. The buildings were enlivened by few colors, except for washing hanging from the windows and children playing around their entrances.

…

We should have said no to more, as we couldn’t operate them satisfactorily to our vision. However, as you can imagine, in a commercial company it is difficult to turn down work.” I asked David about his “vision” for the immigration centers. “More recreation and activities,” he said, “less institutionalized buildings, more internal freedom of movement, and recruitment and training of staff with a social-care ethos rather than just security guards.” None of these benefits ever materialized in Australian facilities. In 2013 a Serco source leaked a cache of internal documents to me that detailed massive price-gouging of the federal government by the multinational, extreme rates of self-harm among detained refugees across the country, the non-reporting of mistakes to avoid government abatements, and a work culture designed to ignore the rights of asylum seekers in order to maximize profit.

…

Several of the detained women at the center who were spoken to during an inspection said to me it was very helpful to have a place to get used to the fact that they were leaving the UK.” Huppert’s vision for asylum policy was moderate, and he eschewed the racism so common in today’s debate: “We have to have immigration controls—we can’t have an open-borders system. I find the concept of open borders intellectually interesting, but you can’t combine that with a welfare state and free healthcare. You can’t do both.” I asked him about the private sector running refugee facilities, and he argued that his focus was reducing the number of refugees behind bars, rather than obsessing over who managed them: “One of the reasons you get the private sector in is because they at least say they can run it for less money.

The Asian Financial Crisis 1995–98: Birth of the Age of Debt by Russell Napier

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Berlin Wall, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discounted cash flows, diversification, Donald Trump, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, short selling, social distancing, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, yield curve

Last Friday, the domestic cost of money was deemed too high in Malaysia, so there was a unilateral declaration that it would rise no further (the base lending rate pricing mechanism was rescinded for the month of July). On Monday, the authorities decided that short-term capital outflows were injurious to the economy, so they have acted to prevent them. While intervening with the price of chickens was serious enough, to intervene with the price of money and the freedom of movement of capital is even more dangerous. The authorities have once again moved the goal posts for the providers of the international capital which has for so long financed their current account deficit and funded domestic investment. Like Thailand, they seek to delineate between the bad capital and the good capital and in the process increase the risks for any investor committing capital to Malaysia.

…

One attack on a market mechanism which permits an outflow of capital has been made. There are other ways of making negative bets on the direction of the ringgit. It seems unlikely that the government would stop short at attacking this particular method. With a high degree of uncertainty regarding the future freedom of movement of capital, the authorities are deterring all forms of capital flow, not just the short-term outflows which particularly perturb them. In Thailand, the authorities altered one market mechanism and then another and then another as they ran around putting their fingers in the dike to prevent capital from escaping.

…

To meet these challenges I have asked the finance ministers and central bankers of the world’s leading economies and the world’s most important emerging economies to recommend the next steps. There is no task more urgent for the future of our people. For at stake is more than the spread of free markets, more than the integration of the global economy. The forces behind the global economy are also those that deepen liberty, the free flow of ideas and information, open borders and easy travel, the rule of law, fair and even-handed enforcement, protection for consumers, a skilled and educated work force. Each of these things matters not only to the wealth of nations, but to the health of nations. If citizens tire of waiting for democracy and free markets to deliver a better life for themselves and their children, there is a risk that democracy and free markets, instead of continuing to thrive together, will shrivel together.

Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950-2017 by Ian Kershaw

airport security, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, centre right, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, labour market flexibility, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open borders, post-war consensus, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, trade liberalization, union organizing, upwardly mobile, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, young professional

‘Immigration’ also included rising numbers of young people both from within and – three-quarters of them – from outside the European Union coming to the United Kingdom to study. A minority of them, mainly non-EU nationals, remained after completing their studies, generally offering much-needed skills and expertise. There was a crucial difference between the categories of migrants from within and outside the European Union: freedom of movement meant that no limitation was possible on the number of migrants coming from the EU. Migrants from those countries comprised on average just under a half of total net immigration (which over subsequent years would come close to averaging more than 300,000 people a year). That made migration from the European Union, within the wider framework of increasing opposition to immigration, a particularly sensitive political issue.

…

But to most British voters the outcome, in February 2016, of his discussions with the leaders of the other twenty-seven member states was distinctly underwhelming. People quickly saw through Cameron’s claims that the negotiations had brought ‘substantial change’ to the terms of Britain’s membership, particularly on the critical issue of immigration. The European Union had adamantly upheld its key principle of freedom of movement of individuals. Cameron gained only the concession that access to in-work benefits could be restricted for up to four years and even then only for a seven-year period. That was minimal. The widely read tabloid, the Sun, rendered its verdict on the deal: ‘It stinks’. Three-quarters of members of the House of Commons favoured remaining in the European Union.

…

Numerous other planned terrorist attacks were foiled by timely police interception or prevented by surveillance from security services. Internet communications were a vital part of the new terrorism, inviting copycat attacks and enabling individuals or groups living in different parts of Europe to coordinate action. The open borders in much of Europe allowed easy transit to venues singled out for attack (and sometimes escape to other countries afterwards). And, whether or not there was actual contact with ISIS or Al-Qaeda, these organizations acted both as a spur to homespun terrorists to carry out attacks and afterwards used them in jihadist circles to advertise their own strength, usually claiming responsibility even where the assailants were acting alone and not under instruction.

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics by Peter Geoghegan

4chan, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, corporate raider, crony capitalism, data science, deepfake, deindustrialization, demographic winter, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, East Village, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, fake news, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Greta Thunberg, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, plutocrats, post-truth, post-war consensus, pre–internet, private military company, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Torches of Freedom, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, éminence grise

But their books, pamphlets and conferences often envisaged a Britain freed from European regulations. In the winter of 2013, the IEA offered a €100,000 prize for the best plan for leaving the EU. The six leading entrants all said that the UK could maintain full access to the single market but end freedom of movement.59 The winner, a civil servant in the British embassy in Manila named Iain Mansfield, was later briefly appointed as a special advisor in Boris Johnson’s pre-election administration. Once the referendum result was in, think tanks quickly began to frame Brexit as a historic opportunity to radically shrink the state.

…

The Alternative Arrangements Commission gained influence at the highest levels of the British government. Twice in as many days in late August 2019, newly installed prime minister Boris Johnson publicly endorsed what he called the commission’s “excellent paper” on the Irish border. The report was widely cited as offering a compromise between the demands of the European Union for an open border and British concerns about the freedom to sign post-Brexit trade deals. In early October 2019, Johnson travelled to Brussels to negotiate again with his European counterparts. Writing in the Telegraph, Braverman and Hands said that their commission had informed “the British government’s thinking and its new offer to the EU”.

…

He had spent huge sums funding political movements around the world, including in the US. Soros first attracted the attention of the Republican right after speaking out against the Iraq War and donating money to the Democrats against George W. Bush in 2004. On Fox News, Bill O’Reilly described Soros as “an extremist who wants open borders, a one-world foreign policy, legalised drugs, euthanasia, and on and on”.82 Orbán went further. With Finkelstein’s guidance, he constructed Soros as an existential threat to Hungary’s very way of life. Soros’s support for democracy and open societies was really a stalking horse for a globalist plot to destroy the nation state itself.

This Land: The Struggle for the Left by Owen Jones

Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, call centre, capitalist realism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, European colonialism, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Floyd, gig economy, green new deal, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, lockdown, market fundamentalism, Naomi Klein, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, open borders, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, short selling, The Spirit Level, War on Poverty

And the party’s leadership had no choice but to cater for their political interests. Two months later, Theresa May secured a deal with the EU for a withdrawal agreement: freedom of movement would end, but a compromise to deal with the vexing issue of Northern Ireland had been struck. A cornerstone of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which ended the bloody thirty-year-long Troubles, was that there would exist a porous, open border between the North and the Republic of Ireland. For Unionists, the six Ulster provinces would remain part of the territory of the United Kingdom; but for Nationalists and Republicans, they could live as though a united Ireland was a reality.

…

Yet with Labour now being devoured alive in the polls – the Lib Dems, recovered from the mauling they had suffered in the 2017 general election, and pitching themselves as the Remain party, were eating steadily into the Labour Remain vote and were now at around 20 per cent – the political space for any deal had disappeared. Labour’s two dearly held principles – freedom of movement and permanent membership of the EU customs union – were shut down by the Conservatives (‘What’s the point of doing Brexit if you don’t end freedom of movement?’ Philip Hammond asked Keir Starmer. ‘That’s what Brexit means.’). In mid-May, after six wasted weeks, negotiations collapsed. Corbyn’s social media manager, Jack Bond, remembers the day well. On the evening of Thursday 16 May, a week before the approaching European elections, Bond was informed that Labour was to pull out of the negotiations the next day ‘so we don’t get completely hammered next week for possibly facilitating a Tory Brexit’.

…

‘There was this narrative from the ultra-loyalist crowd of “this is a plot, you’re working with the right to undermine Jeremy Corbyn”,’ says Chessum, ‘and that was from every level of the Corbyn project.’ After the 2016 referendum, indeed, Labour depressingly abandoned a principled pro-migrant argument, believing that this was unavoidable given a referendum result which was largely driven by opposition to freedom of movement. It was all the greater a betrayal given that the likes of Corbyn, McDonnell and Diane Abbott had, in their wilderness years, steadfastly defended the rights of migrants and refugees at a time when it was unpopular to do so. Nonetheless, as the Labour conference approached in September 2018, the Remainers within the party felt optimistic.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria

"there is no alternative" (TINA), 15-minute city, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, Day of the Dead, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, imperial preference, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Monroe Doctrine, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, social distancing, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, UNCLOS, universal basic income, urban planning, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

Alongside these economic shocks came the imposition of border controls and travel restrictions, even between countries famous for their openness to one other. Europe’s Schengen zone, within which EU citizens normally travel without any visas or restrictions, barred almost all foreign visitors, and for a while, even stopped internal freedom of movement. In addition, people became deeply concerned about their reliance on overseas producers for key medical supplies. One in every three pills taken by Americans, for example, are generics produced in India, which itself gets two-thirds of pharmaceutical ingredients from China. At the height of the pandemic in mid-March 2020, the arteries of world trade narrowed and clogged up.

…

., World Bank, June 8, 2020, https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/updated-estimates-impact-covid-19-global-poverty; Andy Sumner, Chris Hoy, and Eduardo Ortiz-Juarez, “Estimates of the Impact of COVID-19 on Global Poverty,” WIDER Working Paper 2020/43. Helsinki: UNU-WIDER, https://www.wider.unu.edu/publication/estimates-impact-covid-19-global-poverty. 155 “trans-Tasman bubble”: “New Zealand PM: No Open Borders for ‘a Long Time,’ ” BBC, May 5, 2020. 155 “not have open borders”: Ibid. 155 frantically lobbying: Jamie Smith, “Pacific Islands Plead to Join Australia-New Zealand Travel Bubble,” Financial Times, June 7, 2020. 155 15% and 25% of their GDP . . . For the smaller countries of Barbados and the Bahamas, that number exceeds 30%: World Travel & Tourism Council, “Economic Impact Reports,” https://wttc.org/Research/Economic-Impact. 156 boosted their productivity by 33%: Jason Douglas, Jon Sindreu, and Georgi Kantchev, “The Problem with Innovation: The Biggest Companies Are Hogging All the Gains,” Wall Street Journal, July 15, 2018. 156 Other research shows this trend growing: Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, “The Capex Conundrum and Productivity Paradox,” Global Investment Committee, November 2017, https://advisor.morganstanley.com/sandra-smith-allison-butler/documents/home-office/investing/The-Capex-Conundrum-and-Productivity-Paradox.pdf. 157 Google’s global market share: J.

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Nations have begun opening their borders more readily to people from countries where the coronavirus is under control and banning travel from places where infection is more likely—the latter category includes countries that have failed to control the virus, like Brazil, Russia, and (sadly and stunningly) the United States. New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, raised the possibility that her country and Australia, both of which handled Covid-19 well, would create a “trans-Tasman bubble” in which residents of each could travel freely to the other. But, she added, “We will not have open borders with the rest of the world for a long time to come.” Poor Pacific Island nations, extremely dependent on these countries for tourism dollars, responded by frantically lobbying to join the new travel zone. But alas for Tonga and Tuvalu, going forward, travelers and businesspeople will be reluctant to visit places where they could find themselves without good medical care, and exotic destinations will lose their appeal.

Open: The Story of Human Progress by Johan Norberg

Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon tax, citizen journalism, classic study, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, green new deal, humanitarian revolution, illegal immigration, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, negative emissions, Network effects, open borders, open economy, Pax Mongolica, place-making, profit motive, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, spice trade, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, ultimatum game, universal basic income, World Values Survey, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

(Fukuyama), 362–5 End of Work, The (Rifkin), 312 Engels, Friedrich, 33, 36, 162, 206, 247, 256 English Civil War (1642–1651), 148, 183, 184, 201 Enigma machine, 124–6 Enlightenment, 4, 5, 6, 13, 103, 154–60, 165–6, 195–6 Environmental Performance Index, 327 Ephesus, 45 Epic of Gilgamesh, The, 38 Epicurus, 134–5 Epstein, Richard, 320 equality matching, 262–6, 267 Erasmus, 152 Erdogan, Recep Tayyip, 354 Ethiopia, 72, 130 ethnocentrism, 219, 271 Etruscan civilization (c. 900–27 BC), 43 Eubulus, 47 eugenics, 109 Euphrates river, 37 Euripides, 132 European Organization for Nuclear Research, 306 European Parliament, 325 European Union (EU) Brexit (2016–), 9, 14, 118, 238, 240–41, 349, 354, 379 common currency, 280–81 freedom of movement, 118, 343 migration crisis (2015–), 10, 114, 115, 342–3, 358 subsidies in, 280 trade and, 272 United States, trade with, 19 Evans, Oliver, 203 Evolution of God, The (Wright), 249 evolutionary psychology, 14, 23, 225 exoticism, 84 Expressionism, 198 Facebook, 239, 309 Falwell, Jerry, 113–14 Farage, Nigel, 241 farming, see agriculture Fascist Italy (1922–1943), 105, 219 FedEx, 319 Feifer, Jason, 290–92 Fenway Park, Boston, 223 Ferdinand II, King of Aragon, 97, 98, 106 Ferguson, Charles, 314 Fermi, Enrico, 105 Ferney, France, 153 feudalism, 92, 194, 202, 208 fight-or-flight instinct, 15, 346, 348–9 filter bubbles, 239 financial crisis (2008), 10, 15, 62, 254, 333, 358, 359–60 fire, control of, 32–3, 76 Flanders, 208 fluyts, 100 Flynn effect, 109 Fogel, Robert, 276 folk economics, 258–62 football, 223–4, 245–6 Forbes, 274 Ford, Henry, 203 Fortune 500 companies, 82 Fox News, 82, 302, 354 France, 151 American Revolutionary War (1775–83), 201 automation in, 313 Cathars, 94, 142 Cobden–Chevalier Treaty (1860), 53–4 corruption in, 345 Dutch War (1672–8), 101 Encyclopédie, 154 free zones in, 180–81 Huguenots, persecution of, 97, 99, 101, 158, 193 immigration in, 115 Jews, persecution of, 96, 97, 254 languages in, 289 Minitel, 313 Revolution (1789–99), 201, 292 Royal Academy of Sciences, 156 ruin follies, 287 St Bartholomew’s Day massacre (1572), 97 Thököly Uprising (1678–85), 137 Uber in, 320 University of Paris, 140, 141–2, 143 Francis I, Emperor of Austria-Hungary, 178 Franciscans, 144 Franklin, Benjamin, 107 Franks, 92 free speech, 127, 131–2, 160, 163–5, 343 Chicago principles, 164–5 emigration for, 152–3 university campuses, 163–5 free trade, see under trade Fried, Dan, 289 Friedman, Benjamin, 253 Friedman, David, 284 Friedman, Thomas, 325 Friedrich Wilhelm I, King of Prussia, 153 Fukuyama, Francis, 362–5 Fulda, Germany, 179, 180 Future and Its Enemies, The (Postrel), 300 Future of Nostalgia, The (Boym), 288 Galatia, 90 Galaxy Zoo, 80 Galilei, Galileo, 146, 150 Gallup, 164 game theory, 26 Gandhi, Indira, 326 gas lighting, 297 Gates, William ‘Bill’, 274, 277, 309 Gauls, 90, 91, 92 gay rights, 113, 336 Geary, Patrick, 288–9 gender equality, 113, 114 General Motors, 64 generations baby-boom generation (1946–64), 294, 340 generation X (1965–80), 340 immigration and, 106, 110–11, 113–14 interwar generation (1928–45), 340 millennial generation (1981–96), 340 nostalgia and, 291, 293–4, 296 genetically modified organisms (GMO), 299, 301 Geneva, Switzerland, 152, 153 Genghis Khan, 94–5, 96, 174 Genoa, Republic of (1005–1797), 73, 178 George II, King of Great Britain and Ireland, 193 George III, King of Great Britain and Ireland, 103, 193 George Mason University, 257, 258 Georgia, 365 Georgia, United States, 349 German Conservative Party, 254 Germany automatic looms, 179 Berlin Wall, fall of (1989), 10, 340, 341, 363, 364 Bronze Age migration, 75 budget deficits, 60 COVID-19 pandemic (2019–20), 12 guilds in, 190 immigration in, 114, 115 Jews, persecution of, 99, 104–6, 109, 220, 233 migration crisis (2015–), 342–3 Nazi period (1933–45), 104–6, 109, 124, 220, 233, 353 Neolithic migration, 74 protectionism in, 314 Reichstag fire (1933), 353 Thirty Years War (1618–48), 150 United States, migration to, 104, 107–8, 111 Weimar period (1918–33), 353 al-Ghazali, 139 Gholia, 89 Gibbon, Edward, 90 Gilder, George, 314 Gilgamesh, 38 Gillis, John, 291 Gingrich, Newton, 313 Gini coefficient, 273 Gintis, Herbert, 36 global history, 13 global price crisis (2010–11), 11 global warming, 75, 323, 325, 326–34 globalization, 4, 55, 270 backlashes against, 9, 14, 54, 57 cities and, 35 classical world, 43–50 conspiracy theories on, 323 disease and, 11, 77–9 United States and, 19 Westernization, 4 Glorious Revolution (1688), 101, 185–8, 190, 193 Goa, India, 146–7 golden nugget theory, 5 Golden Rule, 251–2 Golding, William, 219, 243, 244 Goldstone, Jack, 5, 133, 353 Goodness Paradox, The (Wrangham), 227 Google, 309, 311 Gordon, Thomas, 201 Göring, Hermann, 106 gossip, 229 Goths, 92 Gottlieb, Anthony, 135 Great Awakening (1730–55), 102 Great Depression (1929–39), 54–5, 56, 254 Great Enrichment, 167, 204 Great Recession (2007–9), 254–5, 358, 359–60 Great Transformation, The (Polanyi), 37 Great Vanishing, 134–5 Great Wall of China, 178 Greece, ancient, 127–32, 169 Athens, 47, 53, 89, 90, 131–2, 134 Axial Age, 129 cosmopolitanism, 87–8 golden nugget theory, 5 Ionian enlightenment, 127–9 Mycenae, 88 philosophy, 13, 70, 127–32, 134–5, 136 Phoenicians, relations with, 43, 44, 45, 46 science, 127–32, 136 Sparta, 47, 54, 90, 132 trade, attitudes towards, 47, 54 xenophobia in, 90 Green New Deal, 302 Greene, Joshua, 216, 259 Greenland, 51 Gregorian calendar, 137, 152 Gregory IX, Pope, 142 Gregory XIII, Pope, 152 gross domestic product (GDP), 68–9, 257, 278–9 Grotius, Hugo, 147, 152–3 groupthink, 83 Guangzhou, Guangdong, 352 guilds, 190 Gutenberg, Johannes, 146 Haber, Fritz, 105 Habsburg Empire (1282–1918) anti-Semitism in, 254 Austria, 151, 179, 190 refugees, 99 Spain, 98–9, 208 Hadrian, Roman Emperor, 91 Hadrian’s Wall, 47 Hagley Park, West Midlands, 286–7 Haidt, Jonathan, 163, 229, 344, 348, 357 Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, 72 Hamas, 365 Hangzhou, Zhejiang, 173 Hanseatic League (1358–1862), 53 Hanson, Robin, 282 Hanway, Jonas, 298 Happy Days, 294 Harari, Yuval Noah, 38 Harriot, Thomas, 150 Hartsoeker, Nicolaas, 159 Harvard Business Review, 313 Harvard University, 116, 122, 137, 253, 309, 313 Haskell, Thomas, 206 Hässelby, Stockholm, 217–18, 245 Hayashi, Stuart, 370 Hayek, Friedrich, 1, 7, 29, 300, 325 Hebrew Bible, 248–50 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 288, 365 Helm, Dieter, 328, 331 Henrich, Joseph, 36 Hercules, 87 Herodotus, 132 Hewlett-Packard, 304 Higgs, Robert, 337 Hill, Christopher, 182 Hinduism, 136, 149, 354 von Hippel, William, 24, 25, 262, 284 Hippocrates, 128 Hispanic people, 110–11 Hitler, Adolf, 104–5, 353 Hobbes, Thomas, 9, 152, 226 Hofer, Johannes, 288 Holmgren, Pär, 325 Holocaust (1941–5), 109, 220 Holy Roman Empire (800–1806), 155, 181, 288 Homestead Acts, 171 Homo economicus, 34, 36 Homo erectus, 76, 267 Homo sapiens, 3, 21, 23, 30–33, 76, 259–62, 282, 371 homosexuality, 79, 113–14, 336 Homs, Syria, 82 Honeywell, 303 Hong Kong, 53, 235, 316 Hoover, Herbert, 55 horseshoes, 203 House of Wisdom, Baghdad, 136 Household Narrative, The, 297 housing, 375–6 Huguenots, 97, 99, 101, 158, 193 human rights, 87, 147, 213 humanitarianism, 204–7 Hume, David, 151, 154, 194 Hungary, 105, 190, 235, 237, 354, 357 hunkering down, 121, 165 Huns, 93 hunter-gatherer societies death rate, 9 disease and, 78 division of labour and, 29, 32, 40–41, 57 equality matching, 262–3, 265 inbreeding and, 78 isolation and, 52 migration, 73–4, 78–9 physical fallacy, 268 race and, 232 trade, 265 tyranny of cousins, 230 Huntington, Samuel, 110, 362–3, 365–6 Hussein, Saddam, 345 Hussey, Edward, 287 Hutchins, Robert Maynard, 165 Hutus, 230–31 Hypatia, 134 hyper-fast stars, 80 IBM, 305, 307, 319 Ibn al-Haytham, 156 Ibn Hayyan, Jabir, 156 Ibn Rushd, 137–8, 143, 144, 145 ice core drilling, 49 Identity & Violence (Sen), 231 identity politics, 241 al-Idrisi, Muhammad, 137 immigration birth rates and, 115 crime and, 110, 119 culture and, 69–73, 116, 119, 120–23 disgust and, 336, 371 division of labour and, 117 empires and, 84–106 European migration crisis (2015–), 10, 114, 115, 118, 342–3 exoticism, 84 GDP and, 68 innovation and, 81–4 Islam and, 112–14, 255 labour market and, 115, 116–19 opposition to, 69, 70, 114–23, 223, 254–5 productivity and, 68, 81, 117, 204 protectionism and, 66–7 self-selection and, 107, 112 skilled vs unskilled, 66, 82, 102, 116, 117 trade and, 35, 66–7, 234–5 tribalism and, 223, 235–6, 240, 243 urban vs rural areas, 114 welfare and, 118, 281 zero-sum thinking and, 254–5, 259 immigration in United States, 102–14 crime and, 110, 119 innovation and, 81–2, 202 overestimation of, 115, 223 tribalism and, 223, 240 zero-sum thinking and, 254–5, 259 In Defence of Global Capitalism (Norberg), 270 in vitro fertilization, 298–9 inbreeding, 78 India, 42, 45, 46, 56, 75, 129, 136, 140, 146, 270 Arabic numerals, 70, 137 engineering in, 269 Hindu nationalism, 354 industrialization, 207 Maurya Empire (323–184 BC), 53 Mughal Empire (1526–1857), 98, 148, 149, 215 national stereotypes, 235 Pakistan, relations with, 366 pollution in, 326 poverty in, 276, 326 Indo-European language, 75 Indonesia, 41 Industrial Revolution; industrialization, 5, 6, 13, 54, 132, 180, 339 in Britain, 182, 188–99, 202 in China, 169, 172–3, 207 climate change and, 326 in Dutch Republic, 101 in India, 207 in Japan, 71 in United States, 202, 291–2 in Vietnam, 207 inequality, 273, 349 Inglehart, Ronald, 339 ingroups and outgroups, 217–47 fluidity, 230–38 political, 224–5, 238–42 zero-sum relationships and, 252–5 Innocent III, Pope, 233 InnoCentive, 126–7 innovation, 4, 6, 10, 27, 80 ancient world, 32, 42, 44, 46 authoritarianism and, 318 bureaucratic inertia and, 318–21 canon and, 195 cities and, 40, 53, 79 creative destruction, 57, 179, 182, 190 cultural evolution, 28 immigration and 81–4 patent systems, 189–90 population and, 27, 51, 53 Schumpeterian profits, 273–5 resistance to, 10, 179–81 zero-sum thinking and, 266–9 Inquisition, 150 France, 94, 143 Portugal, 100 Spain, 97, 98 intellectual property, 58 Intergalactic Computer Network, 307 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 117 Internet, 57, 275, 278, 306–11, 312, 313 interwar generation (1928–45), 340 Inuit, 22, 51 Ionian enlightenment, 127–9 IQ (intelligence quotient), 109 Iran, 365 Ireland, 104, 108–9, 111, 112, 379 iron, 172 Isabella I, Queen of Castile, 97 Isaiah, 46 Isaura Palaia, Galatia, 90 Isenberg, Daniel, 296 Isis, 89 Islam; Islamic world Arab Spring (2011), 10, 342 clash of civilizations narrative, 237, 365 conflict within, 365 efflorescence, 6, 53, 136–41 fundamentalism, 112, 134, 139, 351 Koran, 137, 250–51 migration from, 112–14 orthodox backlash, 148–9 philosophy, 5, 13 science, 70, 132, 136–41 values in, 112, 113 Islamic State, 351, 365–6 Islamic world, 5, 6, 13, 53, 70 Israel, 111, 365 Italy, 6, 151, 169 anti-Semitism in, 254 Fascist period (1922–1943), 105 Genoa, Republic of (1005–1797), 73, 178 guilds in, 190 Lombard League (1167–1250), 181 Ötzi, 1–2, 8–9, 73, 74 Padua, 144, 146 Papacy in, 155, 181 Renaissance, 6, 150, 153, 169 United States, migration to, 104, 109 Venice, Republic of (697–1797), 53, 144, 152, 174, 181 Jacobs, Jane, 39–40, 79, 264 James II and VII, King of England, Scotland and Ireland, 185–6 Jamestown, Virginia, 200 Japan housing in, 376 kimonos, 73 Meiji Restoration (1868), 53, 70–71 protectionism, 314 Tokugawa Shogunate (1600–1868), 54 United States, migration to, 104, 236, 335 Japanning, 156 JavaScript, 310 jealous emulation, 154–7 jeans, 73 Jefferson, Thomas, 103, 184, 201, 205 Jenner, Edward, 296 Jerusalem, 87, 251 Jesus, 250 Jews in Abbasid Caliphate, 136 anti-Semitism, 254–5, 356 Ashkenazim, 99 Babylonian captivity, 87, 249 Bible, 46, 72, 248–50 Black Death and, 355–6 in Britain, 101, 193 in Dutch Republic, 99, 100, 150 in Germany, 99, 104–6, 109, 111, 254 Inquisition and, 97, 98 in Israel, 111 Mongol invasion and, 95 Muhammed and, 251 Nazirites, 72 in Ottoman Empire, 98 persecution of, 11, 95–7, 109, 220, 233, 251, 355–6 in Poland, 111, 220 in Roman Empire, 90, 93, 94 Sephardim, 99 in Song Empire, 170 in Spain, 97, 98, 99, 140 in United States, 102, 109 Jim Crow laws (1877–1965), 106, 254 Job Buddy, 375 Jobless Future, The (Aronowitz), 312 Jobs, Steven, 82, 304 John Chrysostom, 135 John III Sobieski, King of Poland, 237, 238 Johnson, Samuel, 191, 197 Johnson, Steven, 306 Jones, Rhys, 51 Joule, James Prescott, 196 Judaism, 46, 72, 93, 94, 96, 97 Jupiter, 145 Jurchen people, 172 Justinian I, Byzantine Emperor, 134, 224 Kahn, Robert, 307 Kandinsky, Wassily, 220–21, 289 Kant, Immanuel, 154 Karakorum, Mongol Empire, 96 al-Karaouine, Morocco, 137 Kearney, Denis, 109 keels, 44 Kenya, 21–2 Khayyam, Omar, 137 al-Khwarizmi, 137 Kiesling, Lynne, 328 Kim Jong-il, 314–15 kimonos, 73 King, Martin Luther, 19 King, Steven, 111 Kipling, Rudyard, 70 Klee, Paul, 220–21, 289 Know-Nothings, 108–9 Kodak, 319 Koran, 137, 250–51 Kramer, Samuel Noah, 37, 292 Krastev, Ivan, 342–3 Krugman, Paul, 309 Ku Klux Klan, 254 Kublai Khan, 174 Kurds, 136 Kushim, 37–8 labour mobility, 69, 374–7 lacquerware, 156 lactose, 75 Lao Tzu, 129 lapis lazuli, 70 Late Bronze-Age Collapse (1200–1150 BC), 44, 49, 54 Lebanon, 43, 236 Lee, William, 179 leisure, 199 Lenin, Vladimir, 256 Lesbos, 141 Levellers, 183–4, 186 Leviathan (Hobbes), 152 Levinovitz, Alan Jay, 290 Levy, David, 205 Lewis, David Levering, 140 Libanius, 49 liberalism, 14, 183, 334–40 colonialism and, 214 disgust and, 335, 336 dynamism and, 301 economic, 185, 336 Islam and, 112–14 security and, 334–40, 378 slave trade and, 205 universities and, 163 Libya, 48, 89, 366 Licklider, Joseph Carl Robnett, 307 life expectancy, 4, 169, 339 light bulbs, 297 Lilburne, John, 183 Lincoln, Abraham, 203 Lind, Amanda, 72 Lindsey, Brink, 301 literacy, 15, 57, 168 in Britain, 188, 198 in China, 148 in Dark Ages, 50 empathy and, 246–7 in Greece, 128–9 in Renaissance, 146, 148 Lithuania, 238 Little Ice Age, 148 lobbying, 280, 329 Locke, John, 100, 152, 185, 186, 201 Lombard League, 181 London, England, 190, 193–4, 197 7/7 bombings (2005), 341 London Bridge stabbings (2019), 120 Long Depression (1873–86), 253–4 Lord of the Flies (Golding), 219, 243, 244 Lord’s Resistance Army, 365 Louis IX, King of France, 96 Louis XIV, King of France, 237 Louis XVI, King of France, 201 love, 199 Lucas, Robert, 167 Lucy, 24–5 Lugh, 89 Lul, 111 Luther, Martin, 150, 356 Lutheranism, 99, 356 Lüthi, Max, 351 Lysenko, Trofim, 162 Lyttelton family, 286 Macartney Mission (1793), 176 Macedonian Empire (808–148 BC), 84, 87–9 Madison, James, 337 madrasas, 138 Madrid train bombings (2004), 341 Maduro, Nicolás, 354, 380 Magna Carta (1215), 5 Magris, Claudio, 219 Malacca, 100 Maltesholm School, Hässelby, 217–18, 245 mammoths, 76 Manchester United, 246 Manichaeism, 93 Mann, Thomas, 79 Mansfield, Edward, 271 Mao Zedong, 53, 162, 315, 316, 317, 355 Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor, 91 Marduk, 87 de Mariana, Juan, 147 markets, 37 humanitarianism and, 204, 206 immigration and, 68 tribalism, 247 ultimatum game, 34–5 Marley, Robert ‘Bob’, 72 marriage, 199 Marshall, Thurgood, 335 Marx, Karl, 33, 36, 162, 169, 247, 255–6 Marxism, 33, 36, 162, 182, 256, 268 Mary II, Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland, 186, 193 Maryland, United States, 349 Maslow, Abraham, 339, 341 al-Masudi, 136 mathematics, 70, 134, 135, 137, 156 Maurya Empire (323–184 BC), 53 Mauss, Marcel, 71 McCarthy, Joseph, 335 McCarthy, Kevin, 108 McCloskey, Deirdre, 167, 189, 191–2, 198 McConnell, Addison Mitchell ‘Mitch’, 108 McKinsey, 313 measles, 77 media, 346–9, 370 Medicaid, 119 Medina, 251 Medusa, 88 Meiji Restoration (1868), 53, 70–71 Mencken, Henry Louis, 325, 353 Mercury, 89 Merkel, Angela, 343 Mesopotamia, 37–43, 45, 70, 292–3 Metaphysics (Aristotle), 142 Mexico, 73, 77, 257 United States, migration to, 110, 122, 223, 240, 255 Miami, Florida, 120 Micro-80 computers, 304 Microsoft, 305–6, 309 middle class, 60–61 Migration Advisory Committee, UK, 118 Miletus, 127 militarism, 214 Mill, John Stuart, 124, 160, 164, 176, 319 millennial generation (1981–96), 340 Milton, John, 150 Ming Empire (1368–1644), 54, 148, 175, 177–8, 179, 215 minimal group paradigm, 220–22 Minitel, 313 Mobutu Sese Seko, 187 Mokyr, Joel, 157, 195, 196–7 Molyneux, Stefan, 84 Mongol Empire (1206–1368), 53, 84, 94–7, 138, 139, 173–4, 352–3 monopolies, 182, 189 Monte Testaccio, 48 Montesquieu, 89, 94 Moral Consequences of Growth, The (Friedman), 253 Moral Man and Immoral Society (Niebuhr), 253 Moriscos, 97 mortgages, 375 Moscow Institute of Electronic Engineering, 304 most-favoured-nations clause, 53–4 Mughal Empire (1526–1857), 98, 148, 149, 215 Muhammed, Prophet of Islam, 251 Murray, William Vans, 104 Muslims migration of, 112–14, 170, 255 persecution of, 97, 106, 233, 355 Mutz, Diana, 271 Mycenae, 88 Myth of Nations, The (Geary), 288–9 Myth of the Rational Voter, The (Caplan), 258 Naipaul, Vidiadhar Surajprasad, 167 Napoleonic Wars (1803–15), 288 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 126, 127 National Library of Medicine, US, 12 National Science Foundation, US, 313 National Security Agency, US, 313 national stereotypes, 235 nationalism, 9, 11, 13, 16 civic nationalism, 377–8 clash of civilizations narrative, 237 cultural purity and, 69, 70, 71, 352 immigration and, 69, 70, 82 nostalgia and, 287–8, 351 World War I (1914–18), 214 zero-sum thinking, 253, 254, 259, 272 nativism, 14, 122, 176, 223, 254, 349–51, 358 Natural History Museum, London, 124, 125 Naturalism, 198 Nazi Germany (1933–45), 104–6, 109, 124, 220, 233, 353 Nazirites, 72 Neanderthals, 30–33, 75, 76 Nebuchadnezzar, Babylonian Emperor, 46 neckties, 72 negative income tax, 374–5 Neilson, James Beaumont, 194 Nemeth, Charlan, 83 Neo-Classicism, 198 Neolithic period (c. 10,000–4500 BC), 74 Netflix, 309, 310 Netherlands, 99 von Neumann, John, 105 neurasthenia, 291 New Atlantis (Bacon), 147 New Guinea, 41 New Testament, 250 New York, United States crime in, 246, 334 September 11 attacks (2001), 10, 114, 340–42 New York Times, 291, 297, 325 New York University, 223 New York Yankees, 223 Newcomen, Thomas, 196 Newton, Isaac, 158–9, 201 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 131 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 253 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 365 Nîmes, France, 73 Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell), 230, 368 Nineveh, Assyria, 248–9 Nixey, Catherine, 134 Nobel Prize, 82, 105, 276 non-market societies, 34, 35 Nordhaus, William, 273–4 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 63, 64 North Carolina, United States, 102 North Korea, 54, 314–15, 366 North Star, 44 nostalgia, 14, 286–95, 313, 351 Not Fit for Our Society (Schrag), 107 novels, 188–9, 246–7 nuclear power, 301, 327, 328, 329, 332 nuclear weapons, 105, 290, 306 O’Rourke, Patrick Jake, 280 Oannes, 267 Obama, Barack, 66, 240, 329 obsidian, 22, 29 occupational licensing, 376–7 Ögedei Khan, 96 Ogilvie, Sheilagh, 179 Oklahoma, United States, 218–19 Old Testament, 46, 72, 248–50 olive oil, 48 Olorgesailie, 21–2 omnivores, 299 On Liberty (Mill), 160 one-year-old children, 26 open society, 6 open-mindedness, 35, 112 Opening of the mouth’ rite, 70 Orbán, Viktor, 354, 380 de Orta, Garcia, 146–7 Orwell, George, 230, 368 Osman II, Ottoman Sultan, 148 Ottoman Empire (1299–1923), 84, 94, 98, 148, 215, 220, 237, 353 Ötzi, 1–2, 8–9, 73, 74 overpopulation, 81, 160 Overton, Richard, 183 Pacific islands, 52 Paine, Thomas, 56, 158, 247 Pakistan, 70, 366 Pallas Athena, 89 Pallavicino, Ferrante, 150 Palmer, Tom Gordon, 15 Panthers and Pythons, 243–4 Papacy, 102, 142, 143, 152, 155, 178 Papin, Denis, 179, 180 Paris, France exiles in, 152, 153 University of Paris, 140, 141–2, 143 parochialism, 216 patent systems, 58, 82, 189–90, 203, 314 in Britain, 179, 189–90, 203, 314 in China, 58 in France, 189 immigrants and, 82 in Netherlands, 189 in United States, 203 PayPal, 310 Peasants’ Revolt (1381), 208 peer review, 127 Pence, Michael, 108 penny universities, 166 Pericles, 131 Permissionless Innovation (Thierer), 299 Perry, Gina, 243 Perseus, 87–8 Persia, ancient, 84, 86–7, 88, 95, 129, 215 Abbasid period (750–1258), 136 Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BC), 86–7, 88 Greeks, influence on, 129 Mongols, influence on, 95 Safavid Empire (1501–1736), 149 Sasanian Empire (224–651), 134 personality traits, 7 Pertinax, Roman Emperor, 91 Pessimists Archive, 290, 297, 298 Pessinuntia, 89 Peters, Margaret, 66 Peterson Institute for International Economics, 60 Petty, William, 296 Philip II King of Spain, 98 Phoenicia (2500–539 BC), 43–6, 49, 70, 128–9 Phoenicia dye, 44 Phrygians, 89 physical fallacy, 267–8 Physics (Aristotle), 142 Pietists, 153 Pinker, Steven, 23, 243, 266, 324 Plague of Justinian (541–750), 77 Plato, 130, 131, 132, 134, 352 pluralism, 85, 129, 357 Plutarch, 45–6 Poland Battle of Vienna (1683), 237, 238 Dutch Republic, migration to, 99 Holocaust (1941–5), 220 immigration, 116 Israel, migration to, 111 United Kingdom, migration to, 120 United States, migration to, 108, 109 Polanyi, Karl, 37 polio, 293 pollution, 326, 347 Polo, Marco, 174 Popper, Karl, 6, 26, 127, 129, 130, 182–3, 237, 362 population density, 28 populism, 9, 13, 14, 16, 324, 379–82 authoritarianism and, 325, 350–51 complexity and, 324 nostalgia and, 295, 324, 351 trade and, 19 zero-sum thinking and, 254, 259, 274 pornography, 113, 336 Portugal Empire (1415–1999), 100, 146–7, 178 guilds in, 190 Inquisition, 100 Postrel, Virginia, 300, 312, 326 pound locks, 172 poverty, 4, 168, 213, 270 in Britain, 256 in China, 4, 316 immigration and, 66, 69, 81, 121 in Japan, 71 Jeff Bezos test, 275–9 Preston, Lancashire, 190 priests, 41, 128 printing, 146, 153, 171 Pritchard, James Bennett, 43 productivity cities and, 40 foreign trade and, 57, 59, 63 free goods and, 278 immigration and, 68, 81, 117, 204 programming, 8 Progress (Norberg), 12–13 progressives, 286, 300–302 Proserpina, 89 protectionism, 13, 15, 16, 54–5 Great Depression (1929–39), 54–5 immigration and, 66–7 Internet and, 314 Trump administration (2017–), 19, 57–8 Protestantism, 99, 104, 148, 149, 153, 169, 178, 237 Prussia (1701–1918), 153, 288 Psychological Science, 335 Puerto Rico, 80 Pufendorf, Samuel, 147 purchasing power, 59, 61, 63, 66, 198 Puritanism, 99, 102 Putin, Vladimir, 14, 353–4 Putnam, Robert, 121, 165 Pythagoras, 137 Pythons and Panthers, 243–4 al-Qaeda, 351 Qianlong, Qing Emperor, 153 Qing Empire (1644–1912), 148, 149, 151, 153, 175–7, 179 Quakers, 99, 102, 206 Quarantelli, Enrico, 338 Quarterly Journal of Economics, The, 63 race; racism, 76–7, 206, 231–4, 358–9 railways, 53, 179, 202, 296, 297 Rammstein, 274 RAND Corporation, 307 Raphael, 137 Rastafari, 72 Rattlers and Eagles, 218–19, 236, 243, 252 reactive aggression, 227–8 Reagan, Ronald, 63, 111 Realism, 198 realistic conflict theory, 222 Reconquista (711–1492), 139 Red Genies, 236 Red Sea, 75 Reformation, 148, 155 refugees crime and, 119 European migration crisis (2015–), 10, 114, 115, 281, 342–3 integration of, 117–18 German Jews (1933–45), 104–6, 109 Rembrandt, 99 reminiscence bump, 294 Renaissance, 5, 6, 132, 143, 145–6, 149–50, 215 Republic of Letters, 157–9, 165, 195 Republic, The (Plato), 352 Republican Party, 164, 225, 238, 240, 301 Reynell, Carew, 184 Reynolds, Glenn, 308 Ridley, Matthew, 20–21, 80 right to work laws, 65 Rizzo, Frank, 334 Road to Serfdom, The (Hayek), 325 Robbers Cave experiment (1954), 218–19, 236, 243, 252, 371 Robbins, Caroline, 200–201 Robertson, Marion Gordon ‘Pat’, 114 Robinson, James, 185, 187, 200 rock paper scissors, 26 Rogers, Will, 282 Roman Law, 5 Romanticism, 198, 287, 296–7 Rome, ancient, 47–50, 89–94, 132 Antonine Plague (165–80), 77 assimilation, 91–2 chariot racing, 224 Christianity in, 90, 93–4, 133–4 citizenship, 91 cosmopolitanism, 89–91 fall of, 54, 94 gods in, 89–90 golden nugget theory, 5 globalization, 45–6, 47–50 haircuts, 72 Latin alphabet, 45 philosophy, 70, 136 Phoenicians, relations with, 43, 44 Sabines, relations with, 89 Social War (91–88 BC), 91 trousers, attitudes towards, 92 Romulus, 89, 90 Rotterdam, Holland, 158 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 226 Royal Navy, 205 Royal Society, 156, 157, 158, 196 Rubin, Paul, 258 ruin follies, 286–7 rule of law, 68, 189, 269, 334, 343, 358, 379 Rumbold, Richard, 183–4 Rushdie, Salman, 73 Ruskin, John, 206, 297 Russia Imperial period (1721–1917), 154, 289–90 Israel, migration to, 111 Mongol period (1237–1368), 95, 352 Orthodox Christianity, 155 Putin period (1999–), 14, 15, 347, 353–4, 365, 367 Soviet period (1917–91), 162, 302–5, 315, 317 United States, relations with, 236 Yamnaya people, 74–5 Rust Belt, 58, 62, 64–6, 349 Rwandan Genocide (1994), 230–31 Sabines, 89 Safavid Empire (1501–1736), 149 safety of wings, 374 Saint-Sever, France, 180 Salamanca school, 147, 150 Sanders, Bernard, 302 Santa Fe Institute, 216 SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), 3, 162 Saudi Arabia, 365 Scandinavia Bronze Age migration, 75 Neolithic migration, 74 United States, migration to, 104, 108 see also Sweden scapegoats, 11, 83, 253, 268, 349, 355–61 Black Death (1346–53), 352, 355–6 Great Recession (2007–9), 255 Mongol invasion (1241), 95 Schmandt-Besserat, Denise, 38 School of Athens, The (Raphael), 137 School of Salamanca, 147, 150 Schrag, Peter, 107 Schrödinger, Erwin, 105, 128, 129, 132 Schumpeter, Joseph, 277 Schumpeterian profits, 273–5 science, 127–66 in China, 4, 13, 70, 153, 156, 162–3, 169–73 Christianity and, 133–5, 141–6, 149–50 Enlightenment, 154–9 experiments, 156–7 Great Vanishing, 134–5 in Greece, 127–32 jealous emulation and, 154–7 in Islamic world, 70, 132, 136–41 Renaissance, 145–6 Republic of Letters, 157–9, 165, 195 sclera, 25 Scotland, 101, 194 Scotney Castle, Kent, 287 Sculley, John, 304 sea peoples, 43 sea snails, 44 Seinfeld, Jerry, 224 Seleucid Empire (312–63 BC), 88 self-esteem, 372, 379 Sen, Amartya, 231 Seneca, 49, 91 Sephardic Jews, 99 September 11 attacks (2001), 10, 114, 340–42, 363 Septimius Severus, Roman Emperor, 91 Servius, Publius, 90 Seven Wonders of the World, 45 Seville, Spain, 91, 139 sex bonobos and, 226 encoding and, 233 inbreeding, 78 views on, 113, 336 SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), 307 Shaftesbury, Lord, see Cooper, Anthony Ashley Sherif, Muzafer, 219, 220, 222, 243, 252 Shia Islam, 149 Shining, The, 335 shirts, 72 Siberia, 76 Sicily, 89 Sierra Leone, 365 Siger of Brabant, 143, 144 Sikhism, 149 Silicon Valley, 311 Silk Road, 171, 174, 352 silver processing, 49 Simler, Kevin, 282 Simmel, Georg, 266 Simon, Julian, 81 Simple Rules for a Complex World (Epstein), 320 Singapore, 53 skilled workers, 36, 45, 66, 95, 97, 101, 117 Slater, Samuel, 202 slavery, 86, 156, 205–6, 232 in British Empire, 182, 199, 200, 205 in Mesopotamia, 40, 41, 43 in Rome, 47, 48 in Sparta, 54 in United States, 103, 106, 205, 232 smallpox, 77, 197, 293, 296 Smith, Adam, 21, 59, 192, 194, 205, 280 Smith, Fred, 319 smoke detectors, 234 Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act (1930), 55 snack boxes, 20 Snow, Charles Percy, 105 social media, 239, 347, 370 social status, 281–5 Social War (91–88 BC), 91 Socrates, 130, 131–2, 330 solar power, 328, 329, 331, 332 Solomon, King of Israel, 38, 45 Solyndra, 329 Song Empire (960–1279), 53, 169–75 Sony, 319 Soros, George, 323 South Korea, 314, 366 South Sudan, 365 Soviet Union (1922–91), 162, 302–5, 315, 317 Sovu, Rwanda, 231 Sowell, Thomas, 267–8 Spain, 97–101, 184, 207 Almohad Caliphate (1121–1269), 137–8 amphorae production, 48 al-Andalus (711–1492), 97, 137–9, 140 Columbus’ voyages (1492–1503), 178 Dutch Revolt (1568–1648), 98–9, 101 Empire (1492–1976), 147, 178, 182 guilds in, 190 Inquisition (1478–1834), 97, 98 Jews, persecution of, 97–8, 106, 140 Madrid train bombings (2004), 341 Muslims, persecution of, 97, 106 Reconquista (711–1492), 97, 138–9, 140 regional authorities, 152 Roman period (c.218 BC–472 AD), 48, 91 Salamanca school, 147, 150 sombreros, 73 Uber in, 320 vaqueros, 73 Spanish flu (1918–19), 77 Sparta, 47, 54, 90, 132 Spencer, Herbert, 165, 214 Spinoza, Baruch, 100, 150, 153 Spitalfields, London, 190 sports, 199, 223–4, 232–3, 245–6 Sri Lanka, 100, 365 St Bartholomew’s Day massacre (1572), 97 St Louis, SS, 109 Standage, Tom, 166 Stanford University, 307, 311 Star Trek, 246, 259 stasists, 301–2 Statute of Labourers (1351), 208 steam engine, 179, 180, 189, 194, 203, 296 steamships, 53, 202 Stenner, Karen, 242, 343, 348, 350, 357 Stockholm, Sweden, 217–18 Stranger Things, 294 Strasbourg, France, 153 strategic tolerance, 86–96 Strindberg, August, 239 Suarez, Francisco, 147 suits, 72 Sumer (4500–1900 BC), 37–43, 45, 55, 292–3 Summers, Larry, 329 Sunni Islam, 148, 149, 238, 365 superpowers, 338–9 supply chains, 11, 62, 66 Sweden DNA in, 73 Green Party, 325 Lind dreadlocks affair (2019), 72 immigration in, 114, 115, 118, 281 manufacturing in, 65 Muslim community, 114 Neolithic migration, 74 refugees in, 118, 281, 342 United States, migration to, 107 Sweden Democrats, 281 swine flu, 3 Switzerland, 152, 153 Sylvester II, Pope, 137 Symbolism, 198 Syria, 42, 82, 342, 365, 366 tabula rasa, 225 Tacitus, 91 Taiwan, 316, 366 Taizu, Song Emperor, 170 Tajfel, Henri, 220, 221–2 Tandy, Geoffrey, 124–6 Tang Empire (618–907), 84, 170, 177, 352 Tanzania, 257 Taoism, 129, 149 tariffs, 15, 56, 373 Anglo–French Treaty (1860), 53–4 Great Depression (1929–39), 54–5 Obama’s tyre tariffs (2009), 66 Trump’s steel tariffs (2018), 272 Tasmania, 50–53, 54 Tatars, 238 taxation in Britain, 72, 187, 188, 189 carbon tax, 330–31 crony capitalism and, 279–80 immigration and, 69 negative income tax, 374–5 in Song Empire, 172 in Spanish Netherlands, 98 Taylor, Robert, 306 TCP/IP protocol, 307 technology, 296–9 automation, 63, 312–13 computers, 302–14 decline, 51–2 Internet, 57, 275, 278, 306–11, 312 nostalgia and, 296–9, 313 technocrats, 299–300, 312, 313–14, 326–9 technological decline, 51–2 telescopes, 145–6 Teller, Edward, 105 Temple of Artemis, Ephesus, 45 Temple of Serapis, Alexandria, 134 Tencent, 311 terrorism, 10, 114, 229, 340–41, 363 Tetlock, Philip, 160 textiles, 172–3 Thales, 127 Thierer, Adam, 299 third-party punishment game, 35 Thirty Years War (1618–48), 72, 97, 148, 150 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 142–3, 144–5 Thoreau, Henry David, 203 Thracians, 130 Thucydides, 131, 132 Tiangong Kaiwu, 153 Tibetans, 85 Tierra del Fuego, 52–3 Tigris river, 37, 139 Timurid Empire (1370–1507), 139 tin, 42 Tokugawa Shogunate (1600–1868), 54 Toledo, Spain, 140 tolerance, 86–114, 129 Tomasello, Michael, 25 ‘too big to fail’, 280 Tower of Babel, 39 Toynbee, Arnold, 382 trade, 13, 19–23, 28–9, 129, 140, 363, 373 backlashes against, 19, 54–67, 254 benefit–cost ratio, 60, 61, 62 Britain, 181–99 competitive advantage, 28–9 division of labour and, 28, 31, 57 Great Depression (1929–39), 54–5 Greece, ancient, 47 humanitarianism and, 204–7 Mesopotania, 37–43 migration and, 35, 66–7, 234–5 morality of, 33–6 Phoenicia, 43–6 Rome, ancient, 47–50 snack boxes, 20 United States, 19, 57–8, 202–3 zero-sum thinking and, 248, 252–66, 270–72 trade unions, 64, 65, 272, 374 Trajan, Roman Emperor, 91 Trans-Pacific Partnership, 58 Transparency International, 381 Treaty of Trianon (1920), 354 Treaty of Versailles (1919), 353 Trenchard, John, 201 Treschow, Michael, 65 Trevor-Roper, Hugh, 215, 356 tribalism, 14, 217–47, 362, 368–72 fluid, 230–38 political, 224–5, 238–42, 378, 379 media and, 348, 370 threats and, 241, 350, 370 Trollboda School, Hässelby, 218 Trump, Donald, 9, 14, 240, 313, 321, 322, 354, 365, 367, 380 immigration, views on, 223 presidential election (2016), 238, 241, 242, 349, 350 stasism, 301, 302 steel tariffs (2018), 272 trade, views on, 19, 57–8 zero-sum attitude, 248 Tunisia, 45, 48 Turing, Alan, 124 Turkey; Turks, 70, 74, 136, 156, 354, 357, 365 turtle theory, 121–2 Tutsis, 230–31 Twilight Zone, The, 260–61 Twitter, 84, 239, 245 Two Treatises of Government (Locke), 186, 201 tyranny of cousins, 229, 230 tyre tariffs, 66 Tyre, 45 Uber, 319–20 Uganda, 365 Ukraine, 75, 116, 365 ultimatum game, 34–6 umbrellas, 298 uncertainty, 321–6 unemployment, 62, 373–4, 376, 377 ‘unicorns’, 82 United Auto Workers, 64 United Kingdom, see Britain United Nations, 327 United States, 199–203 Afghanistan War (2001–14), 345 America First, 19, 272 automation in, 313 Bureau of Labor Statistics, 65 California Gold Rush (1848–1855), 104 China, trade with, 19, 57, 58–9, 62–3, 64 Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), 254 citizenship, 103 Civil War (1861–5), 109 climate change polices in, 328 Constitution (1789), 102, 202 consumer price index, 277 COVID-19 pandemic (2019–20), 12 crime in, 110, 119, 120, 346 Declaration of Independence (1776), 103, 201, 202 dynamism in, 301–2 Federalist Party, 103 free trade gains, 60, 61 Great Depression (1929–39), 54–5, 254 gross domestic product (GDP), 257 Homestead Acts, 171 housing in, 376 immigration, see immigration in United States Industrial Revolution, 202, 291–2 innovation in, 53, 203, 298–9 intellectual property in, 58 Internet in, 306–14 Iraq War (2003–11), 345 Jim Crow laws (1877–1965), 106, 254 Know-Nothings, 108–9 Ku Klux Klan, 254 labour mobility in, 374, 376–7 lobbying in, 280, 329 Manhattan Project (1942–6), 105 manufacturing, 62–6 McCarthy era (1947–57), 335 Medicaid, 119 middle class, 60–61 NAFTA, 63, 64 National Library of Medicine, 12 national stereotypes, 235, 236 nostalgia in, 290–92, 294 open society, 169, 199–203 patent system, 203 political tribalism in, 224–5, 238, 240 populist movement, 254 presidential election (2016), 238, 241, 242, 349, 350 railways, 202 Revolutionary War (1775–83), 102–3, 200–201 Robbers Cave experiment (1954), 218–19, 236, 243, 252, 371 Rust Belt, 58, 62, 64–6, 349 Saudi Arabia, relations with, 365 Senate, 108 September 11 attacks (2001), 10, 114, 340–42, 363 slavery in, 103, 106, 205 Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act (1930), 55 Supreme Court, 108, 335 tariffs, 66, 272 trade deficits, 60, 270 Trump administration (2017–), see Trump, Donald unemployment in, 373, 376 universities, 163–5, 241 Vietnam War (1955–75), 345 Watergate scandal (1972–4), 345 World War II (1939–45), 56, 64, 335 Yankees, 58 United Steelworkers, 64, 272 universal basic income (UBI), 374, 375 universities, 140 University Bologna, 140 University of California, Berkeley, 311 University of Cambridge, 140 University of Chicago, 165 University of Leeds, 357 University of London, 201 University of Marburg, 153 University of Oxford, 140, 144, 145, 328 University of Padua, 144, 146 University of Paris, 140, 141–2, 143 University of Pennsylvania, 271 University of Salamanca, 140 University of Toulouse, 144 unskilled workers, 36, 66, 102, 117 untranslatable words, 288 Ur, 55 urbanization, see cities Uruk, Sumer, 39 US Steel, 64 Usher, Abbott Payson, 196 Uyghurs, 85, 174 vaccines, 12, 296, 299 Vandals, 92 Vanini, Lucilio, 150 vaqueros, 73 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 213, 261 Vatican Palace, 137 Vavilov, Nikolai, 162 Venezuela, 354 Venice, Republic of (697–1797), 53, 144, 152, 174, 181 Vermeer, Johannes, 99 Vespucci, Amerigo, 146 Vienna, Austria, 95, 237, 238 Vienna Congress (1815), 288 Vietnam, 171, 207, 270, 345 Virgil, 91 Virginia Company, 200 vitamin D, 74 de Vitoria, Francisco, 147 Vladimir’s choice, 221, 252, 271 Voltaire, 153, 193 Walton, Sam, 277 Wang, Nina, 315 War of the Polish Succession (1733–8), 289–90 Ward-Perkins, Bryan, 50 warfare, 216–17, 243 Warren, Elizabeth, 302 washing of hands, 10, 335 Washington, George, 103, 205 Washington, DC, United States, 280 Watergate scandal (1972–4), 345 Watson, John, 291 Watson, Peter, 79 Watt, James, 172, 189, 194, 274 Weatherford, Jack, 95 Web of Science, 159 Weber, Maximilian, 204 WeChat, 311 Weekly Standard, 312 welfare systems, 118, 281, 374 Wengrow, David, 42 West Africa Squadron, 205 Western Roman Empire (395–480), 94, 135 Westernization, 4–5 Wheelan, Charles, 20 Whig Party, 185, 201 White House Science Council, 313 white supremacists, 84, 351, 367 Whitechapel, London, 190 Who Are We?

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As the political scientist Margaret Peters concludes, based on her research of the US experience of trade and immigration: ‘Just as you can’t have your cake and eat it too, you can’t slam the door shut to low-skill labor while also slamming it shut to imports of the goods and services an abundant supply of low-skill labor makes possible.’74 Well, you can, it you are willing to pay the price of much lower purchasing power and more poverty. If not, you can stop imports from a global workforce only if you import the global workforce. Every time trade barriers have been high, businesses have lobbied hard for more immigration. America could survive its nineteenth-century protectionism only because it had open borders. In the case of more closed borders, foreign labour would not just feel the pull, but also a monumental push. Rapidly developing countries have built their swift progress on international trade and on being part of extended supply chains. A new protectionist world order would make armies of unemployed lose the belief in a better future back home, so they would join the millions already desperate to escape to richer countries in Europe and North America. 2 OPEN DOORS ‘Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier.’

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But interestingly, this is what we also said about previous waves of immigrants when they were new to our society and before they had had a chance to integrate and prove their worth and ability. Even in that country of immigrants, the US, large groups, often majorities, thought the next wave of immigrants would destroy everything that previous immigrants had created, as Peter Schrag has documented in his book Not Fit for Our Society. Even those Founding Fathers who embraced open borders were worried that the immigrants who came after the English would not be able to adapt. In 1751, the great cosmopolitan Benjamin Franklin warned that Pennsylvania was becoming ‘a country of aliens’. The large number of German immigrants meant they would never learn the English language or American customs.

The Border: The Legacy of a Century of Anglo-Irish Politics by Diarmaid Ferriter

Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, open borders, Ronald Reagan, upwardly mobile

The protection of the eel was ‘just one of 142 areas of North–South co-operation that are underpinned by joint obligations to EU regulations and the Belfast Agreement’.22 But the headline-grabbing border issues after Brexit were the high politics and political poker games between Britain and the EU. The European Council identified the ‘unique circumstances on the island of Ireland’ as one of the main issues to be dealt with in Brexit negotiations. Unionists also wanted to have their Brexit cake and to eat it across the border, essentially calling for the status quo in relation to freedom of movement of people, goods and services to be maintained.23 Nigel Dodds insisted the DUP wanted a ‘seamless border’ but also wanted, in facing Brexit, to be no different ‘from other parts of the UK’. This was another nonsense; Northern Ireland has always been treated differently from the rest of the UK.

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In 2000 the EU Commission established a special Northern Ireland task force ‘to examine how Northern Ireland could benefit more from EU policies’, the first time the commission had, in its own words, created ‘a close partnership specifically with one region’ in this way. What also made the EU dimension significant was the importance of open borders to the overall EU project and the perception of the EU as being ‘neutral’ regarding Northern Ireland in a way the UK and Irish governments could not always manage.22 In 2010, EU Commission chief José Manuel Barroso noted EU institutions had contributed more than £2.5 billion to Northern Ireland since 1990, while Northern Ireland’s first minister, the DUP’s Peter Robinson, who succeeded Paisley in 2008, said Northern Ireland would have been a ‘very much worse place … if it hadn’t been for the significant funds that have come from Europe’.23 Europe was also the platform from which a ‘shared history’ for the different communities in Ireland could be remembered and commemorated, one of the most obvious examples being the Irish nationalists and unionists who fought with the British army at the Slaughter of the Somme in 1916.

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

Horowitz, Daniel. The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939–1979. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004. Jablonski, Nina G. Living Color: The Biological and Social Meaning of Skin Color. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Jones, Reece, ed. Open Borders: In Defense of Free Movement. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019. Kessler, Rebecca. “The Most Extreme Migration on Earth?” Science, June 7, 2011. Kirkbride, Hilary. “What Are the Public Health Benefits of Screening Migrants for Infectious Diseases?” European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, Amsterdam, April 12, 2016.

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Ahead of them, to the north and west, lay 1.6 million square miles of the European continent, comprising over two dozen countries that had maintained open borders since 1985. Streams of migrants like Haqyar who landed in the southern border countries such as Greece or Italy continued their journeys north unbothered by border authorities at checkpoints demanding papers, heading into the more prosperous parts of the continent, where they could apply for asylum and find jobs, housing, and social connections. But by the time Haqyar’s family made it over the Mediterranean, the borders had closed. Facing hundreds of thousands of newcomers, the governments of Europe changed their minds18 about their open-borders agreement. By 2016, officials had erected border checkpoints around Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, and Sweden.

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Frey Lindsay, “Opposition to the Global Compact for Migration Is Just Sound and Fury,” Forbes, November 13, 2018; “Portugal Approves Plan to Implement Global Compact on Migration,” Famagusta Gazette, August 2, 2019; Lex Rieffel, “The Global Compact on Migration: Dead on Arrival?” Brookings Institution, December 12, 2018; Edith M. Lederer, “UN General Assembly Endorses Global Migration Accord,” Associated Press, December 19, 2018. The militarized borders that bar human movement Jones, Open Borders; John Washington, “What Would an ‘Open Borders’ World Actually Look Like?” Nation, April 24, 2019. The wall itself exudes death Matthew Suarez, interview by author, March 6, 2018. INDEX Note: page numbers in italics refer to figures. Aegean Sea, migrants crossing, here, here African Americans migration northward, here number brought to United States as slaves, here and white concerns about miscegenation, here and World War I intelligence tests, here African Union, and Great Green Wall, here Agassiz, Louis, here, here albinism and early racial taxonomies, here and early theories of skin color, here alien species advantages of, here breeding with native species, here as common and largely beneficial, here as concept muddied by migration, here damage done by, here displacement of native species, here, here early research on destructiveness of, here efforts to purge, in Hawaii, here, here labeling of climate-driven migrants as, here as percentage of species, here positive effects of, here, here prejudice against, here, here, here, here recent reevaluation of impact of, here synergistic relationship between, here U.S.

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

There was a perfectly good case for doing right by them while also embracing resolute enforcement, a case Obama gestured toward early in his presidency, yet which open borders activists came to angrily reject in its waning days. The result is that immigration policies championed by liberals and centrists as recently as the 2000s are now routinely denounced as unacceptably extreme. Immigration policy is not about whether to be welcoming or hard-hearted. Short of absolutely open borders, which most advocates of more open borders at least claim to reject, it is about compromise. Like it or not, we need to weigh competing interests and moral goods, and to adjust our approach over time.

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Surely something so personal and strange as to defy generalization or some specific public policy response. So you’d think my sympathies would be with America’s growing army of open borders activists, who call for ending all deportations and adopting ever more permissive immigration policies. Many of them are Americans like me, with recent immigration in their families, and I understand where they are coming from. But I noticed a contradiction in the arguments I was hearing for more open borders, which led me to part ways with the pro-immigration activists. There is a yawning chasm separating standard-issue immigration enthusiasts, who insist with a straight face that more open immigration policies will have absolutely no negative consequences, and an emerging class of intellectuals I call the bullet-biters: serious, rigorous, thoughtful immigration advocates who recognize that if the United States is going to welcome a far larger number of low-skill immigrants, we Americans will have to transform our welfare state, and we might even have to countenance the creation of a new class of guest workers who would be permanently barred from citizenship.

…

“Qatar to approve permanent residency for some experts.” Al Jazeera, August 3, 2017. www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/08/qatar-approve-permanent-residency-expats-170803095052801.html. 48. Ruhs, Martin. The Price of Rights. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. 49. Matthews, Dylan. “The case for open borders.” Vox, December 15, 2014. www.vox.com/2014/9/13/6135905/open-borders-bryan-caplan-interview-gdp-double. 50. Conn, David. “Thousands of Qatar World Cup workers ‘subjected to life-threatening heat.’” The Guardian, September 26, 2017. www.theguardian.com/football/2017/sep/27/thousands-qatar-world-cup-workers-life-threatening-heat. 51.

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

Within a year he had formed an improbable and short-lived alliance with Margaret Thatcher, which had important long-term consequences. Delors hit upon the idea that the next great project for Europe should be to create a genuine common market by ripping up the rules and regulations that still inhibited cross-border trade across Europe. He would focus on the “four freedoms”—freedom of movement of people, capital, goods, and services. To achieve his goal, Delors needed the backing of the political leaders of the European nations. He could count on the backing of his sponsor, President Mitterrand, and Chancellor Kohl of Germany was already a supporter. It was Margaret Thatcher’s decision to embrace the creation of a true European market that was critical to Delors’s success in pushing through the Single European Act of 1986, which removed many of the remaining barriers to free trade in Europe.

…

In the United States, the conclusion of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Canada and Mexico led Ross Perot, a third-party presidential candidate in 1992, to predict a “giant sucking sound” of American jobs heading south across the border. On the Republican right, Pat Buchanan took on the internationalism of President George H. W. Bush with a raw nationalism that made a great play of the threat to American jobs. Buchanan complained: “Having declared free trade and open borders to be America’s policy, why are we surprised that corporate executives padlocked their plants in the Rust Belt and moved overseas … firing twenty-dollar an hour Americans and hiring fifty-cent an hour Asians?”5 Both Buchanan and Perot made a major impact on American politics. But neither achieved a decisive breakthrough.

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All of her most important policies flowed from her fundamental belief in small government: tax cutting, privatization, deregulation, an assault on inflation, and on trade union power. All were intended to weaken the state and boost private enterprise. One of her very first acts as prime minister was to embrace the judgments and discipline of the market by lifting exchange controls, allowing the free movement of currency in and out of Britain. It was a very bold act that her first chancellor, Geoffrey Howe, likened to walking off a cliff—just to see what happened.8 The Thatcher government’s removal of exchange controls in 1979 was widely emulated around the world and so was crucial to the increase in international capital mobility that underpinned globalization.

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle

2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, David Graeber, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, George Floyd, George Gilder, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kitchen Debate, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shock, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Powell Memorandum, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, super pumped, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

But it is time to bring the project of economic transformation more into focus, to give it the kind of careful examination it deserves, and to adjust our views of late twentieth-century America accordingly. A focus on neoliberalism can help us do that.3 Neoliberalism is a creed that prizes free trade and the free movement of capital, goods, and people. It celebrates deregulation as an economic good that results when governments can no longer interfere with the operation of markets. It valorizes cosmopolitanism as a cultural achievement, the product of open borders and the consequent voluntary mixing of large numbers of diverse peoples. It hails globalization as a win-win position that both enriches the West (the cockpit of neoliberalism) while also bringing an unprecedented level of prosperity to the rest of the world.

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His deep connection to this world, Michael Cohen observed, put him in close touch “with the tastes of baseball-cap wearing, pickup-driving men who otherwise would seem a million miles away from Trump’s pampered and gilded gold existence.”49 In each of Trump’s three beliefs—that free trade and open borders were harming America, that America should privilege its people of European descent, and that America’s true strength lay in its professional wrestling heartland far more than in the aspirations of America’s coastal elites—we can see an incipient attack on America’s neoliberal order. Trump’s politics challenged neoliberalism’s commitment to the free movement of goods and people across national boundaries, its celebration of the diversity of peoples, and its confidence in the wisdom of highly educated and highly cultured globalized elites.

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., The Port Huron Statement: Sources and Legacies of the New Left’s Founding Manifesto (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); Todd Gitlin: The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1987). 59.On the early New Left, see Maurice Isserman, If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (New York: Basic Books, 1989); Rebecca Klatch, A Generation Divided: The New Left, the New Right, and the 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). On the Free Speech Movement specifically, see W. J. Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War: The 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Robert Cohen and Reginald E. Zelnik, eds., The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Neil J. Smelser, Reflections on the University of California from the Free Speech Movement to the Global University (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). A key figure of the Free Speech Movement in Berkley was Mario Savio, whose impassioned speech from the steps outside Sproul Hall, Berkeley, crystallized the sentiments of the New Left: “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part!

Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City by Richard Sennett

Anthropocene, Big Tech, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, housing crisis, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, open borders, place-making, plutocrats, post-truth, Richard Florida, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, Yochai Benkler

Walking lost its value in this scheme, and the sidewalk became less important than the carriageway, because freedom of movement was equated with speed of movement. This was in one way illogical: in a hurtling carriage you sit immobile, whereas your blood pumps when you use your own two feet. The planners had transferred the biological value of moving freely from the human to the mechanical, yet there was in the ancien régime a good reason for the switch: the immense economic and social gap between people who could afford a carriage and people who could not, and so were forced to walk. The city of fast, free movement was a city for the privileged. What does ‘free movement’ entail? Here there is a distinction between the flâneur who wanders, not quite knowing why or where to go, and the person with a definite goal in mind, like getting from home to work or, in another vein, cruising for sex.

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In Naples, the presence of outsiders, in the form of tourists, brings life to a previously dead street. Images 38–41 make clear that ‘openness’ can be achieved in a variety of ways. 42. The boundary is a closed edge, as in this extreme case in São Paulo. 43. The river of moving traffic is as impermeable a boundary as a solid wall. 44. The open border at the edge of Borough Market, London. This is a porous space. 45. This edge in Mumbai is both open and closed. The train behind the street is a danger zone which residents of the street fear and keep away from, while the street is multifunctional, full of people, at all hours. 46. Place marking: an arbitrary marker of value made in Medellín by the simple, informal gesture of putting a plant in the opening of a dwelling. 47.

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

Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, and Mike Huckabee are all running as heirs to Reagan Republicanism. Yet they’ve fallen over each other in condemnation of President Bush’s attempts to follow the Gipper’s lead on immigration reform. Makes you wonder. No self-respecting free-market adherent would ever dream of supporting laws that interrupt the free movement of goods and services across borders. But when it comes to laws that hamper the free movement of workers who produce those goods and services, too many conservatives today abandon their classical liberal principles. Adam Smith, J. C. L. Sismondi, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill give way to . . . Pat Buchanan. Some of us find this troubling.

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Liberal immigration policies were proof that this country remained a land of opportunity, a nation built on the idea of liberty, not the Blut und Boden European doctrine. Reagan held this view long before he became president, as Lou Cannon, his biographer, has documented. In 1952, when the United States was still under the thumb of highly restrictive immigration quotas enacted in the 1920s, Reagan gave a speech endorsing open borders. In his view, America was “the promised land” for people from “any place in the world.” Reagan said “any person with the courage, with the desire to tear up their roots, to strive for freedom, to attempt and dare to live in a strange land and foreign place, to travel halfway across the world was welcome here.”

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Over the same period, Latin America’s declined from 2.7 to 1.7, and Europe’s effectively fell to 0. Worldwide, the typical woman had five children in 1950. In 1995 she had three. The number necessary just to replace the current generation is 2.1. America is headed in the same general demographic direction, but thanks to our open-border policies, it will take the United States a lot longer to reach the point where immigrant-averse Europe and Asia already have arrived. Between 1950 and 2000, the median age in the United States rose from thirty to thirty-five and is projected to hit forty by 2050. Over the same hundred-year period, however, Europe’s median age is expected to jump from twenty-nine to forty-eight, and Japan’s, from twenty-two to fifty-three.

Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers by Andy Greenberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, air gap, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, call centre, Citizen Lab, clean water, data acquisition, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, false flag, global supply chain, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, machine readable, Mikhail Gorbachev, no-fly zone, open borders, pirate software, pre–internet, profit motive, ransomware, RFID, speech recognition, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, tech worker, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, zero day

But there was a more fundamental roadblock to a digital Geneva Convention, according to Joshua Corman, who was at the time of Smith’s speech the director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council: Countries like the United States still think they benefit more from their own ability to wage cyberwar than they would from depriving their enemies of that power. “There’s no appetite to go straight to the Geneva Convention. None,” Corman told me. “The Microsoft thing is dead on arrival, because there’s no way we’re going to give up that freedom of movement.” American officials, Corman explained, still look at the NSA’s superior capabilities and believe that cyberwar favors those with the best offense. What they don’t consider is the degree to which the West has become dependent on the internet and automation—vastly more than adversaries like North Korea or even Russia.

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The revelations included eighty pages of closely guarded speeches Clinton had given to private Wall Street audiences. One included a reference to politicians’ need to have separate “public” and “private” positions, which her critics interpreted as an admission of deception. Another seemed to call for “open borders,” enraging immigration hard-liners. The daily media bombs would keep the campaign off balance through its final days.*1 The Podesta hack also eradicated any last doubts about Fancy Bear’s role: The security firm Secureworks found the link to the fake Gmail site that had tricked Podesta was created with an account on the URL-shortening service Bitly that had also been used to target hundreds of other Fancy Bear victims, from Ukrainian officials to Russia-focused academics and journalists.

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This time, in a blatant mockery: Andy Greenberg, “Russian Hackers Get Bolder in Anti-Doping Agency Attack,” Wired, Sept. 14, 2016, www.wired.com. The site, of course: Raphael Satter, “Inside Story: How Russia Hacked the Democrats’ Email,” Associated Press, Nov. 4, 2017, www.apnews.com. Another seemed to call for “open borders”: “HRC Paid Speeches,” email via WikiLeaks, sent Jan. 25, 2016, wikileaks.org, archived at bit.ly/2RRtcNA. The security firm Secureworks found the link: “Threat Group 4127 Targets Hillary Clinton Presidential Campaign,” June 16, 2016, www.secureworks.com, archived at bit.ly/2RecMtu. “I love WikiLeaks!”

The Other Israel: voices of refusal and dissent by Tom Śegev, Roane Carey, Jonathan Shainin

bread and circuses, conceptual framework, facts on the ground, Internet Archive, open borders, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

It may be permanent (as between Israel and the territories) or may be decreed for a particular military or security purpose of undetermined length and severity (as in the siege of Palestinian cities, towns, and villages). The closure in all its forms prevents the development of a coherent Palestinian economy. Discriminatory and often arbitrary systems of work, entrance, and travel permits further restrict freedom of movement both within the country and abroad. In mid-May 2002 the government announced the formal division of the West Bank into eight cantons (Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarm, Qalqilyah, Ramallah, Jericho, Bethlehem, and Hebron), with movement among them allowed only by permits from the Civil Administration.

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As a result of the Palestinian armed struggle against the IsraeH occupation, the occupation is now the overt, official state of affairs, and can no longer be denied by anyone. Despite the simulation of a "peace process," despite the doctrinal vagueness, despite the hybrid situations, the mixed areas and the open borders, the conditions are clearer today than they have ever been: Reconciliation between Jews and Palestinians will occur only if and when the occupation ends, in the fullest sense of the word. The occupation is defined according to the borders determined in the cease-fire agreement at the end of the 1948 war.

Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990 by Katja Hoyer

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, land reform, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, open borders, Prenzlauer Berg, remote working, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, union organizing, work culture

Merkel simply pretended she did not know what these things meant as she spoke no Polish and got away with it.58 In the summer of 1983, she embarked on an even bigger adventure: a three-week journey through the Soviet republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, some of the few areas of the bloc she had not already visited. This was also her riskiest trip. While study stints in Moscow, Leningrad and Prague were officially sanctioned and organized, Merkel wanted to tour the southern tip of the Soviet Union independently, which was difficult to do as freedom of movement in the USSR on official visas was extremely limited. Tours had to be officially organized and planned in advance, backed up by official invitations. It was an open secret among East German backpackers that if people claimed they wanted to travel to Bulgaria over land and sea, transiting through Poland and Ukraine, they would be issued with a three-day transit visa for the USSR, which could be used to get in.

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The brief lull in the emigration figures in 1958, when Ulbricht had been forced to slow the pace of his collectivization and nationalization programmes, indicate that there was willingness, even from the middle classes, to tolerate lower living standards within reason. There were many in the politburo who argued for moderation – Herrnstadt, Schmidt and Wollweber for example. But Ulbricht systematically sidelined dissenting voices and created a Stalinist regime that tolerated no discussion. However, it is questionable if an open border between the two Germanies would ever have been feasible. Let’s imagine for a moment that Ulbricht had set up a moderate, social democratic system with strong state intervention on a social, economic and cultural level as some reformers in the SED demanded. Workers might have supported this as it afforded them new opportunities and greatly improved social mobility.

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Berlin’s status as an occupied city, jointly governed by powers locked in ideological conflict, became increasingly unsustainable as trust broke down and the Cold War reached new heights of hostility. On 4 June 1961, Khrushchev demanded that Berlin be made a neutral city and all foreign armed forces withdrawn from it. Moscow regarded West Berlin as a splinter in the heart of socialist Eastern Europe and a security risk due to the open border. At the same time, the West understood that withdrawal from their sectors of Berlin exposed them to a takeover. The stalemate of this Berlin Crisis made Ulbricht’s long-standing ambition to close the last open passage between East and West palatable to Washington, Moscow and Bonn. The clumsy words that Ulbricht finally found in answer to Doherr’s question would go down in history as one of the most tragicomical lies ever told.

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society by Eric Posner, E. Weyl

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, augmented reality, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Branko Milanovic, business process, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, feminist movement, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gamification, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global macro, global supply chain, guest worker program, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, market bubble, market design, market friction, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, negative equity, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, plutocrats, pre–internet, radical decentralization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Rory Sutherland, search costs, Second Machine Age, second-price auction, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, telepresence, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, Zipcar

Before Migration Mattered While the early Radicals passionately advocated free trade, they said little about migration.5 This might seem odd: the logic of free migration and free trade is the same, namely, that the expansion of economic openness generates wealth for nearly everyone. Some of these thinkers also mentioned, in passing, that they supported the free movement of people, not just goods. For example, both Smith and David Ricardo argued for free mobility of workers from the countryside to the city and across occupations, and in an offhand way remarked that the same should apply across borders. They also emphasized the importance of the free movement of ideas. Yet free trade overwhelmingly dominated free migration in their thought. One reason for the emphasis of trade over migration was that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the gains from trade were far more important than the gains from migration.

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The Radicals complained that the aristocracy controlled the government, causing it to protect the aristocracy’s monopolies by restricting markets and closing borders to trade. They understood that economic privilege and political privilege were two sides of the same coin and thus fought with equal vigor for competitive democratic elections through the expansion of the franchise and for open borders to international trade. These pioneers won many victories, but they soon came to realize their initial proposals did not go far enough. At the same time as markets for land and labor advanced, industrial capitalism showed a tendency toward new forms of monopoly power over factories, railroads, and natural resources.

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If historical experience is any guide, gains to those who stay in poor countries would be equally dramatic, as most migrants remit a large fraction of their income to the countries they came from.18 In sharp contrast to trade, these gains have transformative potential for global well-being, if they can be harnessed and shared.19 Why Not Just Expand Existing Migration? Some scholars who are aware of these numbers have declared that opening borders is the only morally acceptable response. If countries allowed unlimited immigration, then the poor workers in capital-starved countries would migrate to wealthy countries like the United States, where their wages would be much higher. While the huge surge of migration would reduce the wages of workers in wealthy countries, global well-being would increase enormously.

Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding--And How We Can Improve the World Even More by Charles Kenny

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Jenner, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, inventory management, Kickstarter, Milgram experiment, off grid, open borders, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Robert Solow, seminal paper, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, very high income, Washington Consensus, X Prize

(A comparatively recent event extending global population coverage was the accession of the People’s Republic of China in 1971.) Furthermore, the great majority of the world’s constitutions include lengthy sections regarding the rights of individuals. Take, for example, Zimbabwe’s constitution, which guarantees liberty, freedom of conscience, speech, movement, and assembly, and due and rapid process under law, all while it bans discriminatory laws, undue search, slavery, and forced labor alongside torture and degrading punishment. Of course, the example of Zimbabwe also illustrates how limited the impact of such language can be on behavior.

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Migrants themselves see considerably improved health and education outcomes, and there are spillover effects in terms of quality-of-life impact in their countries of origin.2 Furthermore, from a simple economic perspective, borders that are open to people, like borders that are open to goods, are likely to be good for the countries on the receiving end. At the extreme, it may be that the social dislocation and adjustment costs of a rapid move to fully open borders are high. But most countries are a long way from that risk. Pritchett’s 3 percent solution, especially if focused on immigrants from some of the world’s poorest countries, would have a dramatic impact on development and should be plausible. In the United States, for example, approximately 10 percent of the population is (already) foreign-born without any apparent disintegration in the social or political fabric of the country.

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In the United States, for example, approximately 10 percent of the population is (already) foreign-born without any apparent disintegration in the social or political fabric of the country. And there is a strong moral case for the freer flow of peoples across borders. Again, why should the villager from Achalla be prevented from free movement by lines drawn up by Europeans 150 years ago? Turning to a morally more complex area of international relations, we find that armed force has ended periods of mass murder and returned a semblance of peace to Uganda (removing Idi Amin) and Cambodia (the Khmer Rouge). And state collapse related to civil war is one of the few shocks powerful enough to considerably slow progress in quality of life over the medium term, suggesting the importance of stability to broad-based development.

Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel by Max Blumenthal

airport security, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, centre right, cognitive dissonance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, European colonialism, facts on the ground, gentrification, ghettoisation, housing crisis, intentional community, knowledge economy, megacity, moral panic, Mount Scopus, nuclear ambiguity, open borders, plutocrats, surplus humans, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, urban planning, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

With sustained marketing campaigns, the Jaffan orange became one of the most widely identified symbols of Israel in the West—and one of the few that carried no military association. From 1948 to 1966, the remaining Palestinian residents of Jaffa were confined to the ghetto of Ajami under emergency military regulations imposed by the state’s purportedly socialist leadership. Their freedom of movement was severely restricted by guard dogs and barbed wire for the first two years of military rule. “Before Zionism came to us, we didn’t even know what a ghetto was,” remarked Sami Shehadeh, director of the Popular Committee for the Defense of Jaffa’s Homes. Following the imposition of martial law, the new State of Israel sent its army to conduct ruthless hunts for “infiltrators” inside Arab communities.

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The outlawing of Al-Ard was validated by the Supreme Court, which justified its ruling on the basis of “defensive democracy.” “I did what the people wanted,” boasted Justice Agranat, who delivered the majority decision. As soon as Al-Ard was driven underground, its leaders were arrested, imprisoned, and released only after the imposition of severe restrictions on their freedom of movement. By the 1980s, in the shadow of the transformative trauma of the Land Day massacre, much of the Arab public inside Israel embarked on a process of Palestinianization, replacing the Labor Party’s cast of collaborators with more assertive figures like Nazareth’s new mayor, Toufiq Zayyad, who were determined to act in concert with their brethren who lived under occupation and in refugee camps around the Arab world.

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Diyala was raised in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, a wealthy area until the Jerusalem Municipality began evicting its Palestinian residents and replacing them with ultra-Orthodox settlers. With her status as a Palestinian resident of Jerusalem, she was granted automatic Jordanian citizenship, entitling her to more freedom of movement than West Bank Palestinians, but few of the rights enjoyed by Jewish Israeli citizens. In order to keep her residency status, she had to abide by the Israeli Interior Ministry’s discriminatory “center of life” policy, which required her to maintain a constant presence within the borders of the Jerusalem municipality.

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

., Shelter from the Storm: Policy Options to Address Climate Induced Displacement from the Northern Triangle (University Network, Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic, Harvard Law School Immigration Project, Yale Immigrant Justice Project, and Yale Environmental Law Association, April 2021), https://www.humanrightsnetwork.org/s/Shelter_Final.pdf. 5 Katrina M. Wyman, “Ethical Duties to Climate Migrants,” in Research Handbook on Climate Change, Migration and the Law, eds. Benoît Mayer and François Crépeau (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2017), 347–75; Joseph Nevins, “Migration as Reparations,” in Open Borders: In Defense of Free Movement, ed. Reece Jones (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2019), 129–40; Aaron Saad, “Toward a Justice Framework for Understanding and Responding to Climate Migration and Displacement,” Environmental Justice 10, no. 4 (August 2017): 98–101, https://doi.org/10.1089/env.2016.0033; Jesse J.

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., “Global, Regional, and National Burden of Mortality Associated with Non-Optimal Ambient Temperatures from 2000 to 2019: A Three-Stage Modelling Study,” Lancet Planetary Health 5, no. 7 (July 2021): e415–e425, https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(21)00081-4. 7 “Open Borders: The Case,” Open Borders, accessed August 27, 2021, https://openborders.info/; Zoey Poll, “The Case for Open Borders.” New Yorker, February 20, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/the-case-for-open-borders; Ben Ehrenreich, “Open Borders Must Be Part of Any Response to the Climate Crisis,” Nation, June 6, 2019, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/climate-change-refugees-open-borders/. 8 Adrian Raftery, “The Dip in the US Birthrate Isn’t a Crisis, but the Fall in Immigration May Be,” Conversation, June 21, 2021, https://theconversation.com/the-dip-in-the-us-birthrate-isnt-a-crisis-but-the-fall-in-immigration-may-be-161169; Damien Cave, Emma Bubola, and Choe Sang-Hun, “Long Slide Looms for World Population, with Sweeping Ramifications,” New York Times, May 22, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/22/world/global-population-shrinking.html. 9 “Why 100 Million?

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Consider that in 2020 there were more than five million global deaths attributed to extreme temperatures caused by climate change; COVID-19, by comparison, caused an estimated 3.5 million deaths that same year.6 It’s reasonable to hope that, as climate change becomes an even bigger threat to global health, the world will rise to the occasion and not choose to leave people trapped behind borders. Or the solution may be even more radical than climate reparations. There’s a growing political movement in support of permanently open borders worldwide, in recognition of the fundamental human right to move freely and seek out safe environments. Advocates of open borders propose a system in which individuals who pass a criminal background check are able to move as freely from nation to nation as people in the United States can move from state to state today. Individuals would be able to work and receive social services such as education and basic health care anywhere, regardless of citizenship, although some rights and services—such as voting or a universal basic income—would be limited to citizens.

ZeroZeroZero by Roberto Saviano

Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, call centre, credit crunch, double entry bookkeeping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, Kinder Surprise, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, open borders, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Steve Jobs, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

When you grow up in certain places, you end up adapting to the reality around you. Doña Lucia realizes that bell jars are pathetically fragile. It’s also true that those early days, when sudden success threatened to upset an adolescent’s precarious balance, are gone. In fact, Natalia’s celebrity was precisely what helped her. A star enjoys less freedom of movement than a normal person. In order to make her life bearable she frequents the same places where, mainly, people learn to pretend not to notice her, to treat her normally. And so, a gray area worms its way into Lucia Gaviria’s vigilance. The gym. Keeping in shape is a professional necessity for Natalia, and besides, she really loves physical activity.

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With El Tigre she makes a qualitative leap that allows her to negotiate directly with the Colombian suppliers. So Sandra, El Padrino’s niece, becomes la Reina, the Queen. The Queen of the Pacific knows how to exploit clichés. A woman is weak, so there’s no point in threatening her: For the Queen this means freedom of movement. A woman doesn’t know how to negotiate with men: The Queen takes advantage of the cartel emissaries’ embarrassment when faced with a beautiful woman in a low-cut dress. Now they all have to kneel to her, honor her. She coordinates shipments from Colombia from her luxurious headquarters in Guadalajara and launders the earnings, which get bigger every year.

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When the Soviet regime collapsed, imports proliferated, prices dropped, and the drugs of the West—cocaine and ecstasy—finally made their way onto the market. At first cocaine use was limited to those Russians who could afford to spend the equivalent of three months’ average salary. There was an invasion of substances that found fertile ground in part because of the breakup of neighboring states: wars, open borders, and an army of illegal immigrants unable to find work in the legal economy. For many of them—as in the rest of the world—drug dealing was the only way to earn a living. But the decisive step came with the opening toward the Western Hemisphere, first the United States and Canada, then Latin America and the Caribbean.

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

The criminalization of homeless people also violates the International Covenant Against Torture and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,18 which states that all people have a right to housing, that governments have an obligation to put the wellbeing of people above concerns about disorder and aesthetics, and that homelessness exerts a tremendous cost on those subjected to it. Criminalization efforts exacerbate that cost without housing any more people. International human rights law also gives people the right to freedom of movement. Statutes that attempt to restrict homeless people’s access to certain areas through loitering laws and probation conditions that restrict access to certain areas may violate this. Laws that have a discriminatory purpose and outcome in terms of race and property may also violate international treaties as well as the International Declaration of Human Rights.

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These operations represented the first real effort to close the southern border.12 It involved several new initiatives, including significantly increasing the amount of fencing, immediately deporting immigrants living in the US for a long list of major and minor criminal infractions, creating immigration courts in border areas to facilitate quicker processing and deportation of captured migrants, and creating a massive system for identifying migrants through biometric data collection. The latter two initiatives became the basis for ramping up criminal prosecutions of migrants for crossing the border without authorization. This process intensified after 9/11. Even though President George W. Bush had campaigned on a platform of more open borders, he oversaw additional fencing, increased Border Patrol hiring, and the intensification of the criminalization of migrants. As a result, the policy shifted from what was euphemistically called “catch and release” to one of “capture and hold.” For decades, most migrants caught crossing the border were asked to waive their right to a hearing to challenge their deportation and then quickly returned to Mexico, spending as little time in custody as possible, which was generally advantageous for both the migrant and the US government.

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

A solid two-thirds of Hungarians polled during this period felt that their government was doing the right thing in refusing to agree to quota numbers issued from Brussels or Berlin. And yet one of Hungary’s most famous sons disagreed. The billionaire financier George Soros spent considerable sums of money during 2015 on pressure groups and institutions making the case for open borders and free movement of migrants into and around Europe. As well as a website called ‘Welcome2EU’, his Open Society foundation published millions of leaflets informing migrants of what to do. These informed them of how to get into Europe, what their rights were once there, and what the authorities could and could not do.

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Partly it is because most branches of European Christianity have lost the confidence to proselytise or even believe in their own message. For the Church of Sweden, the Church of England, the German Lutheran Church and many other branches of European Christianity, the message of the religion has become a form of left-wing politics, diversity action and social welfare projects. Such churches argue for ‘open borders’ yet are circumspect about quoting the texts they once preached as revealed. There is another cause, too. The critical analysis of and scholarship around the roots of Christianity has not yet occurred to the same degree with the roots of Islam. A worldwide campaign of intimidation and murder has been exceptionally successful in holding back that tide.

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Any sensible policy on immigration and integration would have taken into account that although this ship of Europe may occasionally save people in distress from the seas around us, there is a point – when we take too many people on board, take them on too quickly, or take on those with bad intent – at which we will capsize the only vessel that we, the peoples of Europe, have. During the migration crisis it was not only ‘open borders’ activists who believed that bringing the whole world on board was a sensible policy. It was members of the Greek government and of governing parties across Europe. Some believed it as ideology. Others simply could find no reasonable moral way to deny entry to the world’s inhabitants. Others flailed around for an excuse.

The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere by Kevin Carey

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon-based life, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, declining real wages, deliberate practice, discrete time, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, Fairchild Semiconductor, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, informal economy, invention of the printing press, inventory management, John Markoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, natural language processing, Network effects, open borders, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush

It all happened more inadvertently than anyone imagines, a combination of first-mover advantage, just the right sequence of industrialization and globalization, Cold War government spending, the rise of the information economy, and not getting bombed into rubble during World War II. But Real Harvard continued getting richer even as Imaginary Harvard grew larger and weirder and more important, because the hybrid university severely restricts your freedom of movement, and really there was nothing else to do. It’s hard to argue for dramatic change when the fourth Class of ’16 is lining up outside the gates—and there were tens of thousands of young people who hoped they’d be part of that group. That’s the way it was until 2011, when the one university in the best position to challenge Harvard for supremacy decided to take the most important attribute about itself and give it away for free to anyone, anywhere

…

Normally, administrators have a lot of leverage in negotiations with faculty. In most academic disciplines, the fabulous university life of the mind can only be led at a university, and Stanford sits at the very top of the ladder of prestige. But here again, Stanford’s fabulously successful postwar policy of open borders between scholarship and commerce proved to be a liability, as did its location in the heart of Silicon Valley. Unlike a professor of comparative literature, Sebastian Thrun had another organization he could work for that was just as wealthy and famous and prestigious in its way: Google. Also unlike a professor of comparative literature, Thrun had money from his various tech-related activities.

The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008 by Thomas E. Ricks

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Berlin Wall, classic study, disinformation, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, interchangeable parts, It's morning again in America, open borders, operational security, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, traveling salesman

“We were engaged in a running battle with AQI as they tried to establish holes in the barriers while we tried to keep them intact,” he said. Taking similar measures in al Anbar Province, the Marines found that the steps to limit the mobility of insurgents produced some unexpected side benefits. “The insurgency is like a shark,” a Marine intelligence report stated, “it has to move to survive. Cut off its freedom of movement and its loses its effectiveness.” As the fighters and death squads shifted to new locations, they were forced to communicate, and signals interception enabled the U.S. military to find them, or to eavesdrop on their reports and planning sessions. Trying to escape the new constraints, some insurgents moved out of the cities and into the desert.

…

David Goldich, a smart young Marine in al Anbar Province, recalled simply seeing local guys showing up with weapons and setting up a rudimentary checkpoint on a main road. To a Marine eye, they didn’t look impressive—“unshaven men wearing civilian clothes carrying rusty AK-47s milling about,” he wrote. But he soon concluded that “they are worth their weight in gold. . . . an amazing force multiplier that denied the enemy freedom of movement in a manner we could not.” They spoke the language, they knew the area, and they knew who wasn’t from it. Higher-ups wouldn’t approve giving supplies to the new guards, so Goldich’s unit decided to help them out and scrounged weapons and food for the men and bullet-proof glass and concertina wire for their checkpoints.

…

“The surge has done incredible things in Iraq but it is not enough,” he wrote after returning home in the summer of 2008. “Change of the sort envisioned by most Americans . . . requires a long-term commitment, for as long as five decades, with enough American forces to assist the unprepared and sometimes lawless security forces while protecting the country’s open borders.” AT THE END OF THE RAINBOW? Nor, at the end of many more years of struggle, is the outcome likely to be something Americans recognize as victory. Instead these additional years of sacrifice promise to be made for markedly limited objectives. A senior intelligence officer in Iraq described the long-term American goal as “a stable Iraq that is unified, at peace with its neighbors, and is able to police its internal affairs, so it isn’t a sanctuary for al Qaeda.

Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David by Lawrence Wright

Albert Einstein, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Mahatma Gandhi, Mount Scopus, open borders, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Suez crisis 1956, Yom Kippur War

His uncle Chaim Weizmann was Israel’s first president.2 Young Ezer grew up in Haifa, a mixed city. His mother spoke fluent Arabic and endeavored to teach it to her children—with imperfect success in his case. His father was a German agronomist who became a forestry officer in the northern part of Palestine. “We were seasoned travelers in a world of open borders, not yet sealed by Arab-Jewish hatred,” Weizman later recalled. His ideal of living in harmony with his Arab neighbors was abruptly shattered in May 1948, when Egypt and other neighboring Arab armies attacked as soon as the State of Israel was declared. “As for the Egyptians, I simply couldn’t grasp what had gotten into them,” he would later write.

…

Under the 1947 UN Partition Plan, which created the State of Israel, Jerusalem was envisioned to be an international city that was not under the rule of any other entity. Begin, however, was not willing to budge on anything having to do with Jerusalem. What peace means. In addition to ending the state of war, there should also be trade, open borders and waterways, and an exchange of ambassadors, although Sadat sourly suggested he was reconsidering diplomatic recognition because of Begin’s poor attitude. Refugees. There were approximately 750,000 Palestinians who fled during the war of Israel’s creation in 1948, and another 300,000 or so who became refugees in 1967.

…

On the question of the Sinai settlements, however, Barak said he could not even discuss it because Begin felt so strongly about the issue. That very day Begin had vowed to Brzezinski, “My right eye will fall out, my right hand will fall off, before I ever agree to the dismantling of a single Jewish settlement.” In that case, Baz said, Egypt would not commit to open borders and full diplomatic recognition. By now night had fallen. The men were discussing the problem of refugees when Baz asserted that Israel could not be a part of deciding which Palestinians could return to the West Bank. Carter set his pen down and stared at Baz. In such moments, Carter doesn’t shout, but his blue eyes blaze and his fury is clearly apparent.

Checkpoint Charlie by Iain MacGregor

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Bob Geldof, British Empire, index card, Kickstarter, Live Aid, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, open borders, Ronald Reagan, Ted Sorensen

Looking at the elongated hut, Haddock then remarked that the unimpressive appearance of the latest MP station, which was installed in 1986, disappointed many visitors. “There was something unfinished, something temporary about it,” he said. “… These impressions, however, were altogether accurate. For the temporariness of the structure reflects the permanence of the determination of free men to uphold the freedom of movement in Berlin.” James Baker and Hurd nodded at these words, while Generals Corbett and Cann looked ahead steadfastly; though they had heard these words practiced days before, the message the words conveyed was both touching and honest. Haddock then turned to the honor guard and other military personnel in the audience.

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As Walter Ulbricht tightened his grip on all facets of the GDR and the standard of living decreased under the economic constraints of a “command economy” through the latter half of the 1950s, so the migration to the West of the best of his workforce rapidly increased, escaping via the safest route—through the open borders of Berlin. The journalist and writer Stefan Heym, a committed antifascist who had relocated back to East Berlin from the USA in 1953, could see the writing on the wall. “The people in the East looked toward the West with longing. They would have liked to have had the same comforts, the same goods, the same chances in life.

…

“It was a scene of intense activity and great tension,” he recalled, “with uniformed men everywhere, all heavily armed; everybody seemed to be involved—the Nationale Volksarmee [NVA], the Volkspolizei, the Grenzpolizei, the Betriebskampfgruppen [factory fighting units]; even the Freie Deutsche Jugend [Free German Youth, FDJ] movement were seen to be in command of armored vehicles.” Richards noticed that the vast majority of East Berliners seemed as scared and confused as the civilians in the British Sector. But though he was still unsure of what the actual intention of all this activity meant for West Berlin, he came to the conclusion it didn’t mean an invasion.

The Emperor Far Away: Travels at the Edge of China by David Eimer

back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, British Empire, car-free, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, mass immigration, megacity, offshore financial centre, open borders, South China Sea

I just felt sad she’d been away so long.’ Many ethnic Koreans leave China in search of better-paid jobs. At any time, one in ten Chinese Koreans are working overseas, mostly in South Korea but also in Japan. Obtaining a passport is easy for them – another sign of how trusted they are. Yet that freedom of movement is also contributing to their declining population because, inevitably, some of those migrant workers never return to Dongbei. Assimilation with the Han is why Koreans now make up only 40 per cent of Yanbian’s population, down from two-thirds when the prefecture was established. Many Korean schools are shutting down, both because there are fewer children to attend them and due to the fact that the offspring of Han–Korean couples tend to be raised speaking Mandarin and so are sent to Chinese schools.

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The largely unsecured borders are demarcated by narrow rivers, or run through rainforest, making moving between Banna, Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam easy. In some places, it is possible to drift across the frontiers without knowing you have done so. While it is impossible for an army even the size of China’s to monitor Yunnan’s frontiers, Banna’s near-open borders are in part due to Beijing’s belief that the minorities here pose no threat to its hegemony. Unlike the Uighurs with their stealthy separatist groups, there is no Dai or Akha nationalist movement. And while the Dalai Lama sits across the border from Tibet, along with tens of thousands of exiles, mobilising international support for the Tibetan cause, no single leader could ever unify Banna’s numerous minorities.

Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again by Brittany Kaiser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asian financial crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, dark pattern, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Etonian, fake news, haute couture, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Nelson Mandela, off grid, open borders, public intellectual, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Russian election interference, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, the High Line, the scientific method, WeWork, WikiLeaks, you are the product, young professional

As the result of something called the Maastricht Treaty, England had been part of the European Union since the late 1990s, but there had long been widespread disagreement over the benefits of an open-bordered and unified Europe and Britain’s participation in it. To what advantage was it for Britain to share a currency and a market with other European nations? The EU was predicated on noble ideas: economic equity across Europe, nondiscrimination, and the shared values of democracy and human rights. It offered freedom of movement without internal borders and the enhancement of solidarity among nations. Indeed, for its commitment to peace and prosperity among its member states, the Swedish Academy had awarded the European Union the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012.6 But more and more Britons had become nativists and separatists.

Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander's War in Iraq by Peter R. Mansoor, Donald Kagan, Frederick Kagan

Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, central bank independence, disinformation, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, HESCO bastion, indoor plumbing, land reform, no-fly zone, open borders, operational security, RAND corporation, rolling blackouts, Saturday Night Live, zero-sum game

U.S. and Iraqi forces would erect cement barriers surrounding a dozen major neighborhoods in Baghdad to control access and keep extremists from flowing either into or out of them. Walls would similarly surround major market areas to prevent car and truck bombs from slaughtering innocent civilians. Checkpoints would deny insurgents and terrorists freedom of movement. Baghdad became a city besieged, a tragic but necessary measure if Iraqi political leaders were to gain the time needed to halt the war through political compromise and national reconciliation. Coalition forces in 2004 had vacated their smaller forward operating bases inside Iraq’s cities in favor of large “super bases” on the periphery.

…

On the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the coalition was in danger of losing the war of perceptions. On the night Iron Promise began, a car bomb outside the Jabal Lebanon Hotel in the zone of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team leveled the building, killing seven people and wounding twenty-seven. Freedom of movement for foreigners and reporters was increasingly constrained by the danger of insurgent ambush and kidnapping. The coalition was showing signs of cracks, as the newly elected Spanish Prime Minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, had just announced his government’s intention to withdraw all Spanish forces from Iraq in the wake of the Madrid train bombings on March 11 by Islamist terrorists.

…

When planning assumptions about the postregime environment proved invalid, formations that had been meticulously organized, trained, and equipped for the march through the Republican Guard to Baghdad found themselves in an urban guerrilla conflict for which they were far 108 Bad Karmah less well prepared. Shortage of forces left large swaths of Iraq untouched by a coalition presence and kept open borders through which foreign fighters and terrorists would soon filter. Iraqis poured into the streets to loot and pillage any facility left unguarded, which, given the rapid collapse of the Ba’athist regime, included nearly all government buildings. Not only would the coalition face a lack of civil servants to run a government, but the seat of government itself would require massive rebuilding and refurbishment.

Protest and Power: The Battle for the Labour Party by David Kogan

Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Brixton riot, centre right, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, falling living standards, financial independence, full employment, imperial preference, Jeremy Corbyn, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, open borders, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War

‘Best endeavours’ would be used to complete the trade negotiations before July 2020, only eighteen months after March 2019. That was a huge aspiration given the complexity of the potential deal. The Good Friday agreement and an open border with Ireland would still have to be guaranteed irrespective of when a future trade deal was concluded. A backstop was thus included that guaranteed an open border until a further trade agreement was mutually agreed. The government’s argument was that the backstop would never have to be used, as a deal would be reached before the deadline. This required a leap of faith that May’s critics in the DUP and the ERG were not prepared to grant her.

…

As it became clear that there would be a referendum, Chessum and a few allies decided that there had to be an independent left campaign to focus on the moral issue of free movement challenging the mainstream narrative. Michael Chessum: The idea started immediately after the 2015 general election when a few people decided that the mainstream Remain campaigns were going to be terrible. David Cameron was going to call a referendum at some point. It wasn’t clear when. We thought we had a couple of years to get our act together. It turned out, no. The referendum was going to happen very quickly indeed. Which put him at odds with the official Remain campaign. If free movement’s your moral issue, who’s got the best record on that?

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There was already muted criticism of Momentum and the Labour leadership for the passivity of the party’s stance. The insurgents of 2015 were now the establishment accused of preventing debate. Michael Chessum: We were one of the big stories of conference, but it was the left going for free movement and the right going for single market and neither quite going for an anti-Brexit position. They were coming from the economics angle. We were coming from the free movement angle. But, of course, it got deprioritized by Momentum. As far as I understand it, that decision was taken pretty poorly in a back room and under heavy pressure from LOTO. The left campaign for a second referendum was increasingly frustrated.

The Fifth Domain: Defending Our Country, Our Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats by Richard A. Clarke, Robert K. Knake

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, business intelligence, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, computer vision, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DevOps, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Exxon Valdez, false flag, geopolitical risk, global village, immigration reform, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kubernetes, machine readable, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Morris worm, move fast and break things, Network effects, open borders, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, quantum cryptography, ransomware, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, software as a service, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day

Using malware that homed in on vulnerabilities in popular blogging platforms, the attackers had gained access to large numbers of accounts on servers at hosting providers, companies such as GoDaddy or HostGator, and then used their powerful processors and high bandwidth to generate and deliver attack traffic to the banks. In order to “block” this traffic, the U.S. government would have had to be sitting in between the attacking computers and the target computers. While blocking the attacks sounds appealing, the reality is that the United States has open borders in cyberspace. No agency of the federal government sits at the internet exchange points, where the undersea cables come up onto land, to inspect each packet of internet traffic. Without such a capability, the U.S. government is simply not positioned to block malicious traffic to protect banks or any other companies.

…

Instead of waiting for the internet to disintegrate around us, an alternative strategy would be to exclude those nations that do not respect freedom of expression or privacy rights, that engage in disruptive activity, provide safe havens to criminals, and are not responsive to law-enforcement requests for assistance. In turn, those nations who buy into the vision of an open, interoperable, secure, and reliable internet would maintain and extend the benefits of being connected. What might that look like? A real-world corollary is the European Union’s model of open borders within the Schengen zone. The Schengen Accord created a bloc of countries within Europe where people and goods could travel freely without going through customs and immigration control. It’s why you can drive through countries from Germany to Spain without getting your passport stamped along the way.

…

A Schengen Accord for the internet would allow the free flow of data across borders, harmonizing national laws so that all data that can be legally accessed in one country can also be legally accessed in other member states. To allow for that to take place, stronger mechanisms for handling the bad that comes with the good of open borders in cyberspace must be built. A few years back, such an idea would have been hard to implement. Today, as the European Union looks to be on the verge of getting smaller and U.S.–EU cooperation reaches a new low, it looks all but impossible. Yet the problems that it solves for both commerce and criminal response remain.

One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger by Matthew Yglesias

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, assortative mating, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business logic, carbon footprint, carbon tax, classic study, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, congestion charging, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cross-subsidies, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, gentrification, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Induced demand, industrial cluster, Kowloon Walled City, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, Mercator projection, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, New Urbanism, open borders, open immigration, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, secular stagnation, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, Thomas Malthus, transit-oriented development, white flight, working-age population, Yogi Berra

On one hand, it is a shame to see prominent people talking down any broad class of immigrants or giving succor to demagogues’ fears. On the other hand, there is no sense in pro-immigration forces in American politics wedding themselves to outlier unpopular positions or pushing obviously unviable open borders schemes and then allowing the demagogues to win all the elections and govern the country. What’s needed, in practice, is a relentlessly pragmatic approach to expanding immigration and that means trying out some ideas and seeing what sticks. A hypothetical community renewal visa concept I will discuss in Chapter 6 seems potentially promising in this regard.

…

Himself, like Card, an immigrant—from Cuba no less—and also a well-regarded empirical labor economist, ensconced at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. But while Card shies away from political fights, Borjas relishes them, memorably dismissing donors to the immigration-friendly Center for Global Development as “open borders plutocrats” and casting himself and his immigration-skeptical worldview colleagues as the true champions of American workers. Similarly, while Card tends to skip somewhat casually from one topic to another and disengage after publishing a few papers, Borjas is all in on research documenting the downsides of immigration.

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Klaus Desmet and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg are scholars focused on the economics of place and space who’ve spent years pushing for more attention to be paid to this reality. “The negative economic effects of climate change are likely to stem predominantly from frictions—that is, national borders—that prevent the free movement of people and goods,” they wrote in a 2013 paper.* In a 2015 follow-up they make the further observation that, examined globally, 75 percent of the human population and 91 percent of economic output come from just 10 percent of the total landmass. Under the circumstances, “If we expect large economic losses from global warming, those cannot come just from the direct effect of temperature increases on the productivity of land.”* That’s not to trivialize the very real problems here.

Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization by Branko Milanovic

Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, place-making, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, stakhanovite, trade route, transfer pricing, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

As the crudest ways to physically stop migration are becoming more common by the day, we must ask whether this problem can be solved, or at least addressed in a better way than the world is doing now. How to Reconcile Migration with Unwillingness to Open Borders There are four elementary features of migration that must be stated at the outset, each of which involves a tension of some kind. First, there is a tension between the right of citizens to leave their own country and the lack of the right of people to move wherever they see fit. Second, there is a tension between two aspects of globalization: one that encourages free movement of all factors of production, goods, technology, and ideas, and another that severely limits the right of movement of labor.

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For this to happen, two changes are essential: (1) the redefinition of citizenship, and (2) multilateralism involving sending and recipient countries. But even if migration were to become more common than it is today, it is still extremely unlikely that the change would be so momentous as to lead to fully open borders and a situation whereby GDP growth rates of poor countries would become unimportant because people could just leave whenever they wanted to. Thus, the growth of poor nations will remain of crucial importance. We turn to this next. 7. Will Economic Growth Still Matter? Economic growth will still matter a great deal in the coming century: it is the most powerful tool for reducing global poverty and inequality (as it is, also, for reducing national poverties).

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The United States is one of the countries that takes this approach, allowing migrants who invest $1 million in US companies (or $500,000 in companies located in rural or high-unemployment areas) to receive a green card. A number of countries in Europe allow foreigners to reside there, and thus to travel visa-free within the Schengen zone (an area of free movement within most of the European Union), in exchange for a real estate investment. Both such filters, education and money, are supposed to improve the pool of immigrants a country receives, and thus ultimately to contribute to the country’s economic output and enable the maintenance of its welfare state by minimizing the number of migrants who depend on social transfers.

Hopes and Prospects by Noam Chomsky

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, colonial rule, corporate personhood, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deskilling, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Firefox, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, invisible hand, liberation theology, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, nuremberg principles, one-state solution, open borders, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Seymour Hersh, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus

.… Since January 1991, Israel has bureaucratically and logistically merely perfected the split and the separation: not only between Palestinians in the occupied territories and their brothers in Israel, but also between the Palestinian residents of Jerusalem and those in the rest of the territories and between Gazans and West Bankers/Jerusalemites. Jews live in this same piece of land within a superior and separate system of privileges, laws, services, physical infrastructure and freedom of movement.14 The leading academic specialist on Gaza, Harvard scholar Sara Roy, adds that Gaza is an example of a society that has been deliberately reduced to a state of abject destitution, its once productive population transformed into one of aid-dependent paupers.… Gaza’s subjection began long before Israel’s recent war against it [December 2008].

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Our kind of democracy.9 Obama made one further substantive comment: “As part of a lasting cease-fire, Gaza’s border crossings should be open to allow the flow of aid and commerce, with an appropriate monitoring regime.” He did not mention that the U.S.-Israel had rejected much the same agreement after the January 2006 election, and that Israel had never observed similar subsequent agreements on opening borders. Also missing is any reaction to Israel’s announcement that it rejected the cease-fire agreement, so that the prospects for a cease-fire to be established, let alone to be “lasting,” are not auspicious. The reasons were reported prominently and repeatedly in the press: Israel will not allow border crossings with Gaza to open, and will insist that Gazan life be reduced to a bare minimum, unless Gilad Shalit is released.

The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall by Mary Elise Sarotte

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, conceptual framework, Deng Xiaoping, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, hindsight bias, Mikhail Gorbachev, open borders, Prenzlauer Berg, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, urban decay, éminence grise

Gorbachev’s reforms and, 21–22, 178 Horn, Gyula, 24 refugee crisis and, 25, 26–27 Horváth, István, 27 Hotel Merkur (Leipzig), 66 Hubrich, Gotthard, 106–109 Human rights Helsinki Final Act (Helsinki Accords) and, 18, 171 violations in GDR, 13 Hummitzsch, Manfred, 42 on Leipzig ring road march, 77 Leipzig ring road march and, 49 Hungary Austro-Hungarian border breach, 20 (see also under Refugee crisis) border opening in, 27 demolition of fortifications on Austrian border and, 24 East German mass exodus to, Stasi internal summary regarding, 24 escape attempts in, 16 and Gorbachev’s reforms, effect of, 23–25 and 1969 treaty with East Germany limiting freedom of movement, 21, 23–24 refugee crisis in, 21, 24–31 Soviet occupation of, 23 UN Convention on Refugees and, 24 Illing, Jens, 54–55 “Information smugglers”/underground journalistic network/covert courier service, 56–66. See also Foreign journalists International Red Cross, 26 Invaliden Street border crossing, 145, 156, 164.

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., a West German wire service announced that “starting immediately,” GDR residents could exit “directly through all checkpoints between the GDR and the FRG.” At the same moment, ADN, the East German news agency, released the group of four’s text. The staff at ADN apparently felt that if Schabowski could ignore the embargo until 4:00 a.m. on November 10, they could as well. Next, the Associated Press chimed in at 7:05 p.m. with “GDR opens borders.” Television coverage appears to have started as late as 7:17 p.m. The first major evening news show to air after the press conference, broadcast by the West German network ZDF, decided to cover Schabowski only as its sixth item of news. Once it had dispensed with the previous five, ZDF reported that “starting immediately, East German citizens are allowed to exit directly over all border crossings between the GDR and the Federal Republic of Germany.

An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford Delong

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, ASML, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, ending welfare as we know it, endogenous growth, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial repression, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, German hyperinflation, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, industrial research laboratory, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, It's morning again in America, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, occupational segregation, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Pearl River Delta, Phillips curve, plutocrats, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, Stanislav Petrov, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Suez canal 1869, surveillance capitalism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, TSMC, union organizing, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, Yom Kippur War

Similarly, dams, automobile factories, and tractor (or tank) factories were all built far to the east of Moscow. That there were far fewer people east of Moscow was a solvable problem. How was Stalin to get workers to man the new heavy industrial plants—especially since he couldn’t pay them much? The answer was by drafting the population. Internal passports destroyed your freedom of movement. Access to housing and ration books depended on you keeping your job (and satisfying your employer). Satisfying your employer also helped safeguard your life. For there was always the threat of Siberian exile to a concentration camp or a bullet in the neck for those whose bosses accused them of “sabotage.”

…

There was the globalization of communication, in the form of the global submarine telegraph network, linked to landlines. By 1870 you could communicate at near–light-speed from London to Bombay and back, by 1876 from London to New Zealand and back. Yet another aspect of globalization was a lack of barriers. Of the consequences arising from open borders, the most influential was migration—with the very important caveat that the poorest migrants, those from China, India, and so on, were not allowed into the temperate settlements. Those were reserved for Europeans (and sometimes Middle Easterners). Caveat aside, a vast population of people moved: between 1870 and 1914, one in fourteen humans—one hundred million people—changed their continent of residence.12 The embrace of openness by world governments also meant the absence of legal barriers to trade, investment, and communication.

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All of this meant that come 1950 international trade was back to the 9 percent of global economic activity that it had been in 1800. The globalization cycle had been fully reversed.25 Furthermore, many influential Americans felt that curbing immigration should be an urgent priority. There had been resistance to free immigration and open borders long before World War I. US senator Henry Cabot Lodge—a nativist, WASPy Boston Brahmin and a Republican—had long beaten the drum, as had Progressive Woodrow Wilson, seeking to avoid social Darwinist corruption of the American race, by which they meant white people, a category they defined very narrowly.26 Most Italian immigrants, Lodge had said, were good, hardworking people.

Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making by David Rothkopf

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, asset allocation, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bob Geldof, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, carried interest, clean water, compensation consultant, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, fake news, financial innovation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, global village, high net worth, income inequality, industrial cluster, informal economy, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Elkington, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, Long Term Capital Management, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, old-boy network, open borders, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Skype, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, William Langewiesche

Not only is power concentrated within the hands of a few, but the few themselves are concentrated in a few places in the world, predominantly white, overwhelmingly male. A few thousand very similar people whose hands are on the world’s most important levers of power and influence, closely connected with one another and sharing interests on issues from market regulation to taxation, from freedom of movement to easy access to workers, from who should possess weapons of mass destruction to who should not. Who needs conspiracies, indeed? AGENDA-SETTING Of all the powers the superclass possesses, one of the clearest and most important is the ability to set agendas for the rest of us. These individuals can’t necessarily always make final decisions, they can’t always project force, they can’t always even agree.

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Many, even a few financial leaders such as Warren Buffett, viewed this as so egregiously inequitable that an opposition movement has formed against it. Because of America’s international reach and power, the revolving door to the financial community is a phenomenon with global consequences. It is no accident that this group is broadly predisposed to policy prescriptions such as open borders, less regulation, and lower taxes. It also favors debt restructurings and bailouts for bad loans, as in the cases of the Brady Plan after the Latin debt crises of the 1980s and U.S. intervention to avert financial catastrophe in Mexico during the Tequila Crisis of late 1994 and 1995. In many respects this is not simply because one group influences another.

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But if the system favors shorter-term returns, largescale operations, and partners who have influence on the markets, it is also a trend that undercuts longer-term growth needs, hurts smaller countries and economies, and exacerbates the inequitable distribution of money and power in many of those countries worldwide. Joe Stiglitz argued in the same vein, only more starkly, during a conversation one evening at his paper-filled office at Columbia University, “Capital market liberalization—free and unfettered movement of capital across borders—can, in some sense, undermine democracy. Some developing countries have experienced this very strongly: When a Wall Street-oriented party loses the election, the markets become unhappy and start pulling their capital out. And because voters know this, they worry about Wall Street’s reactions.

The Cold War: Stories From the Big Freeze by Bridget Kendall

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, collective bargaining, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Great Leap Forward, Howard Zinn, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, open borders, Prenzlauer Berg, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, white flight

The first backlash was the expulsion of [the singer and poet] Wolf Biermann, and the protests against it. And intellectuals, writers, artists who protested against this expulsion were also put under pressure. And in cultural politics, stricter criteria were applied. There was this Riesaer Petition. A doctor called Karl-Heinz Nitschke […] formulated a petition demanding the freedom of movement. He collected signatures among friends and acquaintances in this little town of Riesa. Then he came to East Berlin and wanted to get in contact with correspondents in order to make the petition public, because we had a special function. These Western journalists differed from Western correspondents who were based in Moscow: when you were in Moscow, you just reported for your audience from Moscow, but we did not only report from East Berlin for the viewers and readers in West Germany, but also for the citizens of the GDR.

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It was the largest exodus of East Germans westwards since the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, and it set in motion a dramatic chain of events that no one was expecting, not in Moscow nor East Berlin nor indeed in the Western world. When East Germany eventually closed its border with Hungary, East Germans wanting to leave trekked across the open border into Czechoslovakia instead and either slipped into Hungary from there or sought sanctuary in the West German Embassy in Prague. Eventually, the East German government gave its consent for those holed up in the embassy to leave for West Germany in special sealed trains, stripping them of their right to East German citizenship.

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It was a process that went much faster and more out of control than Gorbachev could ever have predicted or wanted, but one man is owed an enormous debt. Sergei Aleksashenko There’s a big difference between a planned economy and a market economy. The main difference is the equilibrium for the market-based economic system is based on the free movement of prices. So, if there are some imbalances, prices move, production changes and that allows the system to find equilibrium. In the Soviet system, the equilibrium was based on computational models, calculated by Gosplan [the State Planning Committee], Gossnab [the State Supplies Committee], the Committee on Prices, the Committee on Labour.

1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East by Tom Segev

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ascot racecourse, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, distributed generation, friendly fire, full employment, ghettoisation, government statistician, illegal immigration, invisible hand, mass immigration, Mount Scopus, open borders, Ronald Reagan, Yom Kippur War, young professional

He did so in coordination with Dayan, but did not confine himself to his role as journalist: in keeping with the excessively close relationship between newspaper editors and politicians, he went to Eshkol and tried to persuade him to give up the defense portfolio. *At some point, both White House and Israeli embassy staff contacted former president Dwight Eisenhower to inquire what exactly the United States had committed itself to do, a decade earlier, in order to preserve freedom of movement through the Straits.24 *The White House also reiterated its request that Israel stop applying pressure through its domestic letter-writing campaign. “Of course we are continuing it,” Ambassador Harman reported to Jerusalem.3 *Many years later, Chuvakhin said somewhat critically that he had supported a meeting between Eshkol and Kosygin, and that had it been held, the Six-Day War might have been averted.

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Jerusalem’s master plan ensured that when the border was opened there would be a smooth connection with the Old City. Newly built roads, such as the Hebron Road, were being constructed in such a way that they could easily connect to the Old City’s access roads when the time came. “I hope peace will bring about an open border between the two parts of the city. Certainly I do not wish this to occur in a nonpeaceful way,” said Kollek. In April 1967, Kollek dedicated a monument to a convoy that had tried to reach Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus two decades earlier. Several dozen people in the convoy, doctors and nurses among them, had been killed when Arabs attacked it.

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Not all the government ministers believed that a strike on the Dimona reactor would justify all-out war, partly because they felt the world would support Egypt if it destroyed the reactor. The United States did not discount the bombing of the reactor as a possibility. By May 21 there was talk of outright war. According to one minister, Israel Galili, any infringement on the free movement of shipping would mean war, as would an attempt to bomb Dimona. Rabin sounded confident. If Egypt attacked, he said, Israel would deliver “a very severe blow,” although that same day he noted that the results of an air war between the two states would depend on who attacked first.10 The assumption was that whoever struck first and destroyed the enemy’s air force on the ground would win.

The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, American ideology, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bike sharing, borderless world, carbon footprint, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, decarbonisation, deep learning, distributed generation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Ford Model T, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, income inequality, industrial cluster, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, knowledge economy, manufacturing employment, marginal employment, Martin Wolf, Masdar, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open borders, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, supply-chain management, systems thinking, tech billionaire, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, Yom Kippur War, Zipcar

The first effort to introduce the laws of thermodynamics into economic theory was made by the Nobel laureate chemist Fredrick Soddy in his 1911 book Matter and Energy. Soddy reminded his economist friends that the laws of thermodynamics “control, in the last resort, the rise or fall of political systems, the freedom or bondage of nations, the movements of commerce and industry, the origin of wealth and poverty, and the general physical welfare of the race.”5 The first economist to take on his profession directly was Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, the Vanderbilt University professor whose 1971 landmark book, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, caused a minor ripple at the time, but was quickly dismissed by most of his colleagues.

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What the EU experience shows is that when nation-states come together to create a common political community with integrated markets and open borders, commercial and political relations tend to flatten and extend across previous national boundaries, creating a new power configuration that is more nodal and distributed than centralized and top-down. EU governance more resembles a network of nation-states, regions, and municipalities, in which no single force determines the direction of the union, forcing all of the political players to engage in collaborative efforts to reach consensus on common goals. The creation of a continental market and continental governance with open borders also allows regions to bypass their national governments and create their own commercial relationship with other regions, sometimes contiguous to but just across national boundaries, and other times far removed in geography from their home country.

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Contiguous cross-border EU regions are increasingly involved in commercial partnerships of all kinds and often enjoy closer commercial ties with each other than each region has with its own national government or more distant countrymen. The Third Industrial Revolution communication/energy paradigm, because of its lateral orientation, flourishes in borderless open spaces. What this means is that as the ASEAN Union becomes more of a reality, open borders will allow contiguous regions to interconnect and jointly build out the five-pillar infrastructure of the TIR, much like Wi-Fi communications spread from neighborhood to neighborhood and quickly developed into vast, interconnected webs that span contiguous landmasses. If China and India, both of whom have signed the Cebu Energy Declaration, would open their borders, thereby allowing neighboring regions to connect and build out shared TIR infrastructure, the spreading network could whittle away at the sovereign power each government previously enjoyed over the generation of energy and distribution of electricity within their borders.

Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism by Wolfgang Streeck

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, basic income, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, currency risk, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial repression, fixed income, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, means of production, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Occupy movement, open borders, open economy, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, profit maximization, risk tolerance, shareholder value, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck

Nor would it be possible for member-states to operate their own monetary policy: ‘Indeed, it appears doubtful whether, in a Union with a universal monetary system, independent national central banks would continue to exist; they would probably have to be organized into a sort of Federal Reserve System.’8 Furthermore, competition will ensure that no government can burden its economy with too many regulations: ‘Even such legislation as the restriction of child labour or of working hours becomes difficult to carry out for the individual state.’9 Free movement within the union will also make it difficult for individual states to tax their citizens: high direct taxation will drive people and capital abroad, and the absence of border controls will hinder the indirect taxation of many goods. National business associations and trade unions would be subject to similar constraints: ‘Once frontiers cease to be closed and free movement is secured, all these national organizations, whether trade unions, cartels or professional associations, will lose their monopolistic position and thus, qua national organizations, their power to control the supply of their services or products.’10 But why should it be impossible to replace at international level that which must be given up at national level to maintain the cohesion of the federation?

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This would turn them into side payments for the imposition of a Hayekian economic regime, payable to those who can get nothing else out of it. INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE: FROM KEYNES TO HAYEK The historical significance of the transition from a Keynesian to a Hayekian political economy, which has been taking place since the 1970s, becomes clearer if we recall the situation at the beginning of the neoliberal turn. Whereas today, with open borders, formerly sovereign states with independent central banks must pursue a rule-bound economic policy in accordance with the prescriptions of efficiency theory, the Keynesian mixed economy of the postwar decades had at its disposal a wide range of instruments for discretionary government intervention, especially in the distribution of the national product and the life chances of national citizens.

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Countries such as the USA, France, Britain and Germany profited greatly from the flight of capital out of countries with a weak taxation regime and an uneven distribution of income; and their richest citizens have profited most of all, in the form of rising prices in the luxury property market. The bill for this is now being presented to the citizens of countries whose governments happily granted free movement to capital (to the acclaim of the ‘financial markets’) or were pressured into doing so by the ‘international community’. In the topsy-turvy world of financial and fiscal diplomacy embedded in international financial markets, the surrender of national sovereignty to supranational institutions, like international assistance and cross-border regulation, becomes a tool not only for the protection of financial investment and the collection of debt but also for the insulation of ‘the markets’ from political interference in the name of corrective social justice.

A History of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr

air freight, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Beeching cuts, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brixton riot, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, congestion charging, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Etonian, falling living standards, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, floating exchange rates, full employment, gentleman farmer, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, loadsamoney, market design, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open borders, out of africa, Parkinson's law, Piper Alpha, post-war consensus, Red Clydeside, reserve currency, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, working poor, Yom Kippur War

For most investors the world of controls still applied. Sir Nicholas Goodison, later Chairman of the Stock Exchange in the Thatcher years, looked back on the mood by the late seventies: ‘We still had exchange controls. We had a Labour government intent on controlling everything, and no freedom of capital movement. British people were not allowed to take capital abroad; British institutions weren’t allowed to invest capital abroad except by special Treasury permissions . . . we were an insulated market.’12 It was this world which was swept away on 23 October 1979 when Geoffrey Howe, to general shock, abolished exchange controls.

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Indeed the Commonwealth, whose usefulness has been questioned elsewhere in this history, clearly functioned as a kind of doorstop to maintain immigration. It retained a loose association between Crown, obligation and common citizenship which felt real to politicians of both parties. Pressure to close the open border for Commonwealth citizens hardly increased in the Tory Party after the Notting Hill riots, though extra-parliamentary campaigns, such as the Birmingham Immigration Control Association, did spring up. Of course, given that the violence was directed against immigrants by whites, it would have been grotesquely unfair had the first reaction been to send people home.

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Even so, it had only gone through after a ferocious parliamentary battle, with the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell making emotional and passionate attacks on a measure which was still privately opposed by some of the Tory ministers involved. One particularly contentious issue was that the Republic of Ireland was allowed a completely open border with Britain. This may have seemed only practical politics given the huge number of Irish people living and working there already but it offended in two ways. By discriminating in favour of a country which had been neutral in the war with Hitler and declared itself a republic, but against Commonwealth countries which had stood with Britain, it infuriated many British patriots.

From Peoples into Nations by John Connelly

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bank run, Berlin Wall, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, oil shock, old-boy network, open borders, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, the built environment, The Chicago School, trade liberalization, Transnistria, union organizing, upwardly mobile, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce

Because Alexander’s son, Peter, was only eleven years old, a regency was established under his Western-educated cousin Prince Paul, a more practical man not dictatorial in temperament and interested in accommodation. He quickly released political prisoners, including opposition politicians, and relaxed police surveillance and censorship. Elections were still rigged, but political parties gained freedom of movement. Once more, they could represent ethnic interests, something that had been a taboo under Alexander. In June 1935, Paul appointed as prime minister the old Radical politician Milan Stojadinović, and his three years in office brought relative calm, continued relaxations of censorship as well as hopeful accommodation with the Croat leader Vladko Maček.

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Even if they could not prevent the laws, they mitigated their harshness, and the results fell short of what the Hungarian Nazis desired.97 Against the background of neighboring states, it was unusual that the Hungarian regime did not threaten Jews’ lives. Until 1944, Hungary’s Jews did not have to wear discriminatory insignia, faced no restrictions on freedom of movement or choice of where to live, and did not see their personal property expropriated. The hesitation to go as far as Nazi Germany was due partly to the strong relative role of Jews among the Hungarian middle and professional classes and fears that their sudden absence would prove disruptive. Jews made up 5.1 percent of the population, yet in 1930, they constituted more than half of the country’s physicians (54.5 percent), almost half the lawyers and white-collar employees in mining and industry (49.2 and about 47 percent, respectively), and almost a third of the engineers (30.4 percent).

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Compared to the Soviet-dominated states in Eastern Europe, his country appeared liberal, and despite problems—chiefly of economic development—its “model” of worker self-management radiated the hope for freedom, equality, and justice. Yugoslavia’s reputation of being much more liberal than other East European countries survived beyond Tito’s death in 1980. Yugoslavia, alone among socialist states, had opened borders to the West in both directions, permitting millions of its own citizens to work abroad, chiefly in the booming economies of Germany and Austria, and millions of budget-conscious West European tourists to enjoy its seaside and mountain resorts, mostly in Croatia and Slovenia. To help maintain this non-Soviet socialist bastion, the United States injected huge inputs of cash, amounting in the 1950s to $598 million in economic and $588 million in military aid.

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right by Angela Nagle

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, capitalist realism, citizen journalism, crony capitalism, death of newspapers, DIY culture, Donald Trump, Evgeny Morozov, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lolcat, mass immigration, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, Overton Window, post-industrial society, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, The Wisdom of Crowds, WikiLeaks

So, looking at his statements and speeches on his Dangerous Faggot Tour and Buchannan’s, how much do each of their culture wars really have in common? Buchanan’s book Death of The West has been hugely influential on the paleoconservative ideas that have rivaled those of the pro-market modernizing neocons. He called neoconservatism ‘a globalist, interventionist, open borders ideology.’ Through American Conservative, he and other like-minded anti-establishment conservatives opposed the Iraq War and took many other positions that distinguished them from the internationalist, free market, and pro-interventionist components of the right. Long before Trump’s election Buchanan was talking about the white working class as naturally conservative, opposed globalization and neoliberal trade deals, and pushed for a crack down on immigration.

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There is no question but that the embarrassing and toxic online politics represented by this version of the left, which has been so destructive and inhumane, has made the left a laughing stock for a whole new generation. Years of online hate campaigns, purges and smear campaigns against others – including and especially dissident or independent-minded leftists – has caused untold damage. This anti-free speech, anti-free thought, anti-intellectual online movement, which has substituted politics with neuroses, can’t be separated from the real-life scenes millions saw online of college campuses, in which to be on the right was made something exciting, fun and courageous for the first time since… well, possibly ever. When Milo challenged his protesters to argue with him countless times on his tour, he knew that they not only wouldn’t, but also that they couldn’t.

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Although the mainstream media is still quite anti-Trump, it would be naïve to think this isn’t going to result in a chilling of critical thought and speech in the coming years, as fewer and fewer may have the stomach for it. In February 2017, before the spectacular collapse of his career, Milo had planned to give the closing talk of his tour on the campus of UC Berkley, home of the free-speech movement of the left in 1964. Many have commented on the irony of the Berkeley riots that took place – the historical reversal of the left now censoring the campus to cleanse it of the right – but it is also significant that it was on what was scheduled to be the final night of his tour. It was on this night, at the end of a yearlong tour throughout which the US campus left spectacularly failed to challenge him on the level of ideas, that it chose to riot.

Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism by Elizabeth Becker

airport security, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, BRICs, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, computer age, corporate governance, Costa Concordia, Deng Xiaoping, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, global village, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, Masdar, Murano, Venice glass, open borders, out of africa, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, statistical model, sustainable-tourism, the market place, union organizing, urban renewal, wage slave, young professional, éminence grise

A decade later a TWA 707 flew around the world beginning in Los Angeles and flying west after the plane was blessed by three Buddhist monks. Lower fares and bargain flights followed. European countries relaxed passport restrictions and began to see tourism as an important economic engine. “Tourism—Passport to Peace” became the organization’s motto in 1967, capturing its higher purpose to open borders in the promotion of better relations as well as the practical motive of making money. As the U.N. shifted its notion about tourism, the U.N.’s tourism office was moved from The Hague to Geneva, where it was dwarfed among the cluster of U.N. offices and the International Red Cross. The move to Madrid was a step up the bureaucratic ladder even though it meant exile from Geneva, one of the power centers of the U.N.

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In Venice, with a native population of less than 60,000, over 20 million tourists descend on the city every year, an onslaught that is pushing the locals out of their homes and emptying the city of essentials like neighborhood greengrocers and bakeries. In the globalized economy—with cheap transportation, the Internet and open borders—travel has become the ultimate twenty-first-century industry, which means these problems are not going away. • • • It is difficult to find issues of travel and tourism debated in public. Historians, political scientists and economists routinely omit tourism from studies about how the world works.

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Tourists visiting Dubai see a modern, forward-looking country with designer hotels and splashy music concerts. They have no idea of the medieval social practices underpinning this twenty-first-century lifestyle. This is “pick and choose” globalization: embracing open-skies airline policies to challenge European supremacy and bring in tourists; selectively opening borders to attract migrant workers while rejecting the other promises of globalization to improve lives with fair employment laws and respect of human rights. This has nothing to do with the cultural differences of an Islamic nation. Tourists are told in advance that the UAE prohibits public displays of affection and all illegal drugs, puts severe restrictions on drinking alcohol and on desecration of their faith.

Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order by Parag Khanna

Abraham Maslow, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Glaeser, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, Londongrad, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, open borders, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, Pearl River Delta, pirate software, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Potemkin village, price stability, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Zionists used terrorism as a principal tactic to oust the British during the decade prior to Israel’s founding, much as Palestinians do today.7 “We live in a purgatory, always subservient to international bureaucratic masters,” a Palestinian official in East Jerusalem protested, frustrated at the lack of genuine Palestinian self-rule and freedom of movement. After the Hamas victory in the 2006 elections, Israeli security closures forced the parliament to convene by videoconference, a reminder that Israel’s current bantustan model for the Palestinians is unsustainable both economically and politically.8 As in the third world, development is lost when the politics of aid take priority over building indigenous governance.

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The nineteenth century Taiping Rebellion resulted from such involution, in which the people-to-land ratio became too high. The Qing Dynasty was later besieged as China’s size had not grown to accommodate such a rapidly growing population. Should another set of economic troubles hit the Chinese countryside and periphery, more open borders would allow a migration valve for people to flee to countries like Burma and Laos to begin their lives again and work their way up—reproducing a now ancient pattern of Chinese demographic expansion, spread, and control. See Robert F. Ash, “China’s Regional Economies and the Asian Region,” in Power Shift, ed.

In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan by Seth G. Jones

belling the cat, business climate, clean water, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, drone strike, failed state, friendly fire, invisible hand, Khyber Pass, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murray Gell-Mann, open borders, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, trade route, zero-sum game

The Taliban also published several newspapers and magazines, such as Zamir, Tora Bora, and Sirak. Finally, the Taliban began to relocate much of their financial base to Karachi, Pakistan’s financial and commercial center on the Arabian Sea. Over time, the Taliban began to link up with a number of Pashtun tribes, especially Ghilzais. Special arrangements allowed border tribes freedom of movement between Afghanistan and Pakistan—they were not subjected to any scrutiny and were allowed to cross the border merely on visual recognition or identification. A number of these tribes had lands that had been divided by the Durand Line, such as the Mashwani, Mohmands, Shinwaris, Afridis, Mangals, Wazirs, and Gulbaz.

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General Boris Gromov, who commanded the Soviet 40th Army, was the last soldier in his column to cross the Amu Darya River.56 A Flamboyant Congressman from Texas Outside support was critical in undermining Afghan governance and defeating the Red Army. We have already seen the role of Pakistan’s ISI in providing tactical and strategic support. The CIA had known for years that the Red Army did “not have enough troops to maintain control in much of the countryside as long as the insurgents have access to strong external support and open borders.”57 The Soviets saw the support flowing across the border from Pakistan, and the United States encouraged it. As it became clear that the Afghan War was hurting the Soviets, the United States began to covertly support the Afghan insurgents. U.S. aid to the mujahideen began at a relatively low level but then increased as the prospect of a Soviet defeat appeared more likely, totaling between $4 billion and $5 billion between 1980 and 1992.58 The CIA had provided about $60 million per year to the Afghan mujahideen between 1981 and 1983, which was matched by assistance from the Saudi government.

EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts by Ashoka Mody

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, book scanning, book value, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, credit crunch, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, global macro, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, inflation targeting, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land bank, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, loadsamoney, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, neoliberal agenda, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, pension reform, precautionary principle, premature optimization, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, short selling, Silicon Valley, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, working-age population, Yogi Berra

The events will unfold, with the discussions, debates, and decisions reported as they happened. Before the Euro: The Europeans Create a “Falling Forward” Narrative In its origin, the single currency was a French initiative. French President Georges Pompidou called for a summit of European leaders at The Hague in December 1969. The process of opening borders, initiated by the Treaty of Rome in 1957, was well on its way. Stuck in an inertial mindset, Europeans were anxious to achieve more European integration. And, as if it were just a regulatory extension of Europe’s expanding common market, Pompidou proposed a European monetary union. In fact, he said, monetary union must be made a priority.

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According to him, public debate on how Europe should be run was, at best, pointless and could even be counterproductive if adversarial politics created undesirable compromises.154 The Monnet method worked for just over forty years, from the Schuman Plan in 1950 to the Maastricht Treaty, which was signed in 1992. The task in those decades was to create European institutions for productive dialogue among nation-​states and to open borders to trade. Most Europeans saw only a blurred connection between their daily lives and decisions made at the European level. Moreover, since the opening of trade borders had created new business opportunities for many, support for Europe remained high. As Irish political scientist Peter Mair explained, European “elites” had enjoyed a “permissive consensus,” a “popular trust,” and, hence, a “deference to their decisions” on European matters.155 But in 1992, the Maastricht Treaty made the single currency a real possibility.

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See also Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry; Pompidou, Georges Amsterdam meeting attendance, 114 banking crisis, 195 banking system, 161–162, 163–164, 165 BNP Paribas bank, 195, 196, 196f budgetary offenses of, 144 CAP and, 30 compromise of, 12 defeat/​humiliation in Vietnam, 28 deficit borrowing, 36 deflation prevention, 356 economic deceleration, 142 EDC Treaty rejected by, 28, 75–76 educational opportunities, 401–402 effort at achieving parity with Germany, 8 1870-​2000, GDP, 25f eurozone crisis and, 392 eurozone membership, 121 exchange rate issues, 33, 39, 41 “face-​saving device” request, 113 falling productivity, 168–169 franc/​currency devaluations, 5, 34, 35 Franco-​German venture, 24 Germany’s offer of aid, 402 income/​employment comparison, 340f increased debt burden ratio in, 95–96 inflation rates, 174 irrational exuberance in, 172 leadership push for euro, 12 loans to periphery countries, 13–14 Maastricht Treaty and, 101–105, 102f, 187 macroeconomic policy, 57 Mendès France’s leadership, 28 National Front party, 351, 363 nationalization of banks, 163–164 1968, student uprising/​workers strike, 35 1971 consultations with Germany, 52–55 open violation of the SGP, 150 opposition to EDC, 50 Pompidou’s presidency of, 36 post-​WWII “aging,” 33–34 public debt as percentage of GDP, 394f public opposition to monetary union, 50, 104 push for equality with Germany, 57 quarantine fears, 25 R&D/​GDP ratio (1997), 176f recession in, 37, 106, 111 reduced exports to euro area, 171 referendum on the single currency, 9–10, 101–105 referendum on the European Constitution, 187–189 rejection of European Constitution, 14 resistance to opening borders, 30 shift to eurozone south, 400–408 soaring fiscal deficits in, 87 Socialist Party, 351, 358–359, 403 societal divisions in, 400 Société Générale in, 161 Solbes’s/​Prodi’s blacklisting of, 144, 151 student uprising (1968), 35 tightened monetary policy, 68 trade shares, 171f Treaty of Rome accepted by, 31 Treaty of Rome and, 50 trust in the European Union, 389f 2003-​2008, capital inflows, 175f unemployment rates, 55, 95, 96f, 358–359 vote in favor of single currency, 9 voting rights conflict, 137 World Bank governance data on, 398f youth distress in, 394f, 395 Franco-​German venture (Schuman Plan), 24–26, 44 Frankel, Jeffrey, 356, 360 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 77 Freddie Mac, 213 Free Democratic Party (FDP) (Germany), 238, 246, 325, 425, 426–427, 435 French-​Belgian Dexia, 215 French National Assembly, 6, 28, 403 index 629 French Planning Commission, 26 Friedman, Milton call for ending Bretton Woods system, 39 call for flexible exchange rates, 40, 414 on economic and political risks of the euro, 116 on macroeconomic policy, 68 on monetary policy, 2, 140 Front National (France), 402, 405, 406 FTSE Italia All-​Share Financial Index, 298f FTSE Italia All-​Share Index, 298f Garton Ash, Timothy, 32 Gauck, Joachim, 335–337 Geertz, Clifford, 170 Geithner, Timothy, 15, 197, 206 comment on Draghi’s statement, 310 criticism on Europe’s dithering, 309 Deauville decision and, 280 opposition to allowing failure of financial institutions, 15, 214, 258 response to Greek crisis, 258 subprime crisis response, 221, 228–229 Geithner-​Trichet doctrine, 214 General Accounting Office (U.S.), 88 Genevard, Annie, 401 Georgiou, Andreas, 413 German Federal Republic (West Germany), 24 German Hypo Real Estate, 215 Germany.

The Dawn of Eurasia: On the Trail of the New World Order by Bruno Macaes

active measures, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, British Empire, computer vision, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, digital map, Donald Trump, energy security, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global value chain, illegal immigration, intermodal, iterative process, land reform, liberal world order, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, megacity, middle-income trap, open borders, Parag Khanna, savings glut, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, speech recognition, Suez canal 1869, The Brussels Effect, trade liberalization, trade route, Transnistria, young professional, zero-sum game, éminence grise

He seemed to interpret the question as part of a pattern of imposing harsher moral standards and shackles on the United States than on its rivals and rushed to put them on the same level: ‘We have got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country is so innocent?’ The method is not particularly complicated. Trump goes through the list of liberal tenets and in each case asks whether they are compatible with the continuation of American global primacy. Many of those tenets fail the test in his view: open borders, transparency and openness in foreign policy, an adversarial press and a strong allegiance to international organizations. If this trend continues and American foreign policy comes to embrace a strong concept of national sovereignty, unbound by international rules and institutions, a measure of ideological convergence with Russia and China will have developed.

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Imagine an area where people can circulate freely and cross state borders without having to show any identification and where trade is free of tariffs and other barriers. The European Union is the perfect example of this vision. Now take two countries like China and Kazakhstan. Surely they are neither willing nor able to create the same kind of area of free movement and exchange. What they can do, however, is carve up a small portion of their border territories and create it on a limited scale. When you enter the International Centre you are still in China. No private cars are allowed inside, but you can move around using taxis, individual golf carts and bigger trolleys.

…

Rather than the humane and rational system we had perfected, the United Kingdom could now be heading to less desirable political neighbourhoods or, if the new drivers started struggling among themselves, straight into a wall. The Remain side, meanwhile, could not hide its frustration that economic arguments had so little traction over voters, who were clearly swayed by the case against EU rules on free movement of people. But the implicit framing here is that the EU offers the best economic solutions, and doubts about this have kept growing of late. The case for Brexit probably made some considerable inroads among the economically minded voters. There was a growing sense that a change of direction was needed and that the EU is simply not flexible, quick or opportunistic enough to look for the best chance, be it on global trade or on smart regulation, especially in what concerns the digital economy.

The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity by Peter Schwartz, Peter Leyden, Joel Hyatt

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, centre right, classic study, clean water, complexity theory, computer age, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, Danny Hillis, dark matter, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, double helix, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, George Gilder, glass ceiling, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herman Kahn, hydrogen economy, industrial cluster, informal economy, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Productivity paradox, QR code, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, zero-sum game

The vision fits the new realities of an emerging Politics of Prosperity, which will be based on the immense wealth being created in this global boom. We can afford to start thinking more expansively, more generously, and more long-term. The vision also places the value of openness at its core. In our highly interdependent global future, the open options will tend to be the best ones: open trade, open borders, open alliances, open access, open code, open minds. This book lays out the open philosophy that should inform many important decisions that lie ahead. The Long Boom shows the open way to go. When the book first came out in hardcover in the fall of 1999, some skeptical reviewers accused us of being overly optimistic.

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The net effect was to more closely calibrate the interactions of these national economies. Those twin developments of the second half of the 1940s were the main causes of the economic boom in the United States in the 1950s. Why the United States? It was the first country to adopt the new technologies aggressively, and it had the most open borders, so it could take advantage of the enhanced trade environment. And so the U.S. economy just took off on a tear. To this day, Americans look bac on the 1950s as the economic Golden Age. But that economic boom didn't stop in the United States, and it didn't stop in the 1950s. That same boom spread throughout the Free World in the 1960s.

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The collective software, though, attains a similar rigor through the experiences of many thousands of independent eyeballs poring over it. And you certainly can't beat the price. The collective software is absolutely free. Nobody owns it, or, rather, everybody does. In fact, at first this kind of software was called free software, and the people who created it called themselves the free software movement. But the average layperson's notion of anything "free" is that it is less valuable, somehow inferior, and this software isn't. So over time the names have evolved into open source software and the open source movement. The terms refer to opening up to everyone the source code that is the basis of any software program.

Sex, Time, and Power: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution by Leonard Shlain

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, British Empire, Columbine, delayed gratification, double helix, experimental subject, Flynn Effect, George Santayana, Great Leap Forward, invention of writing, Lao Tzu, Marshall McLuhan, open borders, out of africa, sexual politics, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, the medium is the message

Since a month is an exceptionally long time for an animal to hold steady in its consciousness, you clap your hands in glee when first one, then another, and then another finally gets it. Then you stand back and watch in awe. Once the first group of Gyna sapiens have breached this critical time barrier, the rest pour through the gap. On the other side lie the wide expanses of the future, a dimension uninhabited by any other life-form. Freedom of movement back and forth along the salient of time gave first women, and then men, the means to control their personal destinies better. A short time later, this skill would present sapients with control over the earth’s destiny. * * * Menstrual cycles do not fossilize. We may never know what exactly was the relationship between ancestral Gyna sapiens’ periods and the periodicity of the moon.

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Most have fairly definitive barriers of layered cells protecting the maternal bloodstream from the fetal one. The most efficient placenta, from a fetus’s point of view, exists in higher primates. Here, only the most gossamer of tissue divides the placental interface from the uterine one. Tiny blood vessels from each side create mini-lakes of blood separated only by a single porous membrane. As at an open border between two countries, goods and wastes move back and forth with ease.* Among placentas, a human mother’s is the gold-medal winner. It can transfer to her fetus more nutrients more quickly than that of any other primate. If laid end to end, the absorptive surface of the blood vessels of the human placenta would cover thirty miles!

The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy by Dani Rodrik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, full employment, George Akerlof, guest worker program, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Multi Fibre Arrangement, night-watchman state, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, precautionary principle, price stability, profit maximization, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, tulip mania, Washington Consensus, World Values Survey

Unencumbered by domestic economic and social obligations, national governments were then free to pursue an agenda that focused exclusively on strict monetary rules. External restraints were even more blatant under mercantilism and imperialism. We cannot properly speak of nation states before the nineteenth century, but the global economic system operated along strict Golden Straitjacket lines. The rules of the game—open borders, protection of the rights of foreign merchants and investors—were enforced by chartered trading companies or imperial powers. There was no possibility of deviating from them. We may be far from the classical gold standard or chartered trading companies today, but the demands of hyperglobalization require a similar crowding out of domestic politics.

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Recall how the East India Company was superseded by the British Raj when the former proved unable to handle local insurgency, or how the Hudson’s Bay Company’s police powers were handed over to the Dominion of Canada. The British Empire brought law and order to societies that lacked them, argues the Harvard historian Niall Ferguson: “no organization in history has done more to promote the free movement of goods, capital and labor,” he writes, “than the British Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”13 One does not need to buy into Ferguson’s glowing take on the British Empire to agree with his assertion that imperialism was a tremendously powerful force for economic globalization.

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Treasury, the crisis was a financial panic largely unrelated to economic fundamentals and internal weaknesses.10 Asia was going through the bust stage of a boom-and-bust cycle. Banks had overlent in the run-up to the crisis and now they were overreacting in pulling back. It wasn’t the first time financial markets misbehaved, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last. The IMF’s pursuit of new authority to free up capital movements would eventually be doomed by the scale of the Asian financial crisis and its spillovers (the Russian crisis of 1998 in particular). But the quest reflected a remarkable new consensus among officialdom in advanced countries. Clearly, the case for removing government controls on international financial markets had become widely accepted.

Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age by Robert D. Kaplan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, British Empire, coronavirus, COVID-19, dematerialisation, disinformation, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, geopolitical risk, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, mega-rich, megacity, open borders, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning

See also Rijeka Florence, 37, 46, 72 Fortis, Alberto, 186n Fortuna (Rubens), 287 Foundation for Economic Freedom, 248 France, Venice and, 79 Francis I, 20, 154 Franco, Francisco, 101, 162 Franklin, Benjamin, 12 Frankopan, Peter, 185 Franks, 36, 123 Franz Joseph, 104, 108 Frazer, James George, 80–81 Freedom Party of Austria, 150n French Symbolist movement, 13–14 Friuli, 101, 114 Fustel de Coulanges, Numa Denis, 59 G Gaddafi, Muammar, 26 Galerius, 202 Gellner, Ernest, 186 Genoa, 37, 78, 95 geographic determinism, 75, 92–93 Gepids, 38 German Empire, 37 German Reich, 123 Germanicus, 183 Germany, 103, 107 Gibbon, Edward, 31, 41, 52, 95, 242 Gilmour, David, 93 Giotto, 18 Glagolitic chants, 199 globalization, 27, 64, 66, 117, 203, 211, 282 Goethe, 71 Golden Bough, The (Frazer), 80–81 Goldstein, Ivo, 176–177, 178–179 Goldstein, Slavko, 175, 176–177 Goli Otok, 193 Gorra, Michael, 237 Gothic Wars, 24, 33, 37–40 Goths, 40, 103, 123 Grand Canal (Trieste), 99, 134 Grand Canal (Venice), 65, 89–90 Grand Hotel, 24, 121 Graves, Robert, 12 Great Idea, 271, 273 Great Recession, 176–177 Greece Albania and, 244–245 corruption in, 263 as crossroads, 278–280 Durrell on, 268–269 evolution of, 254 family in, 262 national resurgence in, 6 recent history of, 269–275 Greek-Turkish War, 271–272 Greengrass, Mark, 283 Gress, David, 123 Grk, Peter, 153–154 Guggenheim, Peggy, 89–90 Gundulić, Ivan, 220 Gunther, John, 104 H Habsburg Empire Balkans and, 153 collapse of, 285–286 Croatia and, 163 Dalmatia and, 184 Istria and, 139 Ljubljana and, 149 Ottoman Empire compared to, 157 Ragusa and, 216 Roth and, 131–132 Slavic unity in opposition to, 189–190 Slovenia and, 132–133, 155 Trieste and, 100–102, 104–105, 113–114, 119 Uskoks and, 192–193 Yugoslavia and, 156 Hagia Sophia, 47, 48, 65, 75 Haider, Jörg, 150n Hamilton, Edith, 81 Hammer, Langdon, 13 Hannibal, 86 Harris, Robin, 217, 218 Havel, Vaclav, 177–178 Hay, Denys, 19–23, 283 Heads of the Forty, 77 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 170, 193 Heidegger, Martin, 107 Hemingway, Ernest, 94n Heraclius, 184 Herodotus, 212 Herrin, Judith, 36, 47 Herzen, Alexander, 124–125 High Albania (Durham), 249 History of Florence (Machiavelli), 41 History of Venice, A (Norwich), 88 Hitler, Adolf, 101, 107, 116, 132, 162, 200 Holocaust, 30, 107, 108, 113, 116, 120, 138 holy man, emergence of, 45 Homer, 54, 55, 81, 111, 120, 127 Horace, 54, 95 Hoxha, Enver, 246, 253, 255 Hulse, Michael, 96–97 Hungary, 37, 108, 184, 189 Huns, 24 Huntington, Samuel P., 129–130, 141–142 Hussein, Saddam, 26 I iconography, 47 identity, mutability of, 187–188.

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But since Slovenia has in recent years joined NATO and the EU, normalization between the two communities has set in. The local conscience of Trieste was always European as much as Italian, and this cosmopolitan aspect of our personality has been helped by Slovenia joining the European Union,” and particularly by joining the Schengen open-border system three years later, in 2007, he added. History, in his telling, is usually a matter of nuances, fateful choices, and different directions at once, and yet always subject to the pressures of regional powers and economic forces: that elusive combination of determinism and human agency. For the port of Trieste, he goes on to mention, is where the Transalpine Pipeline, opened in 1967 by an international consortium, begins its journey, transporting oil shipped from the Middle East to Bavaria and parts of Austria.

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And they know that the danger in Serbia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia is not necessarily now, when memories are still relatively fresh concerning the bloody cataclysm of the 1990s, but later, years from now, when memory of the last war fades and passes into distorted myth, like much of Balkan history. * * * — I had to remind myself that Ljubljana is only one hour or so by car from Trieste, a place that might have been an independent city-state with open borders—rather than part of Italy—had the post–World War II border settlement worked out differently. Dimitrij Rupel’s father was from Trieste, and his grandfather was a Habsburg customs officer there. Rupel, born in 1946, was Slovenia’s first foreign minister after independence from Yugoslavia, and afterward became ambassador to the United States and mayor of Ljubljana.

Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions by Johann Hari

Adam Curtis, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, Berlin Wall, call centre, capitalist realism, correlation does not imply causation, Donald Trump, gig economy, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, Occupy movement, open borders, placebo effect, precariat, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Rat Park, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Stephen Fry, sugar pill, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, Tipper Gore, twin studies, universal basic income, urban planning, zero-sum game

Chapter 22: Reconnection Seven: Restoring the Future In the middle of the 1970s, a group of Canadian government officials chose This account is based on interviewing Evelyn Forget and reading her published papers, especially Evelyn Forget, “The Town with No Poverty: The Health Effects of a Canadian Guaranteed Annual Income Field Experiment,” Canadian Public Policy 37, no. 3 (2011), doi: 10.3138/cpp.37.3.283. I have also drawn on Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (London: Verso, 2015), and Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-hour Workweek (Netherlands: Correspondent Press, 2016). I have also drawn on these articles: Zi-Ann Lum, “A Canadian City Once Eliminated Poverty and Nearly Everyone Forgot About It,” Huffington Post, January 3, 2017, http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/12/23/mincome-in-dauphin-manitoba_n_6335682.html; Benjamin Shingler, “Money for nothing: Mincome experiment could pay dividends 40 years on,” Aljazeera America, August 26, 2014, http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/8/26/dauphin-canada-cash.html; Stephen J.

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., “The prevalence and distribution of major depression in a national community sample: the National Comorbidity Survey,” Am Psych Assoc 151, no. 7 (July 1994): 979–986. here are some of the key effects Evelyn discovered Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-hour Workweek (Netherlands: Correspondent Press, 2016), 63–4. He is the leading European champion of the idea of a universal basic income. https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2010/07/06/18652754.php, as accessed December 12, 2016. Behavioral problems like ADHD and childhood depression fell by 40 percent E.

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Eventually they tracked Tuncai down at the psychiatric unit where he was being held. Thirty of the people from Kotti and Co. descended on it to explain they wanted Tuncai back. When they were told he had to be detained, they said: “That cannot be. Tuncai is not a person who should be [put away]. He needs to be out with us here.” The camp turned itself into a Free Tuncai movement—they put together a petition to get him out, and they kept showing up at the facility, in big groups, to demand to see him, and for him to come home with them. The place was surrounded with barbed wire, and the security to get in was like an airport. They said to the psychiatrists: “We all know him as he is, and we love him.”

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

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Apollo 13, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, charter city, crack epidemic, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Easter island, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, ghettoisation, gig economy, Golden age of television, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Islamic Golden Age, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, life extension, low interest rates, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oculus Rift, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, private spaceflight, QAnon, quantitative easing, radical life extension, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, WeWork, women in the workforce, Y2K

The good served by some form of European unity is obvious: friendship and cooperation and peace on a long-warring continent, free commerce among neighbors, easy travel across national borders for tourists, students, and pensioners. But the assumption of the men and women running Europe for the last two generations has been that if some unity is good, then more unity must always be better. If free trade works, then open borders would work better. If cooperation between nations was effective, then supranational government was the natural next step. If the Continent could have a common market, then it should naturally have a common currency as well. And at a certain point, that optimism ceased to be justified, and the Eurocrats found themselves building the infrastructure of sclerosis.

…

And the books are indeed quite different. In Atwood’s novel, written amid the Reagan-era resurgence of religious conservatism, a near-future United States is taken over by a ruthless theocratic movement that begins rolling back not just third-wave feminism but also women’s rights to property, free movement, literacy—even to a Christian name. The novel’s totalitarian Republic of Gilead is like a feminist fever dream of what religious-right grandees like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell desired: a society of not just male privilege but also total male domination, with women confined to servile roles or (in the case of the narrator) living as slaves in the households of the regime’s nomenklatura, bearing children for powerful men whose wives are barren, and taking on names (“Offred,” meaning “of Fred”) that make their status as property explicit.

Affluence Without Abundance: The Disappearing World of the Bushmen by James Suzman

access to a mobile phone, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, clean water, discovery of the americas, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, full employment, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, means of production, Occupy movement, open borders, out of africa, post-work, quantitative easing, rewilding, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, trickle-down economics, unemployed young men, We are the 99%

Before the white farmers came, the Omaheke was home to a large and diverse Bushman population. The far east of the region, where groundwater was funneled to the surface through a limestone ridge that pushed up through the desert, was home to the Nharo Bushmen. But most of them lived on the Botswana side of the then open border. To the south were the !Xo, another group whose traditional territories would later be split almost down the middle by the erection of the border fence with Botswana. And in the north and center of the region were the Ju/’hoansi, then the most isolated of the Bushman peoples. Their traditional territories extended several hundred miles northward from what is now Gobabis all the way to the Tsodilo Hills in the northeast.

…

It runs for several hundred miles in a ruler-straight line from east to west until it slams into the border with Botswana. Its current function is to control the movement of animals and in doing so prevent the transmission of livestock diseases. Its unspoken purpose—when it was erected, at least—was to stop the free movement of people. Marking the boundary between “Bushmanland”—centered on Nyae Nyae—and Hereroland to the south, the fence bisects what was once the territorial heartland of the Nyae Nyae Ju/’hoansi. Today there are thousands of acres of rich grassland and healthy acacia forest on the Nyae Nyae side of the fence.

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street by Jeff John Roberts

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple II, Bernie Sanders, Bertram Gilfoyle, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, democratizing finance, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, financial engineering, Flash crash, forensic accounting, hacker house, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, index fund, information security, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joseph Schumpeter, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Multics, Network effects, offshore financial centre, open borders, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, radical decentralization, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator, zero-sum game

These included the radical libertarian Erik Voorhees, who had denounced the Federal Reserve as “fraudulent,” and Roger Ver, a flamboyant figure known as “Bitcoin Jesus” for his habit of giving away bitcoin while proselytizing about the currency. In 2014, Ver renounced his American citizenship over a professed belief in open borders. (That was his explanation at least—skeptics think it was tax avoidance more than principles that motivated Ver.) Whatever their true intentions, figures like Voorhees and Ver were the public faces of bitcoin in the early days, believers who inspired others to adopt the currency, and a worldview that saw Coinbase as a betrayal of Satoshi’s vision.

…

Another influential figure in bitcoin, Erik Voorhees, was even less impressed. Voorhees had developed one of the first bitcoin applications, a gambling game called Satoshi Dice, and ran a company called ShapeShift that let customers exchange one type of crypto for another. Even by libertarian standards, Voorhees was a radical. His political passions included the Free State movement, a campaign to persuade tens of thousands of people to move to New Hampshire. Their influx into that low-population state, the Free Staters hoped, would allow them to create a stronghold for antigovernment zealots. Many in the movement also promoted bitcoin as a way to subvert the state’s control over the money supply.

How Will Capitalism End? by Wolfgang Streeck

"there is no alternative" (TINA), accounting loophole / creative accounting, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, billion-dollar mistake, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, failed state, financial deregulation, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Google Glasses, haute cuisine, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, open borders, pension reform, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, post-industrial society, private sector deleveraging, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, sovereign wealth fund, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, Uber for X, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck

At the same time, by buying cheap T-shirts or smartphones, workers in the rich capitalist countries as consumers put pressure on themselves as producers, accelerating the move of production abroad and thereby undermining their own wages, working conditions and employment. Moreover, globalization relocates not only jobs but also workers. Neoliberal ideology supports migration and open borders in the name of personal liberty and human rights, knowing that it provides employers in the receiving countries with an unlimited labour supply, thereby destabilizing protective labour regimes. Ethnic diversity is welcomed, not only by the liberal middle class, but also by employers desiring docile workers that are grateful for being allowed to be where they are, and anxious to avoid deportation for becoming unemployed or engaging in militant activities.

…

ORIGINATING BATTLES The strategic goals and compromises of European Monetary Union were shaped from the start by these inevitably uneven outcomes; the national economies were thereby forced into selective adaptation. The euro was always a contradictory and conflict-ridden construct. By the late 1980s France and Italy, in particular, were fed up with the hard-currency interest policy of the Bundesbank – which, given the premise of the free movement of capital in a financializing common market, had become the de facto central bank of Europe. They were also irked, the French above all, by the periodic necessity of devaluing their currency vis-à-vis the Deutschmark to maintain their competitiveness; this was felt to be a national humiliation.

…

Their task will be to devise a system flexible enough to do justice to the conditions and constraints governing the development of all societies participating in the world economy, without encouraging rival devaluations, or the competitive production of money or debt, together with the geostrategic contests they foster. Agenda items would include the successor to the dollar as a reserve currency, the empowerment of states and international organizations to set limits to the free movement of capital, regulation of the havoc caused by the shadow banks and the global creation of money and credit, as well as the introduction of fixed but adjustable exchange rates. Such debates could take their cue from the astonishing wealth of ideas about alternative national and supranational monetary regimes produced in the interwar years by such writers as Fisher or Keynes.

Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future by Paul Krugman

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, antiwork, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, employer provided health coverage, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, frictionless, frictionless market, fudge factor, full employment, green new deal, Growth in a Time of Debt, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shock, open borders, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Seymour Hersh, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, universal basic income, very high income, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population

Still, the European project was, overall, a huge success story, not just improving the lives of hundreds of millions but showing how terrible legacies from the past could be overcome by people of good will. And then came the euro. As a political symbol, a single European money seemed like a natural next step in the European project. Europe had become a place of peace, open borders, free movement of people, shared standards on everything from the design of traffic signs to consumer safety requirements. Why not make doing business even easier, further enhance the sense of shared identity, by adopting a common currency? Unfortunately, monetary economics is about more than political symbolism.

…

Then, in 1959, came the Common Market, which eliminated all tariffs between its members—and also required them to act together on trade policy toward other countries, because you couldn’t have France and Germany charging different tariffs on, say, Canadian wheat. Then came things like harmonization of regulations, free movement of people, joint development aid to lagging regions, and along the way a change in name to the European Union. Not everything about this process was wonderful. The Brussels-based bureaucracy that manages pan-European affairs is even more detached from ordinary people’s lives, even more insular in its outlook, than most national civil services.

Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity From Politicians by Joe Quirk, Patri Friedman

3D printing, access to a mobile phone, addicted to oil, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Celtic Tiger, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, Dean Kamen, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, failed state, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open borders, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, price stability, profit motive, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, stem cell, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, young professional

“All this suggests,” wrote Clemens, “that the gains from reducing emigration barriers are likely to be enormous, measured in the tens of trillions of dollars.” Clemens concedes that each of the studies he looked at relies on assumptions, and those assumptions vary among the four studies, yet each estimate independently shows that open borders could boost global GDP in the 50 percent to 150 percent range. This would virtually eliminate all poverty on the planet. If these estimates are correct, this means the greatest evil preventing human flourishing is our superstition that people belong to governments they didn’t choose. Let Love Flow Economist Bryan Caplan asks the average middle-class American to imagine visiting Haiti on a humanitarian mission.

…

Imagine if the bottom billion were offered better opportunities in blue-green nations competing to attract them. Bryan Caplan continues this theme in an EconLog blog entry called “Sitting on an Ocean of Talent”: Now consider: economists already know how to extract many trillions of dollars of additional value from the global economy. How? Open borders. Under the status quo, most of the world’s workers are stuck in unproductive backwaters. Under free migration, labor would relocate to more productive regions, massively increasing total production. Standard cost-benefit analysis predicts that global GDP would roughly double. In a deep sense, we are sitting on an ocean of talent—most of which tragically goes to waste year after year.

Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy by Dani Rodrik

3D printing, airline deregulation, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global value chain, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, open immigration, Pareto efficiency, postindustrial economy, precautionary principle, price stability, public intellectual, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, World Values Survey, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Doesn’t this principle simultaneously allow local self‐rule and a single market, by restricting the competencies of the union only to those that need to be transnationalized? There is nothing wrong with the idea of subsidiarity per se. But the crisis has clarified how narrow the room for national sovereignty really is when we talk about European economic integration. It is no longer a matter of open borders to goods, services, capital, and people. A single currency and unified financial markets also require harmonization of labor‐market rules, banking and financial regulations, bankruptcy procedures, and a good deal of fiscal policy as well. The nation-states of the eurozone may not disappear as a result.

…

It enabled economic integration to remain one step ahead of political integration—but not too far ahead. After the 1980s, the EU made a big leap into the darkness. It adopted an ambitious single market agenda that aimed to unify Europe’s economies, whittling away at national policies that hampered the free movement not just of goods but also of services, people, and capital. The euro, which established a single currency among a subset of member states, was the logical extension of this agenda. This was hyperglobalization on a European scale. As we saw at the beginning of this chapter, there were two lines of thought on how this would work out.

The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It by Owen Jones

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, bank run, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, citizen journalism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, disinformation, don't be evil, Edward Snowden, Etonian, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, housing crisis, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Dyson, Jon Ronson, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, light touch regulation, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, night-watchman state, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, open borders, Overton Window, plutocrats, popular capitalism, post-war consensus, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stakhanovite, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent

Littlewood explains that this anti-statism underpins his rationale for opposing the smoking ban in public places, an unacceptable example of the state’s infringement on the individual’s right to choose. Littlewood is a former Liberal Democrat head of media and – he emphasizes – not a Conservative. He supports the legalization of ‘all drugs’, would ‘probably abolish the monarchy’, is ‘very sceptical about the nation state’, and is ‘extremely liberal on immigration, probably going for open borders’. He is, essentially, a libertarian. But at the centre of Littlewood’s philosophy is a desire to impose drastic cuts on the state. ‘We produced a big piece of research called “Sharper Axes, Lower Taxes”,’ Littlewood recalls, ‘arguing that the efforts being made by the government were utterly feeble and we needed to broadly cut public expenditure in half.’

…

But for all their energy and bravado, the outriders had a job on their hands: ‘There were at that time very few people who thought that free-market ideas and economic incentives could succeed in turning Britain around,’ Pirie would later write. ‘We used to point out that you could then fit most of us into a taxi, and that the entire free-market movement would be wiped out if it crashed.’13 But, few in numbers though they originally were, the outriders’ achievement would nevertheless be seismic. They helped turn what was viewed as the hopelessly wacky and left-field into the new political common sense – something that even they had believed in their more despairing moments was an impossible task.

…

The battles that the government does not pick with the European Union are equally as revealing. Some components of the EU are just like Britain’s own Establishment – institutionally rigged in favour of private interests. This causes no bother whatsoever to Britain’s political elite. EU treaties enshrine the free movement of capital, declaring that ‘all restrictions on the movement of capital between Member States and between Member States and third countries shall be prohibited’. State aid is generally banned on the grounds of granting advantages over competitors. Privatization is encoded in EU law too. EU Directive 91/440 serves to institutionalize the privatization of the railways, for example.

Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century by Christian Caryl

Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial independence, friendly fire, full employment, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, price stability, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , single-payer health, special economic zone, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, Yom Kippur War

Azzam noted another vital difference between Palestine and Afghanistan. It had to do with geography. The Palestinians confronted an Israeli enemy that had the power to keep their borders tightly closed and to monitor any movements across them. Afghanistan, by contrast, boasted eighteen hundred miles of open borders that were impossible to control, as well as many isolated tribes that resisted manipulation from the outside.2 Afghanistan’s remoteness made it a safe haven for an Islamic state. Azzam may have been influenced in this thinking by leftist theories of guerrilla warfare, which were much in vogue in the 1970s—perhaps even by Mao’s theory of the Communist “base area,” which, once firmly established, could serve as the political and military launching pad for a broader insurrection against the strong points of capitalist society.

The Divided Nation: A History of Germany, 1918-1990 by Mary Fulbrook

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, centre right, classic study, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, it's over 9,000, joint-stock company, land reform, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, open borders, Peace of Westphalia, Sinatra Doctrine, union organizing, unorthodox policies

In this way, a deeper understanding can be gained of the conditions upon which each country's stability was predicated for over forty years, the factors contributing to the ultimate demise of the East German communist state, and the nature of the two rather different Germanies which in 1990 were to embark on a process of unification, with all its attendant tensions and difficulties. Page 221 Nine Diverging Societies As the streams of Trabant and Wartburg cars bumped across the newly opened borders from East to West Germany in the winter of 198990, it was quite clear that there was a considerable disparity between the quality of life of Germans in the two states. East Germans stared amazed at the wealth of consumer goods available in West German shops, and rapidly stocked up on bananas, oranges, and other delights which had been rarities for so long.

…

Many men and women had no choice at all: they were simply made redundant. Even the East German tourist trade collapsed, despite the West Germans' new-found interest in exploring a long-ignored part of their 'homeland'. After a brief foray, most found it preferable to make day trips from the comfort of West German tourist facilities close to the now-open border, while, with the change to western hard currency, the former flocks of Hungarian and Czechoslovakian visitors could no longer afford their customary fortnight on the Baltic coast. In such circumstances, the negotiations over the terms of unification were conducted with all the initiative on the West German side.

Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone? by David G. Blanchflower

90 percent rule, active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Clapham omnibus, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, driverless car, estate planning, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, John Bercow, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nate Silver, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, oil shock, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Own Your Own Home, p-value, Panamax, pension reform, Phillips curve, plutocrats, post-materialism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, quantitative easing, rent control, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, selection bias, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, urban planning, working poor, working-age population, yield curve

A Pew Research poll taken in June 2018 found that immigration in the United States had emerged as the most important problem facing the nation.48 In January 2017 immigration was cited less often as being an important problem facing the nation than health care, the economy, unemployment, race relations, and then president-elect Donald J. Trump. In Las Vegas in June 2018 President Trump said about immigration, “I like the issue for [the] election.” He went on. “Our issue is strong borders, no crime. Their issue is open borders, get MS-13 all over our country. … We need people to come in, but they have to be people that love this country, can love our country, and can really help us to make America great again.”49 Being mean to immigrants has consequences; they leave. Donato Paolo Mancini and Jason Douglas in the Wall Street Journal have reported on an exodus of European workers from the UK, especially in the health-care field.50 They filed an FOI request with the UK’s General Medical Council and obtained data showing the number of specialized doctors with non-UK EU citizenship has reached an eight-year low of 10,487 in 2018, down from a peak of over 12,000 in 2014.

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A 2015 analysis looked at the impact of migration on economic growth for twenty-two OECD countries between 1986 and 2006.32 The results showed a positive impact of migrants’ human capital on GDP per capita; in addition, a permanent increase in migration flows has a positive effect on productivity growth. It seems highly likely that Brexit and the end of free movement will result in a large decrease in immigration flows from European Economic Area countries to the UK.33 It also seems that the presence of a larger number of immigrants lowers prices. Immigrant nannies lower the price of childcare. One of the members of the MPC that I was on had a Latvian “ironer” to iron his clothes.

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The UK and France will not be able to restore empire and share the spoils of monopoly power as they did a century ago. There was never going to be lots of money after Brexit to fund the NHS. In June 2018 Prime Minister May once again was talking about using a Brexit dividend to fund the NHS although there is none. No postBrexit paradise. No deal with the EU that doesn’t allow for free movement of capital, services, goods, and people. You can’t eat sovereignty. No repeal of Obamacare. No draining of the swamp. No return of steel or coal jobs. No wall. Dreamland. Your Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid were never safe, and the middle class was never going to get big tax cuts. The lobbyists were always going to ensure the tax cuts mostly went to business and rich donors.

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

Across rich countries, immigrants have been demonized in recent years for supposedly stealing good jobs, but they are not to blame for the hollowing out of the middle class. Political courage is needed to find sensible solutions, which will almost certainly require more immigration. We are not advocating simply opening borders. Migrants need to be documented, not just to ensure they pay taxes but also to protect them from exploitation. And robust controls need to be complemented by efforts to ensure that migrants integrate effectively into society, which is essential for maintaining public buy-in. With these conditions in place, increased migration can be a win-win, helping rich countries to overcome their demographic challenges while simultaneously reducing global poverty by providing a lifeline to millions of people around the world desperately seeking work.

Democracy and Prosperity: Reinventing Capitalism Through a Turbulent Century by Torben Iversen, David Soskice

Andrei Shleifer, assortative mating, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, centre right, clean tech, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, confounding variable, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, first-past-the-post, full employment, general purpose technology, gentrification, Gini coefficient, hiring and firing, implied volatility, income inequality, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, invisible hand, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, means of production, middle-income trap, mirror neurons, mittelstand, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, passive investing, precariat, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, rent-seeking, RFID, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Silicon Valley, smart cities, speech recognition, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban decay, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

STRATEGIC COMPLEMENTARITIES AND INSTITUTIONAL HETEROGENEITY Because of nationally rooted specialization in an integrated world economy, the advanced capitalist democracies are engaged in a game of strategic complementarities. Globalization between them increases the payoffs from the game, as opposed to constraining domestic political choice or suborning democracy of the advanced economies. In Chandlerian companies in a Fordist regime, free trade and freedom of foreign direct investment movement are both important, as they are in knowledge economies. In knowledge economies, as knowledge competences become more decentralized, so knowledge-based MNEs become more like networks of autonomous subsidiaries with complementary knowledge competences. In both cases there is a political incentive to promote globalization across the advanced economies; but it is arguably more important in the contemporary world.

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Finally, it helps us understand why advanced democracies, despite generating prosperity and greater income equality than most nonadvanced countries, have not responded to rising inequality since the late 1970s. Closely related is the question why advanced capitalist democracies have given rise to populist political movements that oppose the very elites that grow out of the knowledge economy as well as open borders and the prosperous cities and the live-and-let-live values that they give rise to. But first we highlight some key conceptual distinctions, causal claims, and empirical hypotheses that make up our basic argument. 1.3. Our ACD Framework Approach Our broad thesis is that a relatively simple framework model of advanced capitalist democracies (ACD) evolved over a long period of time, at least over the last century—from roughly the end of the First World War, by which point all the early industrialisers had become democracies.

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

See Karl Marx, “German Ideology,” in Karl Marx, Early Political Writings, ed. Joseph J. O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 132; and Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), especially p. 6. For a more recent take in a somewhat similar vein, see Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-hour Workweek (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2017). 14. As the 2018 World Inequality Report chronicles, there is a lot of variation in the degree to which different countries have allowed their citizens to share in the growth of the local economy. This, its authors conclude, suggests “the importance of institutional and policy frameworks” in determining outcomes from affluence to inequality.

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To create a truly “single market,” the EU has introduced far-reaching limitations on the autonomy of its member states.78 For example, their ability to tax different forms of alcohol at differential rates is limited because of fears that, say, Belgium, which produces a lot of beer, might choose to impose a heavy tax on wine while Italy, which produces a lot of wine, might impose a heavy tax on beer.79 Technical and environmental standards are frequently set by Brussels rather than by national capitals, putting significant powers in the hands of the European Commission.80 And finally, the free movement of people gives European citizens far-reaching rights to access the territory of other member states81—but limits the ability of member states to decide who should get to live in their territory.82 Free trade treaties constitute only a small subset of the international agreements and organizations that now structure the international system.

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits