[HN Gopher] Governments should compete for residents, not busine...
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Governments should compete for residents, not businesses
Author : john_cogs
Score : 288 points
Date : 2023-03-08 15:25 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| lampshades wrote:
| They should do both.
| sologoub wrote:
| There already are programs to attract residents that can boost a
| country's tax base and add investments to economy. Media likes to
| call them "golden visas" and have derided them all the same. Sure
| there are issues like risks of ill-gotten funds getting laundered
| or criminals getting a new start without facing consequences of
| their crimes, but the same can be said about companies that are
| used as fronts for the same individuals. In the end, very large
| sums of money seem to open most doors, whether it is for
| individuals or companies.
| dougmwne wrote:
| This is pretty silly because governments do compete for
| residents. Having jobs is a major part of attracting new
| residents unless you are a (sub)tropical paradise. A business
| that doesn't employ anyone or consume any inputs from other state
| businesses is not going to be a particularly interesting business
| to incentivize.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| > Having jobs is a major part of attracting new residents
| unless you are a (sub)tropical paradise.
|
| The theory is that for a whole range of lucrative jobs,
| "everywhere with Internet" can offer residents those jobs
| through remote work. So a neighborhood doesn't need to compete
| to attract a big office building.
|
| Personally I think that remains to be seen... we're clearly
| still in the hangover from the pandemic. Society might look
| very different 10 years from now, and 10 years is a reasonable
| horizon for major civic planning. Most of the things that
| attracted Amazon to Crystal City were put in years or decades
| prior to their little competition.
|
| > A business that doesn't employ anyone or consume any inputs
| from other state businesses is not going to be a particularly
| interesting business to incentivize.
|
| Exactly, that's the whole point of the piece. If all the most
| lucrative jobs for your residents are remote, then maybe your
| civic planning will need to revolve around attracting people
| rather than incentivizing businesses.
|
| Again, remains to be seen IMO. One big downside, from the
| perspective of local governments, is that taxes on individuals
| will have to go up. Quite a lot of local tax revenue passes
| through businesses, hidden in prices. You can't hide on a W2 or
| property tax bill though.
| mdgrech23 wrote:
| Also local individuals aren't providing campaign donations
| but sure can bet corporations are.
| dougmwne wrote:
| The thing is that Florida and a few other top destinations
| seem to have a monopoly on attracting remote workers. No
| state income tax helps a lot, but that's not going to make
| Wisconsin a major destination for remote workers. If the
| place hasn't already been attracting retirees for years, it's
| probably not going to ever get on the remote worker radar.
| NineStarPoint wrote:
| For me while State Income tax was an interesting part of
| the decision, ultimately it was easily consumed by the
| massive difference in house prices (and as such rent)
| between different locations. Which is probably part of the
| retiree question as well, but I wouldn't say most of the
| places that ended up on my list with a combination of
| "place I'd want to live" and "reasonable rent prices" were
| retiree destinations.
| LLcolD wrote:
| Maybe this is like a chicken and the egg problem? I see it in
| my country. Investors would like to come and build a factory,
| but there is no work force. So they go elsewhere.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| It's not just jobs, it's stuff like housing, government
| services - and then there's this phenomenon along the NY-PA
| state line, when New Yorkers sell up once their children are
| out of school and move to Pennsylvania. Local taxes are lower
| in PA, but schools are worse, too.
| thex10 wrote:
| > This is pretty silly because governments do compete for
| residents.
|
| I agree, but I also think many places compete poorly.
|
| I recently moved to a fast-growing (read: developer-friendly)
| region of the USA that often claims to be a "top place to
| live". And I might just leave, for many reasons:
|
| * The water tastes terrible. But I bought a filter so
| whatever...
|
| * The schools are bad. But I can try to lottery into the magnet
| school, okay..
|
| * The services suck because they are not made to keep up with
| demand. Worse yet this is "normalized", seen as completely okay
| by the culture.
|
| * Can't make a DMV appointment yet, next appointments available
| in three months
|
| * None of the post offices accessible to me have passport
| appointments available. The only walk in service available is
| in _another county_
|
| * I can't drive, transit exists but is too infrequent to be a
| good option to get to that other county for a very specific
| appointment
|
| That's just a small slice of government-enabled things which
| happen to affect me. But what of it? No one in power gives a
| shit. So f--k me for having high expectations, I guess.
| dougmwne wrote:
| Yeah, I think you've got it. Poor competitors lose the
| competition. Sounds like you are better off somewhere else,
| especially if you want public transit.
| Symbiote wrote:
| It sounds like they have no option other than public
| transport until the 3 month wait for the DMV appointment is
| done.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Sounds like Phoenix area suburbs.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| When corporations are people, competing for businesses is
| literally the same thing as competing for people.
| helen___keller wrote:
| And a lot of issues in (sub)tropical paradises are also caused
| by lack of jobs, or at least ones well paying enough to afford
| housing in a market that's valuable by virtue of being
| paradise.
|
| Case in point, Honolulu has a cost of living on par with (or
| exceeding) New York, SF, etc, but with wages on par with an
| average mid sized midwestern city.
|
| What this means is people who were born and raised on the
| island either live with parents or move to the mainland
| londons_explore wrote:
| There are a few countries who compete for residents.
|
| For example, The Netherlands has a 30% tax advantage for all
| immigrants, for 5 years. Thats _huuuuuge_.
|
| [1]: https://www.iamsterdam.com/en/live-work-
| study/living/officia...
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| > From a tax perspective, the salary agreed upon between you
| and your employer will be reduced by 30%. In return, you
| receive a 30% allowance as reimbursement for expenses.
|
| This is not at all a 30% tax advantage lol.
| techstrategist wrote:
| It actually works out better than 30%, quote is just an
| accounting game. You pay taxes on 70%, the top 30% is a tax
| free allowance. With a top marginal rate of ~50% it's a
| massive savings.
|
| Politically I think they originally justified it as covering
| expenses for people living in a new country (without having
| to declare e.g. trips home), but practically it's a tool to
| help employers attract internationals and make it cheaper to
| offer internationally competitive salaries for professionals.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Imagine you and a local are both are paid EUR100k. The local
| gets EUR60,675.16 after tax.
|
| The immigrant gets EUR77,281.98 annually after tax.
|
| Thats 27% more money in your bank account for the same work
| done.
|
| And there is another huge benefit for those moving from the
| USA... Any income from shares or overseas income are taxed at
| the USA tax rate rather than the dutch tax rate.
| pphysch wrote:
| Isn't it saying that if you earn 100K, you will only be taxed
| as someone who earns 70K? That 30K is then an untaxed
| "allowance".
| necovek wrote:
| > Thats 27% more money in your bank account for the same
| work done.
|
| A nitpick, but that's not "for the same work done", but for
| the same gross salary.
|
| The benefit is in recognition of the extra home-making
| costs (and work) a highly skilled immigrant would have upon
| moving there.
|
| A local would usually have local support system (friends,
| family, inheritance, knowledge of language...).
| necovek wrote:
| Not _all_ immigrants:
|
| > Highly skilled migrants...
| CalRobert wrote:
| It also has among the happiest children in the world, which is
| why we're investigating moving there (happy for any advice or
| leads!)
|
| Interestingly you can apparently, if you're careful about it,
| register your own foreign company there and avail of the 30%
| ruling so long as you register your company before you move. I
| have an Irish limited company and am working on figuring out
| how to do that so I can move to NL and avail of this tax
| benefit.
| [deleted]
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| With falling birthrates in developed countries, competing for
| residents will be exactly what they will be doing.
|
| Making a success of large scale immigration will be essential to
| the future prospects of those nations/communities.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| Is this really all that challenging? Plenty of Indians who are
| willing to move anywhere developed.
| cpp_frog wrote:
| Middle income countries are also facing demographic busts
| (although years later compared to rich countries). Competing
| for highly-skilled human capital, _not_ massive third world
| immigration is essential, the main reason beaing that advanced
| economies with generous welfare are most affected by falling
| birth rates, and migrants to rich countries take as little as a
| single generation to adopt similar reproductive patterns
| relative to native populations (i.e. sub-replacement TFR: asian
| and east-asian to north america are the greatest example of
| this, but also hispanics and muslims to a lesser extent have
| collapsing birth rates). Even more dangerous to a stable
| economy is, that with a generous welfare system an invereted
| population pyramid will not be enough to sustain it, aging
| immigrant populations will exacerbate the problem: again, sub-
| replacement TFR in at most 2 gens. At most it will delay the
| demographic problem, however I personally think that focus on
| industrial automation will be more important.
|
| See also my comment from a previous thread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34909400
| nhchris wrote:
| Successful mass immigration will allow them to persist in the
| systems that are causing those falling birthrates, ensuring
| their people dwindle towards nothing. Stopping immigration
| would force them to change to something sustainable.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > persist in the systems that are causing those falling
| birthrates
|
| Care to specify which systems are causing the falling
| birthrates?
| nhchris wrote:
| "Systems" as in those countries' social and economical
| systems. I don't know exactly what about those systems
| kills birthrates, but they are doubtless to blame, as other
| countries, and even those same countries some time in the
| past, had higher birthrates. Those systems caused that
| change.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >"Systems" as in those countries' social and economical
| systems. I don't know exactly what about those systems
| kills birthrates, but they are doubtless to blame, as
| other countries, and even those same countries some time
| in the past, had higher birthrates. Those systems caused
| that change.
|
| I'd say that falling birthrates have much more to do with
| modern medicine (antibiotics and _effective_
| contraception anyone?) and better sanitation systems, as
| well as industrialization, than with government policies
| (China 's failed "one child" policy notwithstanding).
|
| If you're a farmer, more kids means more (relatively
| free) help on the farm. When almost half[0] of the
| children born died before the age of five, more kids were
| conceived, since many wouldn't survive to adulthood.
|
| That's not government policy, that's technology.
|
| [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041693/united-
| states-al...
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| chewz wrote:
| That was true until end of XIX century. Especially so in XIX
| century. For a person a move was quite simple, sometimes just few
| miles over the border. But moving a business, brick-and-mortar
| business like coal-mine or brewery was hard. That kept personal
| taxes low and business taxes high.
|
| But XX century changed that.
| mannerheim wrote:
| People forget that modern nation states are a very recent,
| post-democratic construct, and in the past, states competed for
| people all the time; the fact that these people spoke a
| different language and had a different ethnicity mattered
| little to a monarch who themselves might not have belonged to
| the ethnicity of the country they ruled.
|
| Hence the Prussians bringing Poles to work on the farms in
| Silesia abandoned by Germans for the factories in the Ruhr, the
| Russians bringing Mennonites to settle the Volga (of course, it
| helped that the imperial family was German), the Austrians
| encouraging Serbs to exchange Ottoman for Habsburg rule, and
| many more such cases.
| alexfromapex wrote:
| The only way to make it happen is to incentivize it monetarily.
| That means the government's budget would have to be heavily
| controlled by how many residents there are. But just residency is
| too narrow of a lens to make any conclusions from, in my opinion.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| > _That means the government's budget would have to be heavily
| controlled by how many residents there are._
|
| ... aren 't we there already?
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Not necessarily. Making it easier to build housing or creating
| temporary tax abatements for renovations is a tired and true
| strategy that doesn't really cost a city anything. Attracting
| new residents to rehab and move into formerly run down housing
| will actually increase tax receipts in the medium term.
| rhuru wrote:
| I think the real problem is some cities have grown far too large.
| Larger the city harder for businesses and people to move out of
| it. Let the city residents through their elected council chose
| the path they want to pursue, with enough diversity people can
| prefer to move in and out of a city with very little impact on
| their day to day life. I have moved in and out of
| Sunnyvale/Mountain View/San Jose few times.
| vonnik wrote:
| This piece is an op-ed, not straight reporting.
|
| Tyler Cowen, its author, is a noted economist (with libertarian
| leanings), and he favors competition in many forms. Anyone
| curious about him and his views should read his blog Marginal
| Revolution and listen to his podcast. They're both smart:
|
| https://marginalrevolution.com/
|
| https://conversationswithtyler.com/
|
| Tyler has written extensively about stagnation in the American
| economy. Part of that stagnation is the decreasing mobility of
| Americans.
|
| I very much agree with him that governments should compete for
| residents, especially the right kind of residents.
|
| It takes hard work to build a successful city.
|
| If we look at San Francisco, we see a city that has done
| everything it can to drive away many residents, and in so doing,
| destroyed its tax base, leading to a budget crisis. A great
| lesson in what not to do!
|
| Why should there not be a market for talent, where the towns and
| cities of America compete to make themselves more livable, better
| centers of serendipity, better providers of public services? That
| sounds great to me.
|
| In an earlier America, some cities took this mandate very
| seriously. For anyone curious, Stanley Marcus of Neiman Marcus
| tells the story of about the leaders of Dallas deliberately made
| it attractive to early residents in order to build their town.
| His biographical book is called "Minding the Store."
| m0llusk wrote:
| The situation in San Francisco is more complex than that. It is
| pretty clear that heavy handed taxes drove some away, but the
| bulk of office workers were not in that elite club. The
| transition to remote work drained San Francisco of its office
| workers. Even with that more than half of the existing office
| space stock is still rented and used.
| vonnik wrote:
| It's not a whole lot more complex.
|
| In the last few years, the city government could have adopted
| very different policies toward policing, homelessness, COVID,
| housing and education, all of which would have made it more
| competitive than it is.
|
| SF's commercial leases, while underperforming on a national
| level, are a whole different issue to the one Tyler is
| addressing, which is about competing for residents, not
| businesses.
| slackdog wrote:
| Residents need jobs. Alaska is one of the most beautiful states
| in the country, but there are relatively few opportunities for
| work. If there were more jobs, more people would consider moving
| to Alaska.
|
| We got a taste of this effect when remote working became common.
| A lot of people moved to other states and cities they wouldn't or
| couldn't live in before when they were expected to live near the
| office. But of course remote working isn't possible for many
| industries, particularly for blue collar labor, so if you want
| those people to move into your area, you need to have job
| opportunities to offer them.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > If there were more jobs, more people would consider moving to
| Alaska.
|
| I wouldn't bet on a surge of people. Even in Anchorage, the sun
| comes up mid-morning and sets mid-afternoon in the winter. And
| about half the year the high temperature struggles to get above
| freezing. A typical summer temperature tops out in the mid 60s,
| and summer is short.
|
| Sure, some people will still move there, but it's not just jobs
| that makes Alaska a tough sell.
| chasd00 wrote:
| One thing to consider is jobs isn't the only thing that
| attracts residents. If i could double my salary by moving my
| family to Alaska I still wouldn't go. It's too cold.
| chasd00 wrote:
| It's not one or the other, governments ( US state governments )
| compete for both. Companies want to be where the workers are at
| and workers want to be where the jobs are at. A state needs
| qualified residents to attract businesses and they also need good
| jobs to attract residents. The articles says WFH is changing that
| but I don't see WFH ever being on a wide enough scale to have
| much influence.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Workers want to be comfortably near jobs. Not so close you
| breath the fumes. Not so far you commute by plane. Ideally with
| good schools if you want kids, and other activities besides
| walking on concrete.
| teawrecks wrote:
| I think the sentiment is more that we should optimize for the
| wellbeing of people; i.e. the wellbeing of companies should
| only optimized to the degree that it contributes to the
| wellbeing of people.
| kodah wrote:
| I would rather that the incentive system be geared towards
| balancing quality of life with affordability. Clustering
| businesses together is how we go to paying for "Cost of Labor"
| which systemically advantages already very rich people becoming
| richer while marginalizing geographies that don't exist to
| cater to businesses with dense, high income people. My
| hypothesis is the more average the experience is across a
| nation the more peaceful and enjoyable life becomes.
| vanjajaja1 wrote:
| For some people, yes, for others, no. There's plenty of
| countries in the world that prioritise creating an average
| and peaceful experience. As far as I can tell the US was
| never one of those countries.
| abvdasker wrote:
| It's worth remembering that New York-based opposition to
| subsidies for Amazon's construction of "HQ2" in Long Island City
| was widely vilified and disparaged in mainstream media outlets
| across the political spectrum. This latest development looks like
| a pretty strong vindication of those who were outspoken against
| these tax handouts to Amazon.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| The specific tax incentives offered to Amazon (above and beyond
| the programs that the city offers broadly) were all linked to
| job creation. Create no jobs; get no tax breaks.
|
| With that in mind, to what extent do you consider this a
| "vindication"?
| [deleted]
| chasd00 wrote:
| The city collects $0 if there's no building no matter what the
| incentive was. It would be as if AMZ went somewhere else to
| build. People see "handout" and think AMZ was written a check,
| but that's not how the incentives work. "handout" is a very
| misleading term.
| abvdasker wrote:
| > The city collects $0 if there's no building no matter what
| the incentive was.
|
| In reality that's not what happened. Amazon has had a very
| large _unsubsidized_ office in Manhattan which predates their
| "HQ2" proposal and has quietly grown even larger in the years
| since I interviewed there. That they have significantly
| expanded their corporate offices in Hudson Yards without
| subsidy suggests that the tax breaks were unnecessary to
| begin with. Amazon was always going to staff up in NYC
| regardless of whether they got the tax break or not.
|
| In general, subsidies of that sort for companies operating
| out of desirable locations like SF and NYC are unnecessary
| because the employer needs access to the highly educated
| talent pool in those cities far more than the city needs any
| individual employer.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _latest development looks like a pretty strong vindication of
| those who were outspoken against these tax handouts to Amazon_
|
| How so? I was in west Manhattan when that happened. We got the
| jobs and capital, not Queens.
| draw_down wrote:
| [dead]
| abvdasker wrote:
| Amazon very publicly decided not to build "HQ2" in Long
| Island City as a result of the local opposition. Amazon's
| significant Manhattan presence predates any of this
| discussion and is largely unsubsidized. It's also a little
| goofy to assume that the people working for Amazon in
| Manhattan don't live in Queens but otherwise would if the
| office was physically located there (especially given their
| proximity to the 7 train lol).
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Amazon 's significant Manhattan presence predates any of
| this discussion and is largely unsubsidized_
|
| It's unsubsidised. But there was a hiring boom originally
| planned for Queens--I know people who were planning on
| living in Queens who had to about turn to Chelsea.
|
| You're correct that Queens lost because of opposition, not
| subsidies _per se_ , but a lot of that opposition was
| churned by anti-subsidy politics.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Wow. Is Bloomberg actually a credible business publication?
|
| Barring a serious housing surplus, or similar major economic
| problems, there are ~no upsides for political leaders who
| actually work to attract more residents to an area. (Attracting
| more & higher bidders, for the limited housing stock, is a
| different story.)
|
| Vs. "attracting new business"? That attracts plenty of favorable
| press, bragging rights, etc. And for local governments - which
| live on property taxes and have to fund the schools & local
| services - every dollar worth of business properties is a money
| farm, and every dollar worth of residential housing is a money
| pit.
| comte7092 wrote:
| Even in the era of remote work, businesses are attracted to
| places with strong (as in a well developed & highly skilled
| workforce) labor markets.
|
| Workers who have high career capital are mobile and can
| generally choose where they want to live.
|
| Nothing about this is unserious just because it doesn't fit
| your worldview.
| bluGill wrote:
| That depends. Factory work is often attracted to a dieing
| town in the middle of nowhere they can scoup up cheap labor
| that is just skilled enough. You can only get your factory so
| large doing this though, but there are towns of 5-10k people
| that fit the bill just fine for manufacturing cheap in the
| US.
| RetpolineDrama wrote:
| > and every dollar worth of residential housing is a money pit.
|
| This can't possibly be true in any of the municipalities I've
| ever lived in. Property taxes are insane, like fancy private
| school tuition insane and it's definitely not going into the
| roads. Actually lets break it down:
|
| Power, water, and sewer are paid for by their consumption. My
| local utilities actually have the problem that they _make_ too
| much money.
|
| Roads are paid for by fuel/registration taxes/insane vehicle
| sales tax.
|
| Schools are paid by property tax, but every public school in
| every jurisdiction I've ever lived in has been inferior to
| private while costing me almost as much via property tax.
|
| Then there's Fire and Police, but those costs should be minimal
| and distributed over the huge number of residents.
|
| Then there's the mail, oh wait that's again funded by usage.
|
| Zoning and code compliance? Again, absolutely minimal costs
| there. Permits cost $... so again funded by usage!
|
| Central planning for development? _What_ planning? lol.
|
| I know where this is coming from, poorly researched and often-
| dishonest narrative from "not just bikes" and their ilk. In
| reality residential communities are huge tax farms. Every watt
| of power, gallon of water, etc is *paid for* (including a
| healthy markup). The damn roads don't cost $15k/year.
| btilly wrote:
| I have no idea whether it is true where you are, but it
| certainly IS true where I am.
|
| First, commercial property taxes in California are generally
| higher than residential. Which is an incentive to attract
| business, not residents. https://www.hechtgroup.com/the-
| different-taxes-imposed-on-co...
|
| Second, you're seriously underestimating the cost of roads.
| As https://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Free-Parking-
| Updated/dp/193... pointed out, the bit of road your car is
| parked on usually costs more than the car. Now walk around
| your neighborhood and look at how much road there is. ALL of
| it costs that much. Most of us don't think about it, but it
| has to be paid for somehow. And it really isn't cheap.
| RetpolineDrama wrote:
| >First, commercial property taxes in California are
| generally higher than residential.
|
| Sure, but businesses making _more_ for an area doesn't mean
| residential areas aren't profitable.
|
| >the bit of road your car is parked on usually costs more
| than the car.
|
| Sensational nonsense. ~100sq ft of black tar asphalt,
| barring some kind of bananna republic corruption scheme,
| could never cost _more_ than an average automobile. Think
| about how absurd that statement is, and reevaluate why your
| internal filters allowed that statement through.
|
| >Now walk around your neighborhood and look at how much
| road there is. ALL of it costs that much. Most of us don't
| think about it, but it has to be paid for somehow. And it
| really isn't cheap.
|
| The premise is absurd, so the conclusion from it is
| invalid.
| btilly wrote:
| Yes, you get taxes from a residential area. But if you
| get MORE from a business area, guess which one cities are
| going to be incentivized to attract?
|
| About the road, a standard parking space is 180 square
| feet. At $100 per square foot for the land that's
| $18,000.
|
| Now compare to the car. Per
| https://hedgescompany.com/blog/2022/02/how-old-are-cars/
| the median car is about 12 years old. If you want to buy
| a 2011 car right now, https://www.truecar.com/used-cars-
| for-sale/listings/year-201... shows you a whole lot of
| options. All are substantially less than that.
|
| The median car really does cost less than the space where
| it is parked. For more on this, see
| https://streetwidths.its.ucla.edu/
| Hermitian909 wrote:
| > Schools are paid by property tax, but every public school
| in every jurisdiction I've ever lived in has been inferior to
| private while costing me almost as much via property tax.
|
| Former educator: This mostly comes down to being able to
| select for students from house holds that have large
| disposable income and care enough about their child's
| education to send them to a private school.
|
| This usually gets you a lot of benefits:
|
| 1. Less disruptive kids (get too disruptive and they kick you
| out)
|
| 2. More engaged kids
|
| 3. Parents with leisure time to volunteer
|
| 4. Easier fundraising (private school in my area rakes in
| ~$1ml/yr in fundraising, vs $500k for the public school).
|
| I really want to re-iterate how powerful the effect of being
| able to kick people out of the school is. Like in most things
| 20% of the families generate 80% of disruptions in public
| schools and private schools basically get to elide that by
| not being a public service.
| notch898a wrote:
| Seems like this could be improved by mandating no more than
| 2x disparity between spending on kids in the same grade
| level. Disruptors can be kicked into the gladiator camps or
| emancipated if they think they're so independent on what
| they can do.
| bell-cot wrote:
| IIR, the biggest barrier to that idea is the kids with
| special needs, and either the ADA or similar laws. And at
| least in some states, "Chris has _really_ special medical
| needs " can be a license to bleed the school district to
| financial ruin.
| Hermitian909 wrote:
| Actual measurement for most disruptions is really hard
| because it usually manifests in things like "Timmy was
| really distracting in class during the Math lesson".
| Quantifying that is difficult.
|
| Capping spending ratios would also be horrific for the US
| specifically because we implement many of our social
| welfare programs for kids through the schools: school
| lunches, speech therapy, etc. (incidentally, this
| overinflates our spending on students relative to peer
| nations). You'd be relegating poor kids to even worse
| outcomes than they already face which would have some
| seriously negative downstream effects once they become
| adults.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Last I heard, average American per-student public school
| spending was ~$10K per pupil per year. Do free school
| lunches and a few hours per week with a speech therapist
| (or whatever a kid needs) actually add $10K to the annual
| cost of a pupil?
|
| (And if "yes", could the problem mostly be fixed by (say)
| changing "2x" to "3x"?)
| notch898a wrote:
| My thought process is the rich kids are already going to
| private school, where by your own admission various
| factors present advantages to them.
|
| The poorer left competing at the public schools all have
| their various challenges and struggles. IMO the best we
| can do for them is afford them equality of OPPORTUNITY
| for use of numerical amount of public funds. Johnny gets
| 10k Billy gets 10k, maybe 20k at most. There's no
| guarantee you'll get equality of outcome, but at least
| you got equal shot at the public funds and one poor kid
| doesn't lose out a huge amount so the other kid gets 5x
| the money. At some point sure more money is almost always
| better than less, but we have to remember that comes at
| the cost of other poor kids.
|
| As for lunches... I don't know why those aren't just
| given to all kids in public school by default. That would
| make it equal and satisfy the criteria.
|
| >Quantifying that is difficult
|
| This sounds accurate but I have to point out you've
| expressed the private schools are finding effective ways
| to identify disruptors.
| loganmhb wrote:
| The roads might actually cost more than that:
|
| https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/4/30/my-city-has-
| ma...
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I live in a high property tax county in Illinois, and 70% of
| my taxes go to the schools. More than half of that 70% pays
| for teacher's pensions.
| legitster wrote:
| Did you actually read the article?
|
| > If Amazon stiffs Northern Virginia, future politicians
| elsewhere may be less eager to promise tax breaks and
| infrastructure investments, not to mention spend their
| reputational capital. Politically speaking, it will be harder
| for urban and suburban leaders to rise to the top by attracting
| a new major corporate tenants. "Pro-business" local governments
| may be less common in the years to come.
|
| If anything, the politicians who blocked Amazon from coming to
| Queens actually got more bragging rights.
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| To answer your opening question: no, Bloomberg has not been a
| credible business publication for some time. They're one of the
| legacy publications that used their name recognition and
| reputation as a springboard to essentially a paid op-Ed
| publication - authors pay them to have their opinion pieces
| published. See also: Newsweek.
| legitster wrote:
| Bloomberg is actually a good publication - especially their
| print edition. But most people's exposure only comes from the
| op-eds - people who only read the op-eds are not reading the
| boring but competent reporting on the pages in between.
| mattkrause wrote:
| FWIW, I've always found Matt Levine's "Money Stuff" column to
| be funny _and_ informative.
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| Odd lots is an amazing podcast as well
| pessimizer wrote:
| > there are ~no upsides for political leaders who actually work
| to attract more residents to an area.
|
| The article is about attracting more _wealthy_ residents to an
| area. It doesn 't say it that directly, but it does directly
| reference the new work-from-home upper-middle-class, and how
| they can live anywhere now.
|
| I don't think the indirectness is being sneaky, it's more
| trying to be polite.
| 464628346 wrote:
| This seems like a false dichotomy. Politicians try to attract
| new businesses because those businesses, if nothing else,
| attract these things called employees. The advantage of the
| approach is that you can try to attract more of the kinds of
| residents you want instead of just "anybody". Most places have
| plenty of "anybody" already.
|
| What else does better as a medium of attraction for worthwhile
| people? Walkability? Save that for the Europeans who pretend
| like boasting Paris and (formerly) London qualifies them to
| talk about managing large cities. Civil services? I'm salaried
| and I've got a car, the only reason I'd use most common civil
| services is either because my ride is in the shop or I was
| literally stabbed and needed the ER. Otherwise you couldn't
| /pay/ me to deal with the kinds of people who take the bus.
| Meanwhile parks and libraries are for the homeless and parents
| in denial about the times.
|
| So what's left to brag about to attract people?
| beebmam wrote:
| "Corporations are people" - Mitt Romney
|
| Competing for residents IS competing for businesses, with maybe
| a few exceptions for resource extraction.
| kube-system wrote:
| theyre-the-same-picture.jpg
|
| The #1 reason people move is for employment opportunities.
| Although, promising some companies tax breaks doesn't guarantee
| you're going to meaningfully create jobs. But the same goes the
| other way around, giving residents low taxes or other incentives
| also doesn't guarantee they'll move there, if they can't get a
| job.
| cyclecount wrote:
| This line of thinking comes up often on HN but it ignores the
| central reason for governments to enact borders, a rather modern
| invention. Governments (at the behest of businesses) enforce
| borders so that labor cannot effectively organise. A border
| exists often for workers only, but is mostly a legal fiction that
| corporations can easily navigate.
|
| The most common example for the Americans reading this is NAFTA,
| which makes workers in Detroit compete with workers in Mexico
| (suppressing wages in both location) while allowing the auto
| manufacturing companies to treat all of North America as one
| market. Toyota can move their plants around the region somewhat
| freely; can someone in Mexico freely move to the midwest?
| MithrilTuxedo wrote:
| The United States is probably a more common example for
| Americans. The US Constitution makes the whole country a free
| trade zone between states. Borders between states are easily
| navigated by corporations, by design. Workers in Washington
| compete with workers in South Carolina. Manufacturers can
| freely move their plants around the US.
| Forestessential wrote:
| You are wrong. Mexico-United States Border keeps Mexican labor
| and business from being more ferocious than American businesses
| in America. Borders have been protecting cultural states for a
| very long time in fact. 3200BC and before countries existed. It
| has and still does have alot to do with cultural tastes, and
| unlike how you expressed it, 'protecting the economy' from
| being formed against the wishes of the countries leaders.
| Borders come about for different reasons surely, but to reduce
| a border to an economic zone is just commie-aide.
| mtoner23 wrote:
| Idk, i think borders exist to exclude other groups of peoples.
| this is why european countries kept splitting up on various
| racial groups (check and slovaks, all of yugoslavia) Businesses
| on the other hand would prefer to have access to all peoples.
| and to have access to cheaper or better labor wherever it is,
| giving us the success of the european union.
| nradov wrote:
| The differences between groups in the former Yugoslavia have
| little to do with race (as most Americans would understand
| the term). It's tough to tell the difference between a Croat
| and a Serb just by looking at them. Conflicts were based more
| on culture, religion, language, and perhaps something akin to
| "tribal" identity (not literally tribes but I don't know how
| else to describe it). Some of these conflicts date back to
| the 14th century.
|
| The only significant group in the region which some might
| identify as a distinct "race" are the Roma. That minority
| lives in all of the countries and they didn't cause countries
| to split up.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Albanians?
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Idk, i think borders exist to exclude other groups of
| peoples.
|
| To exclude them from what? That's the question. You give one
| of the answers here: sometimes people would want to exclude
| them because they lower wages. But in reality, people who are
| alarmed by lower wages are rarely in the position to say
| anything about what happens at the border. The people who get
| a say about that are the people who are alarmed by _higher_
| wages.
| remarkEon wrote:
| > Governments (at the behest of businesses) enforce borders so
| that labor cannot effectively organise.
|
| I have never heard this explanation. Where is it coming from?
| It sounds not only wrong but inverted to me. Governments
| enforce borders to effectively secure their territory and
| people, and thus its own power. Is the idea that, without the
| "legal fiction" of borders, we'd have some kind of global
| autoworkers Union or something?
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Lately - it seems people inside countries enforce their
| boarders to make sure other people from less fortunate
| countries can't come in and drive down their wages...
|
| We live in a democracy.
|
| The idea that we vote to screw ourselves over completely is
| strange.
|
| Some people forget that everything isn't a zero sum game.
| Something can be good for companies and not bad for you. And
| something can be good for you and not bad for companies.
|
| Some people DO NOT care about the economy and only care about
| social issues - or at least the economy's importance is far
| inferior to social issues (usually because they don't make
| much money in the first place).
| hellotomyrars wrote:
| People vote against their own interests all the time,
| either out of a lack of understanding (willfully or
| otherwise), or because they are a single issue voter.
|
| It should not be a surprise that social services are taken
| advantage by a large population of rural/republican voters
| who vote in candidates who's explicit platform is removing
| or diminishing the very social services they depend on.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > because they are a single issue voter.
|
| If they're a single-issue voter then - by definition -
| they are not voting against their interests. They just
| have different interests than you.
|
| Maybe you care about a million things, mostly revolving
| around taxes.
|
| Maybe all they care about is whether or not someone else
| can get an abortion.
|
| That's THEIR interest.
| 1_1xdev1 wrote:
| That's where their _focus_ lies, not necessarily where
| their _interests_ do.
|
| It's in everyone's interest to get a good deal for their
| money. For example, we should all be for an _efficient_
| government, and _efficient_ markets. However folks vote
| against those all the time without thinking about it,
| because their _focus_ is elsewhere.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| No it isn't!
|
| If you don't care about money, and only care about
| telling other people what to do - money isn't your
| interest. Telling other people what they can and can't do
| is your interest.
|
| You seem to be incapable of grasping that other people
| care about other things than money.
| kdkwsndne wrote:
| > The idea that we vote to screw ourselves over completely
| is strange.
|
| One word: Brexit
| [deleted]
| tap-snap-or-nap wrote:
| Currently, there exist multinational corporations but not
| multinational unions. Furthermore, some countries do not
| permit unions to extend their reach across the same industry
| effectively. This perspective reflects the view that labor
| has been engaged in a conflict with capital.
| nradov wrote:
| Indeed there is nothing stopping workers from organizing
| across borders, even if individual workers are only legally
| authorized to work in one country. Many labor unions have
| local chapters in multiple countries and can coordinate labor
| actions. For example, see the _International_ Brotherhood of
| Electrical Workers which operates in the USA and Canada.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| It's tricky. American unions avoid coordinating with their
| American counterparts because of corruption.
|
| Unions have a very specific set of rules to play by, and
| these rules are different for each country.
| nradov wrote:
| Huh? There is certainly corruption in some labor unions
| but that doesn't prevent them from coordinating with
| their counterparts in other unions. Even the most corrupt
| unions frequently back each other up in order to maximize
| negotiating power versus management.
| cmh89 wrote:
| >Unions have a very specific set of rules to play by, and
| these rules are different for each country.
|
| The rules unions have to play by were put in place to
| reduce their power to effectively organize.
| lesuorac wrote:
| > Governments enforce borders to effectively secure their
| territory and people
|
| Only if by "secure" you mean prevent your population from
| leaving [1]. The whole origin of border control was to
| prevent people from leaving. The easy way to think about it
| is you can't leave a country without a passport but you can
| enter a country without a visa (exceptions apply).
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passport#History
| stale2002 wrote:
| > Only if by "secure" you mean prevent your population from
| leaving
|
| Did you think about this statement for even 1 second?
|
| It should be clearly and immediately obvious that it is
| easier to leave places like the US than it is to enter it.
|
| This is obviously the case.
|
| You cannot with a straight face claim that actually it is
| easier to _enter_ the US than leave.
|
| Clearly, leaving is easier.
| lesuorac wrote:
| There are 4x [1] the amount of people that annually enter
| the US than have passports issued [2].
|
| It is in fact, 4x easier to enter the US than to leave.
| Passports are actually rare for a US citizen to have, you
| just live in a bubble.
|
| [1]: https://www.trade.gov/sites/default/files/2021-03/Fa
| ct%20She... [2]:
| https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/about-
| us/reports-...
| stale2002 wrote:
| > Passports are actually rare for a US citizen to have
|
| Its not difficult to get a passport, regardless.
|
| Pointing to how many people choose to leave the US, or
| get a passport, does not counteract the true fact that
| getting a passport is easy.
| remarkEon wrote:
| You can think about it that way if you want, but it's not
| how it works in reality and the wiki link contradicts what
| you're saying about modern practices.
| celeritascelery wrote:
| > The most common example for the Americans reading this is
| NAFTA, which makes workers in Detroit compete with workers in
| Mexico (suppressing wages in both location)
|
| I don't understand how Supply side wage competition would be
| alleviated by allowing workers to move freely between
| countries. It seems like it could potentially make it worse for
| higher wage regions of the world?
| fallingknife wrote:
| It would do exactly that. We run 2 separate immigration
| systems in the US. One very restrictive system for high
| paying jobs and one very permissive for low paying jobs. The
| latter is technically illegal but tolerated. It can't be
| legal, because then there would be nothing stopping those
| immigrants from eventually getting the high paying jobs.
|
| This dual system protects the upper class from wage
| competition while allowing it for the lower classes, ensuring
| that the upper class benefits both from this protection and
| also the lowered living expenses provided by cheap labor from
| the lower classes. All arguments that somehow economic laws
| don't apply and immigration doesn't lower wages come from
| members of the upper class who want to preserve this system
| that benefits them.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Maybe, but that's not the only reason. Borders are also
| enforced because you can't have open borders _and_ social
| welfare programs.
| andrekandre wrote:
| > you can't have open borders and social welfare programs
|
| this may sound simplistic/naive but cant you just tax those
| additional people to pay for those welfare?
|
| i guess the assumption is those people wouldnt be working?
| inglor_cz wrote:
| It is more of a "long term experience" than mere
| "assumption".
|
| At least in Europe, a sizeable amount of illegal migrants
| has only very rudimentary education, and the # of job
| openings for unqualified people is very limited. Some
| literally cannot read even in their own language.
|
| As a result, immigrants from Africa and the Middle East
| are, on average, significantly overrepresented among
| welfare collectors and significantly underrepresented among
| taxpayers.
|
| Of course, as long as the numbers involved are tiny, you
| can try to educate at least their kids, but once a fairly
| low threshold is crossed, parallel societies develop in
| full. Having classrooms where 90 per cent of the kids don't
| even speak the official language of the country is quite an
| intractable problem. And that threshold beyond which the
| schooling system basically gives up has been crossed in
| many regions of many countries such as Sweden or France.
|
| TL;DR: You cannot maintain a modern welfare state with
| premodern population.
| quacked wrote:
| Most of these types of articles take a "consumer" model of
| civilization: humans exist to consume, and the primary question
| is what they're going to consume and where they're going to do
| it. Labor exists as a phenomenon that enables future
| consumption, and QoL is measured by GDP per capita. "Countries"
| are an irrelevant social construct that inhibit free trade
| between interested, cooperative parties. This is a very
| limiting, privileged point of view of humanity. In reality
| Civilization is a mysterious art that requires cult-like
| adhesion to certain practices in order to "work". These
| economics-heavy libertarian open borders guys have absolutely
| no idea what to do when the power goes out for more than a
| week, or if they're personally wronged by a neighbor and the
| government won't get involved. It's a childish, first-world
| view of Man and Man's culture to assume that the only thing
| needed for Prosperity and Peace is economic competition
| administered and monitored by first-world-style democratic
| governments.
| subsubzero wrote:
| This line of thinking trends very recently. Corporations are
| not everything despite what they and the media have you
| believe. Countries are defined by territory either hard won
| from conflict(war) or based on shared cultural leanings. Having
| citizenship is a privilege for many and in some countries it
| requires mandatory enlistment in the armed forces(Israel, South
| Korea).
| golemiprague wrote:
| [dead]
| someguydave wrote:
| That way of thinking collides with the idea that trade and
| immigration should be unfettered, especially if the benefits
| accrue to foreigners.
| nhchris wrote:
| > Governments (at the behest of businesses) enforce borders so
| that labor cannot effectively organise.
|
| This is backwards, and I'm having trouble understanding how a
| more diverse, more transient population would find it easier to
| find common interests and unite. Suppose a factory unionizes -
| without borders, the owner will find it easier to import non-
| union workers. While moving a factory is challenging regardless
| of borders - it's a big, heavy thing, tied into local
| infrastructure and supply chains. It's even reflected in the
| rhetoric - "immigrants will do the jobs Americans won't".
|
| It's also reflected empirically: _Whole Foods ' heat map says
| lower rates of racial diversity increase unionization risks_ -
| https://www.businessinsider.com/whole-foods-tracks-unionizat...
| (unpaywalled: http://archive.is/1khJw)
|
| And in the strong Danish unions as far back as 1981
| (https://mattbruenig.com/2021/09/20/when-mcdonalds-came-to-
| de...) when Denmark had only 3.02% of immigrants and their
| descendants (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Denm
| ark#Modern...)
| nerdponx wrote:
| > easier to find common interests and unite
|
| I think the idea is that there _are_ common interests to be
| found, but borders artificially keep people apart, by
| segmenting up legal jurisdictions. For example, why Starbucks
| employees in Jersey City aren 't all that different from
| Starbucks employees in New York City right across the river.
|
| > Whole Foods' heat map says lower rates of racial diversity
| increase unionization risks
|
| To what extent is this correlated with the economic security
| of their employees? Employees in wealthier areas
| (statistically correlated with whiter) might be more educated
| on average (which could be correlated with desire to
| unionize) and/or more likely to have a higher-income partner
| or family member (which means lower financial risk due to
| failure or being fired).
| nhchris wrote:
| > borders _artificially_ keep people apart
|
| _GPS data shows how wolf packs carve out territory_ -
| https://bigthink.com/hard-science/wolf-gps/
| nerdponx wrote:
| This is not what I believe, but my attempt at summarizing
| the point under discussion.
| slackdog wrote:
| Corporate DEI initiatives using divisive rhetoric designed
| to foster paranoia, in order to keep workers on edge around
| each other. ( _" You're all racist. Even if you think you
| aren't racist, asserting you have no subconscious racial
| biases only proves that you're overtly racist. You're
| constantly commit racist 'microaggression' offenses against
| your coworkers without even realizing it."_)
|
| Such paranoia between coworkers is a serious impediment to
| labor organization. The more diverse the workplace, the
| better this works.
| nerdponx wrote:
| My experience has led me to believe that most individuals
| in favor of corporate DEI initiatives are earnestly and
| in good faith attempting to put into practice the
| recommendations of critical race theory and related
| frameworks.
|
| The same experience has led me to believe that most
| managers and employers are not so crafty, and are going
| along with it because it seems to be trendy and in-demand
| and because they don't want to be publicly canceled. It's
| more about petty virtue signaling among managers than
| coordinated suppression of organized labor.
|
| Furthermore, most DEI initiatives _do not_ look like what
| you describe, outside of a limited subset of academic
| institutions that have always been somewhat radical
| (including few to none of the name-brand universities in
| the Americas) and smaller companies /startups headed by
| highly-opinionated idealists.
|
| In general I think we are right to be skeptical of
| attempts to divide, rather than unite. It's absolutely
| possible that DEI initiatives are weaponized at some
| organizations, and we should be wary of that possibility.
| But it's also not fair or correct to assume that it's
| _always_ being wielded as such.
|
| It's worth noting that there are legitimate good
| intentions behind all this no-subconscious-bias
| microaggression stuff. It's derived from a very earnest
| radical academic tradition. The kernel of wisdom at the
| core of it all is that diversity is good and should be
| not just acknowledged but actively embraced and
| celebrated. That is, people can be united together,
| without all being the same.
| slackdog wrote:
| > _My experience has led me to believe that most
| individuals in favor of corporate DEI initiatives are
| earnestly and in good faith attempting to put into
| practice the recommendations of critical race theory and
| related frameworks._
|
| Yes, of course they are. As explained by Chomsky's model
| of propaganda, corporations hire true believers for these
| roles because they are the most effective and reliable.
|
| > _most managers and employers are not so crafty_
|
| Amazon being so crafty is a documented fact; it's naive
| to think they're the only ones.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Chomsky's model of propaganda is a useful model, but it's
| not an iron law.
|
| Amazon is a great example of a company where I absolutely
| would not put it past them to use DEI initiatives to try
| to defeat labor organizing. But in many other cases these
| initiatives are actually demanded and sought after by
| employees.
|
| I think in this case the actions of well-meaning people
| were only appropriated as an oppression tactic _after_
| they 've caught on in popularity.
|
| History and my own anecdotal experience are not
| consistent with your implied theory that CRT-driven DEI
| became popular specifically as an anti-labor capitalist
| conspiracy.
| slackdog wrote:
| Incidentally, it was while working at Amazon years ago
| that I first encountered the divisive and paranoia-
| inspiring form of DEI training which I described above.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > I'm having trouble understanding how a more diverse, more
| transient population would find it easier to find common
| interests and unite.
|
| I think it would make it far easier. The problem is every
| jurisdiction attacking unions and workers in their own unique
| legal frameworks, and the forcing of unions/workforces to
| compete _with each other_ across the borders between these
| jurisdictions. Capital gets to play Mexican against
| Indonesian workers, even down to workers in Cook County
| against workers in DuPage county.
|
| If an Indonesian can easily work in Mexico and a Mexican can
| easily work in Indonesia, their interests aren't just
| theoretically similar, they're almost the same.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| > ignores the central reason for governments to enact borders
| [...:] so that labor cannot effectively organise.
|
| You're going to have to show up with some evidence for this
| claim. You're not asserting that the outcome is a byproduct of
| borders, a happy accident useful to businesses. You're
| asserting that the driving reason for the concept of a border
| is for businesses to disrupt organized labor.
| paradox242 wrote:
| I am confused about your use of the word 'borders' in this
| context. As long as there have been states there has been a
| concept of sovereign territory and so there have been borders,
| even if it was somewhat fuzzy where exactly that line was in
| real space.
|
| Large companies are able to navigate the border issues because
| they are able to make deals with a government and can (at least
| promise) to bring in a lot of investment and wealth that the
| government might be able to realize in taxes, either directly
| from the company's revenues, or indirectly through other
| businesses and property that grows along with the company's
| investment.
|
| That company's can do this more effectively than individuals is
| less a function of some kind of cynical conspiracy to cut out
| of the worker (though that might be a side benefit that both
| sides appreciate), than it is a simple pragmatic response to
| the fact that it is much easier to deal with a small number of
| people about a large sum of money than it is with a large
| number of people about small sums of money.
|
| This is similar to why the U.S. government is so amenable to
| working so often with dictatorships to secure it's
| international interests. They can work with (or influence or
| bribe) a single person or small group to make large deals
| quickly and without having to worry about the messy politics
| and oversight associated with a democratic government that has
| to approve major policy decisions.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| It is literally easier to move a person than an entire company
| across national borders. The process for both is at it's core
| the same - identify, verify and pay your taxes.
|
| Yes people can and do move from Mexico to the Midwest all the
| time.
|
| Why do you think Mexican laborers should get paid less for
| building your car then someone in Detroit? Part of the goal of
| NAFTA is to help stabilize the economy of Mexico and help
| longterm reduce the severe violence in parts of the country.
| wishysgb wrote:
| Legally it is very hard for a Mexican to move to the Midwest.
| As in almost impossible requiring almost 20years.
|
| I am not Mexican but it toke my family 14 years to be able to
| move to the US from Palestine, although my grandparents and
| uncles have been here since the 80s. It really isn't hard.
|
| A company doesn't need to move everything, they can just
| literally build a new factory or rent one else where, not
| only that they would even get tax breaks as incentives for
| moving.
|
| Borders enforce the huge discrimination in pay between TJ and
| San Diego. Even though the same companies work on both sides
| of the border.
| notch898a wrote:
| I'm honestly astonished people even do it the legal way.
| It's not even a crime to overstay. One could easily set up
| shop in California, get an AB 60 driver license, live in a
| sanctuary area and have at it.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| For professional jobs, it is very easy for a Mexican or
| Canadian to move to the US and work.
|
| > The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) created
| special economic and trade relationships for the United
| States, Canada and Mexico. The TN nonimmigrant
| classification permits qualified Canadian and Mexican
| citizens to seek temporary entry into the United States to
| engage in business activities at a professional level.
|
| > Among the types of professionals who are eligible to seek
| admission as TN nonimmigrants are accountants, engineers,
| lawyers, pharmacists, scientists, and teachers.
|
| https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-
| states/temporary...
| boh wrote:
| It's really bizarre that state sovereignty is just considered a
| business practice. No it's not a "modern invention" to "enact"
| borders. Nor does labor organizing have anything to do with its
| enforcement. Corporate-centric culture doesn't do well in
| explaining the world. I'd suggest a less narrow viewpoint.
| vkou wrote:
| It's a modern (a 'temporary measure' enacted in WW1)
| invention to enact a passport-controlled system of travel and
| residency across the entire world.
|
| Border control prior to it was more focused on customs taxes,
| and in some countries, keeping undesirable races/religions
| out.
|
| We have decided the latter is wrong, so instead of directly
| banning, say, Chinese or Jewish immigration, we replaced it
| with quotas on country of birth/origin.
| ncpa-cpl wrote:
| > It's a modern (a 'temporary measure' enacted in WW1)
| invention to enact a passport-controlled system of travel
| and residency across the entire world.
|
| I wonder if the same will happen to online travel pre-
| entry-authorizations.
|
| During Covid many countries implemented pre-entry-
| authorizations, similar to US ESTA or Canadian ETA.
|
| Even if the Covid emergency state has been over, some
| countries that didn't have this forms before, still require
| them for travel.
| sgjohnson wrote:
| We can go one step further and also say that the entire
| system of social welfare is a post-WW2 invention.
|
| Before WW2 the state only helped those who couldn't help
| themselves. Now the state just fucks everyone.
| vkou wrote:
| > Before WW2 the state only helped those who couldn't
| help themselves.
|
| Through much of human history, the state largely 'helped'
| the aristocracy maintain a monopoly on wealth and power,
| through frequent applications of violence against their
| political enemies. In fact, in ~all non-democratic, and
| in many democratic societies, the state and the
| aristocracy - and thus, their interests, are often
| indistinguishable.
|
| But either way, what does _any_ of that have to do with
| passport controls?
| zamfi wrote:
| > Before WW2 the state only helped those who couldn't
| help themselves
|
| Not...really? Unless by "state" you are broadly including
| the church and other philanthropy.
| shkkmo wrote:
| While borders have a long history, checking passports at
| borders is indeed a "modern invention" and controlling
| emigration was explicitly part of the motivation for its
| adoption and why "being issued a passport" isn't considered a
| human right.
| notch898a wrote:
| I've crossed into Mexico many times and not once have they
| asked for an identity document. You find out what a piece
| of cattle you are when you enter the US, though.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Try that with Canada.
| boh wrote:
| It isn't. Free movement of people hasn't been a thing since
| the invention of civilization. You needed seals/papers to
| get in/out of city-states, duchies etc. They reference
| passport-like paperwork in the bible. I know history is
| boring, but it doesn't hurt to try it sometime.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "a rather modern invention"
|
| Congestion charge is a rather modern invention as well, because
| the amount of cars in some city centers exceeded the tolerance
| of the locals and the capacity of the roads.
|
| Borders can be soft/open as long as a modest amount of people
| crosses them. In a world of 8 billion people and relatively
| cheap travel, open borders would result in massive flows of
| people into several desirable locations - whose citizens aren't
| happy about such prospects.
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| Which is why the EU single market has free movement of workers
| as one of its 4 central pillars.
|
| A major sticking point with Brexit - the UK wanted to be in the
| market _without_ worker free movement (because immigrants)
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| For a migratory species it is literally inhuman to erect a
| border. Borders should be jurisdictional boundaries but should
| be permeable like the states in the US. The rest of the
| tribalism BS is just that.
| gameman144 wrote:
| I'm interested here, as I'm inclined to disagree pretty
| strongly.
|
| How would you prevent the erosion of rights or culture by a
| group with a bigger population?
|
| For instance, have a few hundred thousand Americans move to
| Cuba and vote to have Cuba secede to the US? Or a few hundred
| thousand mainland Chinese citizens move to Taiwan and do the
| same?
|
| While it's definitely nice to keep migration smooth and easy,
| it seems like there are _lots_ of issues wherein free and
| unlimited migration could cause relatively predictable
| problems.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > For instance, have a few hundred thousand Americans move
| to Cuba and vote to have Cuba secede to the US?
|
| That would be a great thing for Cuba. Cubans have been
| fleeing their failed state by the thousands, risking their
| lives and dying to get a shot at reaching America.
|
| Starvation, medicine shortage, brutal LGBT purges are sadly
| common place under the Castro regime. Pretty sure these
| Americans would be welcomed with open arms!
| ashwagary wrote:
| Most shortages seem to be due to economic sanctions and
| trade embargoes. I wonder how much fleeing rates would
| dwindle if they were lifted.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > Most shortages seem to be due to economic sanctions and
| trade embargoes.
|
| Not really. Cuba is free to trade with any country that's
| not the USA (and is even free to trade with the USA
| except for certain entities or commodities).
|
| Decades of corruption, incompetence, brain drain and
| failed government made the local economy unable to
| compete.
| ashwagary wrote:
| >Not really.
|
| A country of 11m people loses an estimated $3+ billion
| per year from various UN condemned restrictions.
|
| Are you saying that causes no shortages? That's not a
| trivial sum of money (~$300 per capita).
| pastage wrote:
| Miguel Diaz-Canel is president now.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| The same way you would with a bigger population for any
| reason. There's an added bonus that if rights erode, people
| can simply leave to somewhere less oppressive. People can't
| leave oppressive places due to borders. Less oppressive
| places may become oppressive but that would drive people
| elsewhere.
|
| I'd use the US as an example. In a real sense the US is a
| collection of small countries with a federal system and
| free right of migration. For this discussion the federal
| system is irrelevant. How does California or New York or
| other high populace states ensure erosion of rights? I'd
| posit part of the very reason they're so attractive is they
| tend to hold rights very high on their list of priorities.
| More oppressive states, likewise lose populace to migration
| because unless you're in the in group you don't belong
| there.
|
| Cultural erosion is IMO nativism and bias. Time is change,
| no culture is static, and even our oldest cultures are
| young compared to humanity and look nothing like they did
| 100 years ago. Changing populace doesn't change a culture
| any more than time does, it's just easier to blame someone
| that doesn't look or talk like you for it.
|
| Your examples of mainland Chinese citizens or Americans
| moving around are only relevant because the issue of
| borders to begin with. If there were permeable borders we
| would be in a steady state and you wouldn't see behaviors
| like that. Maybe in the beginning you would see artifacts
| of history manifest weird transient behaviors, as you do in
| any suddenly changed dynamical system. But in steady state
| your scenarios would be as likely as all democrats moving
| to Georgia to change the election. It sounds good but in
| practice didn't happen.
| rajin444 wrote:
| > Cultural erosion is IMO nativism and bias
|
| Are you implying that non natives are inherently better
| than natives?
|
| One of the hallmarks of declining empires is importing
| people - not to say those people are better or worse, but
| mixing diverse peoples together is extremely hard. It has
| to be done slowly and carefully.
|
| > Changing populace doesn't change a culture any more
| than time does
|
| I don't see how you can look at the history of anyone
| anywhere and believe this.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| No, that's a false dichotomy. You are implying by that
| false dichotomy that one is greater than the other. Until
| very recently in human history one would be the same as
| the other. That is what I am saying. Being born in a
| location has nothing to do with being better or worse.
| It's just a random occurrence. What makes a person better
| than another is how they live their life, not the
| circumstances of their birth.
|
| While I don't disagree mixing of diverse people can be
| hard, I would simply point to American history as an
| example of how the empire you seem to laud was built by
| mixing peoples relentlessly. In fact immigrants tend to
| be the drivers of American growth, while the native
| born... not so much.
|
| I find it fascinating you think culture doesn't change
| with time, but with the mixing of different people into a
| culture only. What culture has been unchanged with time?
| Language itself mutates constantly, how can a culture be
| static with time? How does it stay static? The people in
| the culture change with every birth and every death, the
| memory of the culture is wiped out every 100 years.
| Written histories are a poor tool of continuity for
| something as complex as a culture. Human beings
| themselves change radically over the course of their
| lives. All things are impermanent, but human culture
| isn't just impermanent, it's an illusion.
| rajin444 wrote:
| I guess it's safe to assume you think genetics has no
| impact on life outcomes and/or there aren't significant
| genetic differences between geographically (by ancestor)
| populations?
|
| > What makes a person better than another is how they
| live their life, not the circumstances of their birth.
|
| Their genetics dictate how they live their life.
| Environment can have an affect, but genes dictate how you
| react to your environment (unless you believe in God
| etc).
|
| > I would simply point to American history as an example
| of how the empire you seem to laud was built by mixing
| peoples relentlessly.
|
| Compared to the last 50 years or so these immigrants were
| all very similar both in history and genetics. And even
| then it's been a rough ride! I agree immigrants can be
| great as long as they are carefully selected for.
|
| > I find it fascinating you think culture doesn't change
| with time, but with the mixing of different people into a
| culture only.
|
| Cultures absolutely change over time but the rate of
| change is much slower than if you introduce a new people
| from vastly different cultures. It's the shearing force
| applied by the differences that's the issue. If it's too
| powerful something has to give.
| 988747 wrote:
| [dead]
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > In a real sense the US is a collection of small
| countries with a federal system and free right of
| migration.
|
| Before that comparison works, you have to eliminate the
| Constitution and all of the protections that come with
| it.
| tracker1 wrote:
| How is it different than the EU? I mean the alliance is
| stronger, and the EU is closer to the original Articles
| of Confederation the US was bound under. But aren't
| Germany and France separate nations... that we call
| different US states, and EU nations it's a very similar
| alliance.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Why? You made a huge assertion with no explanation.
| tracker1 wrote:
| You can only influence the rights/freedoms/liberties of those
| jurisdictional boundaries.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Humans stopped being migratory about 12,000 years ago.
|
| You probably don't want criminals to freely move into your
| country. You probably want a country that gets funded by
| taxes (both short term and long term).
|
| No country in the world maintains open borders. Everytime
| there has been mass unorganized migration it has been a
| humanitarian disaster.
|
| Platitudes only work on paper.
| vharuck wrote:
| I don't think your points hold up against the example of
| state borders.
|
| Criminals move between states, but it's not a huge problem.
| The states can share information and allow joint action. It
| may require more effort to set up between nations, but it's
| a common thing today.
|
| Taxes work fine. If you're a resident of a state, you pay
| income tax to that state. So we obviously know how to find
| out residency.
|
| >Everytime there has been mass unorganized migration it has
| been a humanitarian disaster.
|
| If borders were to become easily crossable (not necessarily
| non-existent, but just a checkpoint to count
| incoming/outgoing and stop smugglers) in a day, then the
| next day would see mass migration in so many directions.
| But after that first wave calmed, I wouldn't expect mass
| migrations except those following humanitarian disasters.
| Three had migrations we see today are caused by disasters.
| Even when the emigrants experience terrible conditions in
| the receiving country, I imagine it's because their
| previous life was shattered and they had to quickly flee.
| It's not a fair comparison to people who would migrate if
| immigration controls were removed.
| notch898a wrote:
| Consider something like 1/3 of Americans have a criminal
| history. Maybe 1 of 30 of those are incapable of living
| in society. Keeping out fugitives makes sense but I
| totally disagree with keeping out criminals, particularly
| when in much of the world criminal often just means you
| did something the government didn't like.
| andrekandre wrote:
| > Consider something like 1/3 of Americans have a
| criminal history.
|
| really? not as in traffic tickets, but actual conviction
| of a crime?
| rootusrootus wrote:
| No. Not sure sure exactly _where_ it started, but it gets
| attributed to Andrew Cuomo often enough, citing the 1 in
| 3 number. That comes from FBI statistics, which define a
| criminal record to include arrests.
|
| Here is a discussion:
| https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2017/aug/18/andrew-
| cuo...
| rootusrootus wrote:
| That includes arrest records, not just convictions. About
| 3% of the population has served any time in prison, and
| about 8% of the population have been convicted of a
| felony.
|
| https://news.uga.edu/total-us-population-with-felony-
| convict...
| notch898a wrote:
| Are you familiar with the US immigration system? That is
| exactly what they consider in criminal history. What they
| examine includes arrests, not just convictions, so it's
| precisely the stat we want.
|
| See form I-485 for PR: 24. Have you EVER
| been arrested, cited, charged, or detained for any reason
| by any law enforcement officer (including but not limited
| to any U.S. immigration official or any official of the
| U.S. armed forces or U.S. Coast Guard)?
|
| I'm not sure what we're talking about if you're excluding
| non-convicted arrests, but it aint immigration.
| [deleted]
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Countries are equivalent to prisons in your example? I
| agree, they act that way now.
|
| But what about states in the United States? They were
| explicitly formed as a set of states - nations - that
| cooperate under a federation. Free migration wasn't always
| the case in the original states but was required in the
| constitution.
|
| What about the EU? People can move about freely today when
| in the past they weren't able to.
|
| Or are you saying there's something superior about
| Americans and Europeans and we need to keep everyone else
| in their prisons?
|
| You quote 12,000 years ago as some sort of transition.
| Realistically migration was relatively unimpeded until the
| 1900's. Citizenship isn't the same as migration, and in
| many cultures citizens and denizens were two classes with
| the denizens migrating relatively unimpeded. Some cultures
| like ancient China had travel papers but that was reserved
| for nobles or elites - normal people were too beneath
| notice to require documentation to travel.
| tracker1 wrote:
| It's possible for any adjacent nation/country/region to
| join the US or EU... so it's perfectly possible for free
| travel, if you agree to the rules of the higher
| federation. You can only impact jurisdictions you have
| jurisdictional control over.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| > Every time there has been mass unorganized migration it
| has been a humanitarian disaster
|
| Are all of these unorganized, mass migrations disasters? Or
| are they in response to disasters?
|
| Most organized mass migrations have been disasters. Forced
| relocations aren't fun.
|
| But unorganized mass migrations, where people say "let's
| get out of this place and go somewhere better" tend to
| mitigate pre-existing disasters.
| FpUser wrote:
| >"Humans stopped being migratory about 12,000 years ago"
|
| Up until recently ( relatively ) a person could pretty much
| move to other country without much fuzz.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| That is ahistorical. Rome, Greece and so on generally
| required you to file paperwork, pay money and usually
| join the military if you wanted to be able to move in
| their borders and have rights.
|
| Even moving to a new tribe in Native peoples in North
| America required proving a blood relation, having someone
| vouch for you, or being skilled enough they would accept
| you in.
| nhchris wrote:
| Because this was so rare that the destination countries
| didn't see it as a problem. And when it did happen en
| masse, it was usually war.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| That's not true at all, there were often famines and
| other natural disasters that made it impossible to live
| in a region and people just migrated. It happened
| constantly.
|
| Watching the children in Ethiopia starving to death, I
| couldn't help but wonder how we felt forcing people to
| live in an emergent desert to death by starvation was
| better if we just wrote a song about it - "We are the
| world." If that were true, why couldn't they just leave?
| nhchris wrote:
| Ethiopia is an interesting example, but not of scarcity.
| While my country's population grew by a mere 40% since
| 1950 (and has been stagnant the last few decades),
| Ethiopia's grew by 534%, and shows no signs of slowing:
| https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ethiopia-
| popu...
|
| Had we grown at their pace, we'd also be experiencing
| famines.
|
| As for why they couldn't leave - you can ask their
| neighbors. The West is not the only destination.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| At the time I'm talking about the cause of the famine was
| an extreme drought, and all sorts of other problems as
| you allude to. More than population growth was war and
| instability - all great reasons to migrate if you could,
| but the lack of food is an even more common and
| compelling reason to migrate throughout human history
| regardless of the reason.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983-1985_famine_in_Ethio
| pia
|
| I didn't assert the west should unilaterally open their
| borders. I stated that borders are inhuman - as humans
| are naturally migratory. Taking that to the real world,
| that would mean their neighbors should open borders as
| well - not just to Ethiopians, but to everyone.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| In the last 70 years alone we've added over 5 billion
| people. In the 1800s there were vast swaths of temperate,
| fertile land that were basically unclaimed. Moving around
| was no big deal at that scale.
|
| Now we have people everywhere (that doesn't suck; and
| even some places that do). We have social programs and
| expensive infrastructure. The world is very different now
| than even 100 years ago.
| FpUser wrote:
| What is the end result? Something like you are to reside
| in this town an we'll let you out twice a year for
| vacation and XMas? Want to move to other city - there is
| a waiting list 10 years long.
| notch898a wrote:
| You still can in Argentina and Paraguay.
|
| Paraguay up until recently required a ~5k deposit but
| they dropped even that. In Argentina "technically" you're
| supposed to follow a bunch of rather restrictive resident
| visa pathways but few do that and you can file for
| citizenship immediately upon landing and until your case
| is finished cannot be deported. The requirements are
| basically live there for 2 years and show you had some
| income, but by judge shopping some allow black market
| income lol.
|
| Others of note: Bolivia and Somaliland only require a
| token payment for a 1 year resident visa (think in
| Bolivia you only need do that 2 or 3 times to become PR
| or citizen). If you have a bit more cash several places
| like honduras / nicoragua / ecuador only require ~30k
| "investment" which is basically accessible (eventually)
| to anyone middle class+ with enough determination. When I
| went to Rojava they also accept basically anyone as they
| are a "people without a nation" who happen to have sort
| of a nation.
|
| And then there's weev, who posts here on occasion. I
| think he got a Transnistria passport, which is obtainable
| after only a year of residence. It's my understanding
| residency is as easy as going to a hotel and asking to
| talk to the right people about getting a resident permit,
| and paying some moderate fees.
|
| If you're not too discriminating pretty much anyone can
| emigrate from the US forever with very little capital.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| All of that already happens without open borders, it just
| costs us more money to maintain.
| gameman144 wrote:
| The rates are vastly different though,no? If I have a
| leaky faucet, it seems strange to say "This faucet is
| useless: the water is getting through anyway, and this
| way I'm having to pay for new gaskets!"
| candiddevmike wrote:
| I don't think your example is valid because we're not
| talking about water, we're talking about humans who are
| choosing to leave their country for a better place.
| Pursuit of happiness and all that jazz. I guess my
| opinion is being born in a place like the US shouldn't be
| some kind of privilege, and instead we should strive for
| the US to be a bastion for human dignity.
| gameman144 wrote:
| > we're talking about humans who are choosing to leave
| their country for a better place.
|
| What makes the US a better place? What keeps other
| countries from being a better place?
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| The constitution and bill of rights and the effective
| government the founding fathers created that ensures the
| continuation of those law bodies.
|
| The lack of those blessings from the past is what
| prevents others. It's no fault of the people who live
| here or there today for the situation we are in. If
| George Washington had accepted a crown when offered we
| would be just as screwed up.
| gameman144 wrote:
| > The lack of those blessings from the past is what
| prevents others.
|
| I think this strongly discounts the agency of
| individuals. In our time these are certainly blessings,
| but they had to be fought for by their contemporaries.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| It's true, but the platform and framework of that fight
| is what has kept it stable over time. That is what we
| inherited. It's also very fragile, and that's where the
| contemporary fight happens to preserve it. But without
| the framework, the fight is a unstable and degenerates
| quickly into a pretty gnarly state. That's why the
| founders struggled so hard - their writings at the time
| on these very subjects are profound and helpful in
| framing how lucky we are, but also how typical our
| problems are in history.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| So then work on making other countries as good as the US,
| not by cramming every person into the US.
| mind-blight wrote:
| Lots of countries maintain open borders. The entire
| Schengen zone is an open borders agreement.
|
| Also, you're incorrectly conflating mass migration with
| open borders. You can have open borders without causing a
| mass migration and vice versa.
| Eumenes wrote:
| TIL humans are birds
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Behold! I've brought you a man
| indymike wrote:
| > central reason for governments to enact borders, a rather
| modern invention.
|
| Every deceased Emperor, Chief, King, Earl, Duke, Lord and other
| ruler of lands and holder of fiefdoms would disagree with this.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| >This line of thinking comes up often on HN but it ignores the
| central reason for governments to enact borders, _a rather
| modern invention_.
|
| Would you be kind and provide some scholarly proof for the
| _rather modern invention_? It might not have been called
| "border" and have the gate with digital IDs to pass by but well
| defined (for their time) territories existed for thousands of
| years as evidenced by territory disputes between bordering
| sovereign groups in all lived-on continents.
| mikem170 wrote:
| Not the parent you replied to, but the modern passport as we
| know it goes back only about 100 years.
|
| > Migration was generally speaking, unhindered and each
| emigrant could decide on the time of his departure, his
| arrival or his return, to suit his own convenience. But World
| War I brought harsh restrictions on freedom of movement. [0]
|
| > The concept of a worldwide passport standard is relatively
| new, created in the aftermath of the First World War. ...the
| United States at the turn of the last century emerges: a near
| constant rush of immigrants, most destined to pass through
| Ellis Island. There they were given a cursory disease check,
| questioned, and in most cases, allowed to proceed on their
| journeys inward. This was easy enough to do without a global
| standard for identifying documents. [1]
|
| > On the outbreak of the First World War, countries imposed
| border controls to block the entry of subversives and the
| exit of men with skills useful to the war effort. Passports
| were issued to allow travellers access through these
| restrictions. When peace came in 1918 most countries retained
| both border controls and passports. [2]
|
| There used to be more restrictions on commerce than on
| people. Now it is the opposite. Money can move freely across
| international borders, and labor has become something to
| arbitrage.
|
| [0] https://fee.org/articles/passports-were-a-temporary-war-
| meas...
|
| [1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/a-histo
| ry-...
|
| [2] https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/when-
| passports-...
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| The original post I was asking for further details is about
| borders, not passport.
|
| That said, passports have been around near as long as
| borders, just did not have the smart chip embedded in them.
| Letters of recommendations or safe passage to pass a port
| have been around nearly as long as the notion of sovereign
| boundaries. It might have been a parchment with a wax seal,
| a ring, or a stick with a burn-mark, maybe even clay
| tablet, but the purpose of the "passport" is the same -
| passage into and across a territory controlled by another
| group other than the person holding the "passport" - i.e.
| safe passage.
|
| Your reference last states King Henry the 5th of England
| had "pass porte" in the early 15th century. The Greek city
| states had safe-passage documents between each other way
| before the English. There is a bilingual "letters of
| recommendation" in Chinese and Tibetan from the 10th
| century to allow safe passage for a pilgrimage. A thing
| that allows a non-local to pass safely into and out of a
| territory. (British Library IOL Tib J 754)
| https://www.princeton.edu/news/2014/11/17/bringing-
| ancient-b...
| colonCapitalDee wrote:
| I'm not convinced. Passports might be a modern invention
| (and really that isn't surprising, a global identification
| system requires sophisticated bureaucracy and cheap,
| accessible transportation), but that doesn't mean that
| people used to be able to move freely across borders.
| Modern technology makes immigration accessible to the
| masses in a way that simply wasn't the case in the pre-
| modern world.
|
| A few things you would have to consider before immigrating
| in the pre-modern world:
|
| - Where are you going? There's no internet, books are rare,
| and maps are inaccurate (and often plain wrong)
|
| - How will you get there? Transportation is expensive and
| unreliable
|
| - How will you preserve wealth? A global financial system
| accessible to normal folks does not exist yet
|
| - What will you do to support yourself? Pre-modern
| communication infrastructure makes scoping out foreign
| labor markets difficult
|
| - How will you learn the language? You'll have to find
| someone to teach it to you, instructional material will be
| limited
|
| - Who will you leave behind? Any family members that don't
| come with you will likely never be seen or heard from again
|
| - What if people decide you're not welcome? Well-enforced
| protections against discrimination do not exist yet
|
| People did immigrate, so obviously immigration was not
| impossible. Not all of these questions apply to every
| situation (people migrating to an adjacent country would
| not have to deal with many of these concerns). But
| immigration was far harder than it is today, and fraught
| with risk. Pre-modern borders were, by virtue of being pre-
| modern, effectively closed.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > The most common example for the Americans reading this is
| NAFTA, which makes workers in Detroit compete with workers in
| Mexico (suppressing wages in both location)
|
| And Canada, who's planning to give amnesty and permanent
| residency to half a million illegal migrants in the coming
| year. [0]
|
| [0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/immigration-
| ministry...
| pjc50 wrote:
| It's true that hard borders are a modernish (start of c20th)
| invention, but they're just as often something that _labour_
| asks for in order to prevent labour competition. "Taking our
| jobs" and all that.
|
| They're also products of both the information-state (being able
| to know who's in the country through identity document systems)
| and the jet age. Before the steamship the only real border
| enforcement was on trade at ports.
|
| The British Empire had "freedom of movement" that effectively
| lasted only as long as people weren't using it in significant
| numbers. People could move from the colonies to the centre, and
| indeed after WW2 the government actively solicited Jamaicans to
| do so ( _Empire Windrush_ ), but resistance from the public has
| increased since then.
| SergeAx wrote:
| Businesses are paying more taxes than people do, so the article's
| title is eeconomically infeasible. Also I suspect that businesses
| are creating more jobs, so 2:0.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| https://archive.ph/lvwNo
| gtop3 wrote:
| What are the best strategies to attract remote workers to a
| location?
|
| * Utilities such as roads, water, high speed internet feel like
| table stakes now. Fiber internet is quickly spreading in rural
| areas, and I know people with septic tanks and a fiber line. Ten
| years ago Google Fiber was a major selling point for Kansas City.
|
| * Governments have little control over climate, nearby geographic
| features, time zone, and a million other details. They can
| highlight their strengths in marketing campaigns.
|
| * Cost of living only works for so long. We've seen areas in the
| last decades that have an influx of population and they usually
| see a corresponding increase in COL. There are approaches
| governments can take to slow down the growth of COL, but it seems
| inevitable.
|
| * Taxes and local regulations might help attract some workers.
| Cannabis consumers might be more inclined to move somewhere they
| can gain access legally. High income workers might be attracted
| to places without state income tax. Women might migrate to a
| state that aligns with their abortion politics. Motorcyclists
| might prefer places with lane splitting.
|
| * Large projects such as professional sports teams, well
| connected airports, large hospitals or ski lodges might play a
| role. Governments can attract these types of projects.
| nerdponx wrote:
| > * Cost of living only works for so long. We've seen areas in
| the last decades that have an influx of population and they
| usually see a corresponding increase in COL. There are
| approaches governments can take to slow down the growth of COL,
| but it seems inevitable.
|
| This IMO is the _big_ issue though. Governments need to be
| aware of long-term population trends as stay ahead of them when
| it comes to planning. I consistently feel like local
| governments find themselves surprised at demographic changes
| that have been obvious for several years.
| chasd00 wrote:
| yeah get behind on population growth and you'll never get
| caught up. This happened to Austin, the city just put its
| head in the sand and wanted to stay a small town forever. Now
| they're hopelessly behind building out the infrastructure to
| support a population growing at an ever faster rate.
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| > * Cost of living only works for so long. We've seen areas in
| the last decades that have an influx of population and they
| usually see a corresponding increase in COL. There are
| approaches governments can take to slow down the growth of COL,
| but it seems inevitable.
|
| COL increases because it is difficult or impossible to build
| new housing, and because single-use zoning requires creating
| massive amounts of infrastructure since it is illegal to build
| work and shopping near where people actually live. In addition,
| taxing property value disincentivizes developing land, leaving
| empty lots in even the most valuable places to build:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJqCaklMv6M
| gtop3 wrote:
| While I agree this is a major component, I think it's an
| oversimplification. As construction increases in an area
| construction labor costs increase. Water prices might
| increase, as more residents draw from a finite supply. More
| schools, DMVs, grocery stores and strip malls need to built
| and new construction is more expensive. Liquor licenses might
| be a static amount and grow more slowly than the population.
|
| I would describe COL increases as local resources and
| infrastructure being put under more demand and investments
| into importing resources or building infrastructure is more
| expensive than using existing infrastructure. Property taxes
| are a large source of funding for these investments. Dense
| housing might reduce the additional load on infrastructure
| but it doesn't remove it.
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| > Property taxes are a large source of funding for these
| investments.
|
| The idea isn't to get rid of property taxes and do without
| that revenue; the idea is to tax things that aren't
| beneficial that we want more of.
|
| I think our perspectives are different on how much of a
| handbrake bad policy is on the market's ability to create
| what people want.
| hintymad wrote:
| How does Bay Area fit in the narrative? From my personal point of
| view, Bay Area, where I live, offers very little to its
| residents: public schools have super low standards and low
| teaching qualities. Many of the schools use seemingly run-down
| portables while public schools in other states, such as WA, have
| amazing buildings and facilities. More than 1/3 of the families
| in the Bay Area choose private schools, the highest ratio in the
| US. The housing price has been through the roof. The average
| commute time is north of an hour. California also has higher
| taxes for income and business than most of the other states. Yet,
| people have been flocking to California (except last year) and
| tech companies still choose the Bay Area for their headquarters.
| gnopgnip wrote:
| >California also has the higher tax for income and business
| than most of the other states.
|
| Is this a bad thing? It is true that California has high
| marginal rates, but for most people that isn't what matters.
| The progressive rates are more favorable, and from a policy
| perspective this creates more economic opportunity. For
| instance a married couple making $125k a year(bay area median)
| would have $4300 less in take home pay in Oregon.
|
| >public schools have super low standards and low teaching
| qualities
|
| Six of the top ten school districts in the state are in the bay
| area. https://backgroundchecks.org/top-school-districts-in-
| califor...
| tracker1 wrote:
| If you don't mind living in a studio apartment for 2-3x the
| cost of a house rental in Oregon.
| hintymad wrote:
| > Six of the top ten school districts in the state are in the
| bay area.
|
| This is because the majority of the parents in the tech
| industry in Bay Area are tiger parents or 24x7 helicopter
| parents. I kid you not, in a lunch with random tech workers
| there you will find 9 out of 10 are PhDs from elite
| universities. The parents themselves are overachievers, and
| they push their kids really hard. They know every EC, every
| competition, every course track. They send their kids to
| tough tutoring schools like AOPS and Think Academy, if they
| don't get multiple private tutors for their kids. They
| certainly compete for those elite summer camps. In addition,
| people with less means, such as manicurists and housekeepers,
| would pool their resources to find private tutors for their
| kids in their big families. On the other hand, teachers in
| Cupertino school district ask parents to grade homework
| (WTF!). The physics teacher of the kids of NASA's director
| ask questions like "which one is heavier, a pound or a
| kilogram" in grade 8 physics exams (WTF!). In the meantime,
| some school districts try to forbid students from taking
| algebra 2 or geometry in grade 9 in the name of equity. This
| makes me especially sad, as brilliant kids who can't afford
| tutoring will be deprived the rights to be properly
| challenged, all in the name of so-called equity. But I
| digressed.
| gpm wrote:
| Great weather.
|
| A virtuous cycle of good people attracting businesses willing
| to pay a premium for good people attracting good people.
| francisofascii wrote:
| It all began when the US Navy starting using the bay area for
| research and technology, followed by Stanford getting into
| innovation and starting companies, then more tech companies
| started, hired people, attracted more people and more
| companies, and here we are.
| CalRobert wrote:
| If you're in one of the older areas (SF, Berkeley, Oakland)
| it's one of the few places on the west coast you can live an
| urban lifestyle in a walkable city.
| hikawaii wrote:
| [dead]
| ikiris wrote:
| ... so why do you live there?
|
| You choose it same as everyone else that's there now. Sounds
| like they compete well enough for you?
| hintymad wrote:
| My life is good, thanks to the booming tech industry. And as
| other comments said, the weather is great for me. Indeed,
| mediterranean weather is a godsend. There was a reason that
| Greeks and Romans had leisure to come up with foundations of
| modern civilization.
|
| I was not complaining about the life. I was just wondering
| how the government's behavior fits the narrative of competing
| for residents vs business. Of course, I'm angry about the
| quality of education in California or the corruption in
| government in general, but that's not the point of my
| questions.
| gretch wrote:
| People often live here _despite_ the government, not because
| of it.
|
| Great weather. 4 hours away from skiing. 1 hour away from the
| beach.
|
| These things aren't attributable to the quality of the govt
| (except I will say that govt does do a decent job of
| preserving natural ecosystems)
| slg wrote:
| >Great weather. 4 hours away from skiing. 1 hour away from
| the beach.
|
| Why not move to Los Angeles, better weather, closer to
| skiing, and closer to the beach? Seems to me that there is
| still something the government is doing to keep you in the
| Bay Area.
| ghaff wrote:
| I probably disagree on the weather but I don't really
| like heat. There are also a lot of local natural areas
| for hiking and so forth.
|
| But, really, they're different. Take money out of the
| picture and tell me I needed to live in either SoCal or
| NoCal and I'd definitely pick the latter.
|
| (And there's better skiing than both.)
| hintymad wrote:
| Plus, LA is too dry, and the commute is even worse than
| in Bay Area.
| nhchris wrote:
| The article is valid in speaking specifically about _US states_
| competing, but otherwise I find the idea of treating governments,
| and countries, as mere economic platforms, that compete like a
| business would, disturbing.
|
| They are representatives of their nations, and their duty is to
| their people, to whom they are guardians, of said people and
| their homelands. They should not be 'competing' for more
| residents just as families shouldn't compete to attract other's
| children.
| welshwelsh wrote:
| The way I interpreted it is- cities and states should focus
| more on being great places to live, not great places to move
| your corporate office.
|
| And although I'm sure this is not a popular sentiment, I think
| governments are too biased towards people already living in
| their jurisdiction, even if those people are there by mere
| coincidence (i.e. they happened to be born there). People
| shouldn't be held to higher standards simply because they were
| born somewhere else, which is something they don't control.
|
| An ideal immigration policy would be to allow anyone making
| above the median income, or otherwise anyone who would be an
| "above average" resident to become a citizen instantly, and the
| government should work hard to attract these people.
| Conversely, they should encourage "below average" residents to
| relocate to more affordable/lower tier areas, and not give them
| any special privileges just because they are "legacy
| residents."
| necovek wrote:
| > ...governments are too biased towards people already living
| in their jurisdiction...
|
| That's a direct result of democratic government: people
| choose those who promise to work in their best interest.
|
| If you dislike this, who would you vote for? Someone who'd
| look to "expel" you from your local community?
|
| > ...making above the median income...
|
| Ok, so instead of having diversity, you believe it's best if
| there is no intermingling of classes?
|
| But then, why stop at above/below median? Why would the top
| 1% want you in their area? Or the top 5% in theirs? Or...
|
| And why have the buck stop at income? I am sure an area would
| be proud to be home to an adult population that's 95% PhDs.
| And then they can split up between tenured professors or not.
|
| Not to mention disallowing people from having a long term
| home as their circumstances bearably change.
|
| This is so fundamentally not thought through.
| necovek wrote:
| Not to mention that people are already being pushed out
| from their "legacy" communities due to raising prices.
| nhchris wrote:
| It is not "coincidence" that Chinese are born in China and
| Polish in Poland. It is their inheritance, their birthright,
| the fruit of their ancestors' labors. To tear out all
| connection to one's history by calling it "coincidence" is,
| frankly, sickening.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I wonder if someone born in a war torn region with few
| resources and no organized society would have the same
| opinion.
|
| It is just a statement of fact that the geographic location
| a person is born is coincidence.
| bigger_inside wrote:
| the term "coincidence" is weird. I read it as somehow
| relying on the idea that first, there is a person (like a
| soul?), and then, that soul is "coincidentally" put
| somewhere. Correct me if you think that's strange, but
| the idea of "coincidence" to me only seems to make sense
| if the person somehow predates the location of birth. But
| if that's not the case, as I would guess most of us
| believe, then there is no coincidence here, "just" a
| birth that is already positioned - and your nationality,
| heritage, culture, language are dependent on that birth.
| And hence, that is the frame in which a person can only
| develop - after that fact. And THAT is nowhere near
| coincidence...
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I did not read it all as you did. "Coincidence" in
| welshwelsh's comment was used to indicate who is
| deserving of the benefits of living in place X rather
| than place Y, where it can be reasonably concluded that X
| is overall better to live in than Y.
|
| I disagree with nhchris's response of
|
| > It is their inheritance, their birthright, the fruit of
| their ancestors' labors.
|
| Because there is no natural law that something is "your"
| inheritance, birthright, or that you have claim to the
| fruit of your ancestors' labor. Might makes right is how
| nature works, and it just so happens that you were born
| in a time and place where certain "rights" are being
| upheld, and there is not a stronger party that wants and
| is able to take them from you.
|
| You can even go further and replace place X and Y with
| parents X and Y.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I would say that if ownership of land and property are
| indeed a right... then being able to give that property
| to your descendants (or anyone else) is also a right.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Assuming the power structures governing the land allow
| that. See this example for how nebulous "rights" can be.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce%27s_Beach
| bigger_inside wrote:
| I didn't read this just materially. There's a language,
| customs, "ways of thinking" you inherit; also, there is
| an image, there are power structures and positions you're
| born into. Sociologists speak of different forms of
| capital: not just financial capital, also social capital,
| cultural capital, etc., that can all be "exchanged" for
| other things later (the relationships of your parents
| with other people, the ease qith which you can get an
| education title, etc)
|
| and still: for the person born to "deserve" living with
| these benefits nebulously assumes the person, and the
| "deserving", were there first, and THEN you are born and
| by sheer chance, you got it - or not. Again, when you
| stop thinking this way, sort of "thinking of an abstract
| person" first, but rather realize that there are no
| abstract people, just real ones, this starts to feel
| weird.
| playingalong wrote:
| We have history to help us answer your question.
|
| The answer is: yes, people returned to many places after
| they were totally demolished, suffered from systematic
| resource drainage and were background of inhumane
| genocides. TLDR: massive scale war is nothing new.
|
| Sadly
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| But you also have people that do not? My entire parents'
| generation immigrated thousands of miles away to various
| places around the world and never went back (other than
| as tourists), and it was not even war torn or lacking in
| resources. They just happened to bet that they could
| provide a better life for themselves and their children
| elsewhere.
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| Whether something is disturbing or not doesn't say much about
| whether it's a good idea, just that it is different from the
| conventional.
|
| Around the world, governments act like abusive parents. If
| people could migrate freely (creating a competition for
| residents), much more people would live without the abuse of
| authoritarian governments.
| nhchris wrote:
| Governments don't come from the geography, but the people.
| Living in a small country myself, a place such as China,
| India, Indonesia, or Nigeria could send (and they would
| gladly come) enough people to outvote us on any issue 3x
| over, without even noticing they're missing anyone. We would
| simply cease to exist first as a sovereign people, and soon
| after as a distinct people at all, without any territory to
| call our own.
| tap-snap-or-nap wrote:
| Initially, immigration served as a means to address
| specific shortages, but nowadays it appears to be utilized
| as a strategy to reduce wages. Unfortunately, the political
| discourse surrounding immigration has become increasingly
| hostile. This suggests that politicians may be prioritizing
| corporate interests and a select few economic beneficiaries
| over the well-being of the general public.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > Governments don't come from the geography, but the
| people.
|
| I think that's something the left is increasingly
| uncomfortable with; the idea that some countries aren't as
| developed as others because of its people and that simply
| transplanting people across countries won't change anything
| to it.
| lolinder wrote:
| This is a perspective that's really hard for someone in the
| US to understand. When people here make the exact same
| arguments that you're making, it sounds xenophobic and
| dangerous. It's the stuff of Trumpism and MAGA. However, in
| the context of a true nation state, the exact same words
| can mean something very different.
|
| When we in the United States try to claim that immigration
| would hurt our sovereignty as a people, we're referring to
| an almost fictional nation that's supposedly being overrun
| --we have always been an eclectic group of immigrants from
| many places, and the people who have deep ancestral ties to
| the land are generally marginalized already.
|
| But when people in a true nation state express the same
| concerns, we in the US should understand that the context
| is very different. This isn't the case of third generation
| Americans trying to claim that this land is theirs and no
| one else should be able to come here--instead we're talking
| about people whose families have been there _literally_
| since time immemorial.
|
| I'm not writing this to take a stand on immigration in
| Europe or anywhere else, but it's important for us in the
| US to not project our own sensibilities into a completely
| different context.
|
| A good article on this topic:
| https://acoup.blog/2021/07/02/collections-my-country-
| isnt-a-...
| tracker1 wrote:
| For me, the biggest concern with unchecked immigration is
| logistics. But I'd just assume having work Visa
| applications mostly based on having a job and place to
| live worked out before being able to come in. I'd also
| like to see pay floors as a scale from minimum wage for
| Visa employers to favor existing citizens first. Along
| with SSI style tax that doesn't go to the Visa worker.
| indigochill wrote:
| There are a couple interesting assumptions here:
|
| 1. There's such a thing as a true nation 2. That how long
| a person's family has lived in a region should entitle
| them to keep others out
|
| The first one is bound to wander into circuitous
| philosophical debate, but I'm curious what the rationale
| is for the second.
| lolinder wrote:
| I'm not making the second assumption at all, I explicitly
| disclaimed any opinion on the merits of particular
| stances on immigration in countries that are not my own:
|
| > I'm not writing this to take a stand on immigration in
| Europe or anywhere else, but it's important for us in the
| US to not project our own sensibilities into a completely
| different context.
|
| As for the first assumption, I'll grant you I was making
| that. Whether or not the concept of a nation exists in
| reality, it undeniably exists in people's heads, and it's
| less obviously artificial in Europe and elsewhere than it
| is in the United States.
|
| EDIT: Although, note that I didn't actually use the
| phrase "true nation", I said "true nation state", and I
| think the existence of a nation state is less up for
| debate than the existence of a nation.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| > I think the existence of a nation state is less up for
| debate than the existence of a nation.
|
| That seems muddled. A nation-state is a state whose
| population are dominantly formed out of a single
| "nation." Generally the nation implies some kind ethnic
| or ancestral ties (and granted the definition can be
| fuzzy) - but if concept of a nation is in doubt ... then
| so in the concept of a nation state. They are necessarily
| coupled.
|
| I think the key thing is that for a nation state,
| anything that can significantly impact the composition of
| the citizenry to change the scope of what the nation
| means is effectively an existential consideration. The US
| is explicitly not a nation-state, though americans have
| mixed opinion on the matter. Europe is comprised of
| nation states, but may of them these days seem to
| consider that a bit of an historical embarrassment and
| want to transition to be some form of multicultural
| state, especially as part of the multinational
| confederation of the EU.
| ticviking wrote:
| I think the second one comes from the idea that we
| inherit the residence and customs as something akin to
| property. The 'right' to inhabit a particular region in
| the same way of life, could be defended if people coming
| to a place disrupted those rights.
| mannerheim wrote:
| I don't think countries should necessarily compete for the
| citizens of other countries, either, but they should have to
| compete for their own at the very least. People aren't the
| property of their government, and if another city or state or
| country offers them a more attractive life than their home,
| they should be free to take that offer.
|
| The solution to emigration for a polity shouldn't be keeping
| their citizenry prisoner or forcing others to treat their
| residents more poorly because of some imagined 'race to the
| bottom', but to instead make their own land more attractive to
| stay and live in.
| nhchris wrote:
| > but they should have to compete for their own at the very
| least.
|
| That I agree with. While it is entirely up to a country's
| discretion whether they permit immigration, _leaving_ a
| country must not be prevented.
| legitster wrote:
| How is this not just pure, racist nationalism? Where you live
| is not a family. If you are born unlucky geographically it
| seems like you should absolutely have the right to improve your
| lot.
| psacawa wrote:
| What can I say, man? History is absolutely chock full of
| examples that show that other identity groups can represent
| existential threats, including very recent ones: Chinese
| genocide of Uyhgurs, Burmese genocide of Rohinya, Russian
| agression in Ukraine.
|
| Let me pick at specifically Russia/Ukraine. A short time ago,
| these countries economic ties were vast. There were many
| Ukrainians whose personal wealth stemmed from e.g. the
| country's ties to Russian petrochemical industry.
|
| Others, seeing that, said "You are accruing personal wealth
| by strengthening a foreign power's hold on our nation." To
| which the response was occasionally "Are you racist? Are you
| nationalist?" We see now how this turned out.
|
| The dirty secret is that history vindicates all forms of
| identity group tribalism, in principal. That includes racism.
| There is no shortage in history of examples like the above,
| nor of examples of destroyed nations.
|
| If anything, I feel the problem is that contemporary
| countries do not represent the nations the purport to.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I would say you only have (limited) influence over the
| nation you are born into... so, you should somewhat
| naturally favor that nation's well-being over others. You
| can only influence the acts/actions of other nations as
| strings attached to trade/treaty. And can only assume those
| that you trade with will be making the same emphasis, which
| is their own nation's well-being.
| bumby wrote:
| Why is family any different, but identity viewed through a
| evolutionary/genetic rather than geographic lens? Both are
| pure chance that you have no control over.
| hermannj314 wrote:
| I've owned houses in two cities in my life.
|
| One called itself "A developer-friendly community" and the other
| "A healthy community"
|
| The cities were organized around their taglines. One was 300
| years old and focused on parks, trails, conservancy, and
| community centers. The other a younger city focused on growth and
| sprawl, tax abatements, and new businesses.
|
| You should live where the government aligns with your phase of
| life and personal goals and be free to choose a new government
| later. Also, democracies can shift over time but generally it is
| easier to move somewhere new than to feel entitled to change a
| municpal culture simply because you got older.
| tclancy wrote:
| >entitled to change a municpal culture simply because you got
| older
|
| I get what you probably meant, but this is a really strong
| statement. Our town is struggling with spiraling property taxes
| and it is forcing long-term residents out. I really feel for
| older people who've had decades of a social circle, have people
| to help them with things they can no longer do, etc. You can't
| move somewhere else and replicate that.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Yeah... I hate property taxes as a concept. That you can lose
| your property due to simply living another year is kind of
| messed up. At least, it should be locked to value at purchase
| adding only inflation. My house (according to the
| city/county) is worth 3x what I bought it at 5 years ago...
| If it goes up this much again, taxes will likely reach close
| to the mortgage payment. It's simply not right.
|
| I'd be happy to move right now, but interest rates
| effectively prohibit that as if I had the same amount
| burrowed my mortgage payment would be over twice what it is
| now.
| acomjean wrote:
| The state I live in capped property tax increases
| (Massachusetts)
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Massachusetts_Proposit
| i...
|
| It's as very expensive state but the taxes are limited. And
| every time a community needs a school or some
| infrastructure it becomes an old (fixed income) vs young
| battle.
| wyager wrote:
| > At least, it should be locked to value at purchase adding
| only inflation
|
| This completely eliminates the social upside of property
| taxes compared to other forms of taxes
| bumby wrote:
| Couldn't that social upside be captured through means
| that don't force people from their homes?
|
| It seems like the use of property tax as a major local
| finding mechanism has a lot of negative effects, from
| poor school performance to inflated housing costs.
| ghaff wrote:
| There's very little correlation between per student costs
| and performance. It's very common for urban schools to
| have very poor outcomes with very high costs per student
| compared to suburban towns with much lower costs and much
| better performance. The state where I live also equalizes
| educational funding to some degree with state funding.
| tyoma wrote:
| Its called a tax lien. Basically, if you can't pay your
| property taxes, you still get to stay in your home, but
| the unpaid taxes must be paid (with interest) before the
| home can sold or otherwise transferred (with some rare
| exceptions for like death of a spouse, etc.)
| mandevil wrote:
| This- fixing property tax to purchase price- is exactly
| what California's Prop 13 did, which has ended up gutting
| California local governments
| (https://edsource.org/2022/californias-prop-13s-unjust-
| legacy...). It has resulted in lots of people who aren't
| paying their fair share into the upkeep of their community,
| and driving CA house prices insane. It's been a giant
| fiasco, hurting California's growth, and locking people
| into their house so they can't move:
| https://www.nber.org/digest/apr05/lock-effect-californias-
| pr...
|
| So, not a good solution. Got another idea?
| ZainRiz wrote:
| Is the claim here that the city's spending needs went up
| much faster than inflation? If so, why?
| scetron wrote:
| Indeed! Not everyone has the capability to up and move. I've
| recently heard that having a good community around you is one
| of the best things for healthy longevity, it becomes even
| more difficult to do this.
|
| It also happens to be an issue that I am facing, move for
| more closer alignment to my ideals and abandon my established
| community, or stay and try to change where I am.
| bumby wrote:
| General question related to this: are the spiraling property
| taxes related to similarly spiraling home values?
| jacobr1 wrote:
| Strong correlation, but not exclusively. Plenty of areas
| regularly vote for bond measures paid by increases in
| property taxes. So you can get increases of BOTH rate and
| value.
| zamnos wrote:
| The other situation would be California's Prop 13, which
| locks down property tax rates to when you bought the house.
| It keeps long term residents in, but has had some unexpected
| consequences and its part in California's housing crisis is
| not to be ignored.
|
| https://edsource.org/2022/californias-prop-13s-unjust-
| legacy...
| ghaff wrote:
| I live in an ex-urban town and there's very little commercial
| development in town except at the fringes. However, town
| services and school need to be paid for and this was becoming
| an issue without significantly raising property taxes--which
| aren't super-high but it's also not an especially wealthy
| town as a whole.
|
| We recently went through a couple of very contentious town
| meetings about doing a rezone in one of the two parts of town
| that has _some_ commercial development basically so
| distribution centers can be built there. But make no mistake.
| The town as a whole would be perfectly happy to have near
| zero non-farm commercial activity if that were financially
| feasible.
| xxpor wrote:
| The problem is when the "healthy community" is close to the
| central city and has good transit. Metro areas are networks,
| nothing happens in isolation.
| SllX wrote:
| Correct, but municipal corporations are generally[1] legal
| monopolies on the land within their jurisdiction. San
| Francisco has no legal jurisdiction over what Daly City or
| San Mateo County does, let alone Atherton and vice versa.
|
| [1] Your State may vary.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| Right, and how is that working out for regional transit in
| the Bay Area? Probably better than most other places in the
| US ... but as far from functional for most residents in the
| area. The standard seems to be creating some kind of cross-
| county or cross-municipal agency with either delegated to
| independent funding mechanisms. Different states explicitly
| support or allow this to varying degrees.
| [deleted]
| nikanj wrote:
| Would I be correct in guessing homes in the former were much
| more expensive than the latter?
| JeremyNT wrote:
| > You should live where the government aligns with your phase
| of life and personal goals and be free to choose a new
| government later. Also, democracies can shift over time but
| generally it is easier to move somewhere new than to feel
| entitled to change a municpal culture simply because you got
| older.
|
| I feel like people need to understand this.
|
| I'm currently living in Nashville, TN, which you may as well
| have been referring to in the second half of your comment (not
| mentioned: the focus exclusively on tourism while ignoring
| needs of actual residents). I did not appreciate how different
| values could lead to such wildly different outcomes in quality
| of life.
|
| The situation with the government at both the state and city
| levels is absolutely dire here (for different reasons) and
| there's really no hope in changing anything.
|
| "Vote with your feet" is the smart approach.
| bumby wrote:
| There is an unacknowledged knock-on effect though. I doubt
| anyone completely assimilates to the new locale, with the
| result becoming a mix of values. This may not suit so well
| with local residents (see opinions from ID and TX regarding
| new CA residents who "voted with their feet")
| kilgnad wrote:
| The problem with this is that the taglines enforce a theme even
| when the circumstances change.
|
| Your healthy community is experiencing homelessness and a
| housing affordability problem along with every "themed"
| community around you. Does it make sense to stick with the
| original theme? No. It doesn't.
|
| The problem here is that by owning property you buy into that
| theme. Any divergence from that theme is harmful to what you
| bought.
|
| The only way forward is eminent domain.
|
| But at the scale of current property ownership there's going to
| be huge backlash from property owners. If people who don't own
| property organize in numbers that dwarf the total amount of
| property owners then that could generate enough conflict
| towards social change.
|
| But that level of organization won't happen until the
| desperateness hits a sort of criticality. We're still far from
| that so I'm safe. But make no mistake I know the moral action
| that we must take, and me sitting on my property is not it.
| AlgorithmicTime wrote:
| [dead]
| mcguire wrote:
| As AlgorithmicTime (now dead) wrote, American home ownership
| rates peaked in 2004 at 69%, fell to 64% in 2016, and are
| back up to 66%.
| (https://www.statista.com/statistics/184902/homeownership-
| rat...)
|
| In California, it's about 56%. You gave to get San Francisco
| proper to get a minority and then it's still 38% (https://www
| .census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/sanfranciscocou...)
| kilgnad wrote:
| You have to look at age and location. If you characterize
| the whole US you're including people who are much older and
| people who live away from very urban areas.
|
| Among older people and in small towns and villages the
| housing problems, are of course, much milder.
| maxsilver wrote:
| > You should live where the government aligns with your phase
| of life and personal goals and be free to choose a new
| government later.
|
| It should be noted that while this is good advice, this is a
| big luxury to have, and not something that is broadly
| applicable to most people. If you don't have the money, if your
| career is tied to a specific industry, if you have children
| from any past-and-now-divorced marriage, or a handful of other
| reasons, you may be locked to specific areas for a really long
| time.
|
| Yes, move somewhere new if you _can_ and you feel the grass is
| greener. But municipal government absolutely owe it to their
| residents and community to support the people they have, not
| just the people they wish they had.
| hammock wrote:
| > generally it is easier to move somewhere new than to feel
| entitled to change a municpal culture simply because you got
| older.
|
| This notion sounds right, but observationally it is incorrect
| in practice. In Chicago the neighborhoods cycle between
| bustling, vibrant - when filled with new, young singles who
| move in and bring business with them; and eventually evolving
| over a decade or so into a bougie DINK family-oriented
| community, before completing the lifecycle as a sleepy,
| economically depressed place with miserably stable/flat real
| estate values that you just pass over.
|
| Seen this exact cycle happen with a dozen different
| neighborhoods in Chicago.
|
| If people were instead moving to a different area, this
| wouldn't happen. Well, some are moving to different areas (the
| suburbs, etc) but not entirely.
| legitster wrote:
| > Overall, there may be less competition to attract corporations.
| At the same time, political competition for residents may become
| more intense, because more people will be able to choose where to
| live regardless of where they work. This competition could lead
| to improvements in schools and parks.
|
| I am as capitalist as they come, but I don't disagree with this
| assessment at all. I find it bizarre how some cities almost
| became hostile to their own citizens and got away with it because
| of a monopoly on the good jobs.
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| https://archive.is/OiagC
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