The Long View 2007-06-21: Immigration and Rotten Boroughs; Zero Population Growth Anachronism; NASA's Greatest Triumph; No Black Holes; Global Warming Plan B
Here is a case of John should have checked the numbers and didn’t:
No, the problem is not "too many people": Japan and California are roughly the same size, but Japan has four times as many people as California and is substantially richer. In part, CAPS is part of the problem: the success of the anti-natalist program of groups like Californians for Population Stabilization created the tightened labor market for which open borders are supposed to be the solution.
US GDP per Capita
Japan GDP per Capita
I suppose John could have meant that more populous Japan has a bigger economy than California, but that isn’t a very interesting point to make. And yes, I posted US GDP per capita, because California is above the US average here, so if the US average is 50% higher than Japan, California will be too.
I am entirely sympathetic to the argument that neither population nor population density are necessarily evil things, but the numbers don’t back this argument up.
Immigration and Rotten Boroughs; Zero Population Growth Anachronism; NASA's Greatest Triumph; No Black Holes; Global Warming Plan B
The ever-cynical Mark Steyn suggests an aspect to the immigration debate that had escaped me:
On the whole, the left is better at immigration math than the right. They know, for example, that the “fast track to citizenship” pitch is bunk. They don’t need citizens: Congressional districting is based not on citizens or voters but on residents, and a gazillion amnesties will be enough to give the demographically weakened Democrat precincts a huge windfall come the next apportionment.
This would be another difference between the immigration of 1900 and that of 2000. In the earlier episode, political machines wanted high immigration because they wanted new voters. Currently, maybe, political machines want high immigration to create rotten boroughs. We may also note that the old machines at least gave value-for-votes: they provided jobs and social services for their adherents. I am not aware that pro-immigration groups do that today. Certainly the Democratic Party doesn't.
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This critique of immigration must be spiked: It is always surprising to run across the old zero-population-growth groups these days, considering how anachronistic they have become. Here's a bit of Population Bomb nostalgia from Californians for Population Stabilization:
Californians know what's happening to our state because we're forced to face the worsening consequences on a daily basis: impossible traffic, unbreathable air, endless urban sprawl, badly overcrowded schools, a dangerously depleted health care system, loss of open space and habitat, depressed wages, heavier taxpayer burdens, and more.
All of these problems have two things in common: they are robbing us of the quality of life for which we work so hard and they all have the same cause: too many people.
Too many people and too few resources. America's open-door policies have left California, and the nation, with a continued and unsustainable flood of immigration. And something must be done.
No, the problem is not "too many people": Japan and California are roughly the same size, but Japan has four times as many people as California and is substantially richer. In part, CAPS is part of the problem: the success of the anti-natalist program of groups like Californians for Population Stabilization created the tightened labor market for which open borders are supposed to be the solution.
* * *
NASA is another mistake from the 1970s, if we may believe the discussion at Chaos Manor. There we see how NASA took a plausible idea for a usable space plane and turned it into the dangerous, expensive, and eminently scrappable Space Shuttle. The chief cause of the evil was that NASA wanted a monopoly of space:
NASA's policies were deliberate. They knew precisely what they were doing. They were keeping USAF from having a space program. And the Navy.
Those goals were achieved, with the side effect of preventing the United States as a whole from having a sustainable space program. On the other hand, it is not self-evident that we would have been better off turning over federally funded aerospace development to the Air Force. The USSR had an unambiguously militarized manned space program, and they did not do better, or even as well.
* * *
Disturbing news on the cosmological front, if we may believe this report:
"Nothing there," is what Case Western Reserve University physicists concluded about black holes after spending a year working on complex formulas to calculate the formation of new black holes. In nearly 13 printed pages with a host of calculations, the research may solve the information loss paradox that has perplexed physicists for the past 40 years....
The physicists are quick to assure astronomers and astrophysicists that what is observed in gravity pulling masses together still holds true, but what is controversial about the new finding is that "from an external viewer's point it takes an infinite amount of time to form an event horizon and that the clock for the objects falling into the black hole appears to slow down to zero," said Krauss, director of Case's Center for Education and Research in Cosmology....
If black holes exist in the universe, the astrophysicists speculate they were formed only at the beginning of time.
So, no baby universes? And what does that imply for the Anthropic Principle, eh?
* * *
Meanwhile, the Left is ready for disconfirmation of Global Warning, according to Joseph Hertzlinger
If Anthropogenic Global Warming turns out not to be a problem, the creationists (and maybe other pseudo-scientists) will not let us forget it. The hard left is already preparing a back-up plan. (The “Living Marxism” people are planning to blame pro-nuclear people.) The academic scientists that the Global-Warming hysterics are claiming to speak for also need a back-up plan.
This issue has become a war of flacks. Happily, the underlying question is eminently testable.
Copyright © 2007 by John J. Reilly
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