The Necessary Immigration Debate

as mass immigration increases diversity, it reduces social cohesion and civic trust

.. the trust problem is not a simple matter of racist natives mistrusting foreigners, since social trust is often weakest among minorities — which is one reason why the most diverse generation in American history, the millennials, is also the least trusting.

.. It’s one reason why campus politics are so toxic, why Democrats struggle to keep their diverse coalition politically engaged

.. Then linked to these ethno-cultural tensions are the tensions of class, where mass immigration favors stratification and elite self-segregation.

.. regions and cities with the largest immigrant populations are often the wealthiest and most dynamic.

.. The hinterlands are also filled with people who might want to move to wealthier regions (or who used to live there) but can’t because an immigrants-and-professionals ecosystem effectively prices out the middle class.

.. Thus our rich and diverse states also often feature high poverty rates when their cost of living is considered, while second and third-generation immigrants often drift into the same stagnation as the white working class

.. Which in turn encourages them toward mild contempt for their fellow countrymen who don’t want to live under a cosmopolitan-ruled caste system

.. For some pro-immigration Republicans this contempt is Ayn Randian: We’ll all be better off with more hard-working immigrants and fewer shiftless mooching natives. For pro-immigration liberals it’s the predictable cultural triumphalism: The arc of history is long, but thanks to immigration we won’t have to cater to heartland gun-clingers any longer.

In both cases there’s a fantasy of replacement that’s politically corrosive, and that’s one reason why Donald Trump is president and Jeb! and Hillary are not.

.. Hence my own view that keeping current immigration levels while bringing in more immigrants to compete with our economy’s winners and fewer to compete for low-wage work represents a reasonable middle ground.

 

The World Bank Is Remaking Itself as a Creature of Wall Street

Jim Yong Kim, the World Bank’s president, is
trying to revitalize a hidebound institution.
But his embrace of Wall Street is controversial.

.. In the fall of 2016, Jim Yong Kim, the president of the World Bank, sat down with some of the most powerful figures in the global economy.

Hosted by Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund, their discussion focused on financial trouble spots around the globe. There was scant talk about poverty, which the World Bank has committed to eradicate.

.. The World Bank, once a powerhouse of global finance, is searching for relevance. Mr. Kim’s unusual solution: embrace Wall Street.

.. Developed-world governments that are the bank’s members provided the bulk of its money, which was used to make loans to developing nations for infrastructure projects and the like.
.. the bank’s war chest is dwarfed by the funds pouring into developing countries through financial markets. Perhaps most important, the World Bank’s biggest benefactor and largest shareholder — the United States — has become its most trenchant critic.

.. Instead of relying solely on contributions from reluctant donor governments, he is pushing private investors — sovereign wealth funds, private equity firms and insurance companies — to pony up trillions of dollars for projects in Indonesia, Zambia, India and elsewhere. His pitch: They can reap rich returns by putting their money to work alongside the World Bank.

.. Trained as an anthropologist and medical doctor, Mr. Kim now says that the world of high finance is “some of the coolest stuff I have ever looked at.”

.. The son of Korean immigrants, Mr. Kim worked in the slums of Haiti and Peru, guided by the liberation theology of Catholic priests and the outrage of leftist intellectual Noam Chomsky.

.. as a public health crusader and a vocal critic of the bank for imposing heavy-handed solutions on poor countries — made him acutely aware of the institution’s frailties.

.. provides cash to companies in exchange for equity stakes, the World Bank currently drums up more than $7 billion a year from the private sector to invest in ventures in the developing world. Mr. Kim wants that figure to increase eventually to $30 billion.
.. The World Bank promised to protect investors against some losses.
.. those benefiting from the World Bank’s lending practices were “the people who fly in on a first-class ticket to give advice to governments.”
.. The argument was that growing investment flows into developing countries rendered World Bank lending mostly superfluous.

.. Last year, the World Bank dispensed $61 billion in loans and investments. By contrast, investors now inject more than $1 trillion a year into emerging markets

.. In effect, he was pitching the bank’s services as a middleman, ready to back projects with guarantees and other incentives. No longer could the World Bank be the sole provider of loans, which, he said, are “crowding out” the private sector.

.. the World Bank economists whose pay is tied to how many loans they churn out

.. “One of the most difficult things to do in a large bureaucracy is to change incentives,

.. “And if you have a large bureaucracy full of economists it is especially hard, because it turns out that economists really hate it when you change the incentives.”

.. On Wednesday, the bank’s top economist, Paul Romer, abruptly resigned.

.. His end came after he claimed, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, that the World Bank’s closely-watched report on business conditions in different countries had been altered for political reasons.

.. the bank tends to see private sector solutions — those involving the profit motive — as morally questionable.

.. World Bank staffers are used to talking to governments, and now they have to leverage the private sector? It is a different skill set, and flexibility is not the hallmark of development institutions.”

.. “He had to work against his own incentives,” Mr. Kim said, referring to the bank’s practice of rewarding staff for loans. “And that is part of the institutional problem here.”

.. “He has pursued a strategy of making himself popular in Davos by attacking the organization and its staff,” said Lant Pritchett, a retired World Bank executive. “It is this idea that his hand has been hampered by bureaucratic machinations. That may be accepted in Davos — but it’s completely false.”

.. His biggest coup was working with Ivanka Trump

.. They eventually settled in Muscatine, Iowa, where Mr. Kim was a high school quarterback before going on to Brown and securing advanced medical and anthropology degrees from Harvard.

.. Mr. Kim concluded by announcing that the bank would no longer back oil and gas drilling projects.

The Mind Meld of Bill Gates and Steven Pinker

Mr. Gates readily acknowledged that the person he is today is not one he would have recognized when he was in his 20s and single-mindedly building Microsoft. “I was a zealot,” he said. “I didn’t believe in weekends. I didn’t believe in vacations. I knew everybody’s license plate so I knew when they were coming and going. That was my life: doing great software.”

.. Plus, you don’t want a tech company run by somebody in their 60s. At least I didn’t want to. I ended up retiring at 53.

.. But for a young man in his 20s, writing software night and day may be the best way to add to human welfare. I’d never heard of vaccines. I didn’t have any money. But the personal computer, the internet, hey, that’s what I was good at. And I enjoyed doing it every day.

.. I came across statistics that homicide rates in the Middle Ages were about 35 times what they are today in Europe. When I posted this online, I started receiving correspondence citing more examples: The rate of death in warfare has come down by a factor of 20 since 1945. Domestic violence is down. Child abuse is going down. I was sitting on all these data sets showing reductions in violence that few people were aware of that I thought ought to be better known.

.. That “things getting better” is the greatest story that no one knows.

.. there’s the idea that we can’t want something good for ourselves without wanting it for everyone.

.. What makes Papua New Guinea — where there’s no police and revenge after revenge — different from Western society is that when we give ourselves over to the law, we want it to be executed impartially. We gain stability. But if you could get your son off, of course you’ll try.

.. the proposition, Philip — which comes from Spinoza. He said those under the influence of reason desire nothing for themselves that they do not desire for all humankind. But reason is not a powerful part of human nature. Innately, we favor family over strangers, our tribe over other tribes. It’s only when we’re called upon to justify our beliefs — not consult our gut feelings, but convince others of the right way to act — that we conclude that all lives have equal value.

.. when you consider a radical change, like “Hey, let’s tear up the global trade agreements; they’re a disaster,” you’re more likely to implement it if you think things are getting worse. “Let’s tear up the treaties. Let’s try a nondemocratic approach.” Your willingness to go off the current path is much, much higher.

.. There’s a tendency in journalism and political debates to assume that it’s easy to achieve a perfect society: “Good people would do that.” The fact that we don’t means that evil people must be running the system: “Let’s throw them out and find nobler ones.” This leads to empowering charismatic despots and destroying institutions that have done a lot of good.

.. I’m sure Bill gets this all the time: “Why throw money at the developing world? They’re just going to have more babies and be just as poor.”

.. What indicator improves even faster than reduction in violence? Our distaste for violence. We’re more upset about it today. If I see someone spanking a kid — I’m stealing from Steven’s book — I might get up and say: “Hey, wait a minute!” Forty years ago, it might have been more like: “Do you want to borrow my belt?”

.. Extreme global poverty has been reduced from 90 percent 200 years ago to 10 percent today.

.. The person who invents an affordable and efficient toilet should be made a saint.

Think how much human happiness will be granted, how much human suffering eliminated. We should think quantitatively; it’s the morally enlightened way. But it’s not the way our brains evolved when we make moral evaluations.

.. One of the biggest enemies of reason is tribalism. When people subscribe to an ideology, they suck up evidence that supports their preconceptions and filter out evidence that goes against them. Contrary to the belief of most scientists that denial of climate change is an effect of scientific illiteracy, it is not at all correlated with scientific literacy. People who believe in man-made climate change don’t know any more about climate or science than those who deny it. It’s almost perfectly correlated with left-wing versus right-wing orientation

.. But I’m optimistic. I do think awareness of how things have worked is important to recreate a conservative center — that is, make us careful about what we change.

.. innovation is not viewed as an unalloyed way to improve the human condition. And that’s fair, because it’s not pure. Does social media split us into tribes in a way that’s dangerous? Does it create, even in high school social circles, a channel for bullying, or a desire to look perfect in photos?

.. There are certain things that governments are always going to do better than private innovators. Basic research, for instance.

.. PG: Name a problem we may think of as intractable that you’re optimistic about solving in the near future.

SP: War between countries. Civil wars are harder to eliminate because there are so many insurgent and militia forces. But there are only 192 countries. They could agree not to declare war on each other. I think we’re on the way.