We’re headed for global instability, but don’t expect the US to have a fate similar to Europe.
As the past 4 years have demonstrated, there is a very large segment of the US population is very much against immigration, and would happily turn the country into an "island" by building walls around the land borders.
The exact amount of immigrants and the requirements to come here legally is less uniform in acceptance.
The biggest issue is between legal and illegal immigration.
Among the Republicans, the 40% who are anti-immigration tend to feel very strongly about it, and are likely to consider it a major issue. The 60% of Republicans who are OK with immigration are less likely to consider it a major issue.
This makes it hard nowadays to get Republican support in the House for pro-immigration policies, because a pro-immigration Republican member of the House will attract anti-immigration primary challengers who will get the vote of the 40% who are anti-immigration. With that big bloc in hand its hard for the challenger to lose.
You can see a similar thing with abortion. About 60% of Republicans favor keeping Roe v. Wade, about 30% want to overturn it, and the rest are unsure [1]. But how many Republican members of Congress will come out or vote in favor of keeping Roe v. Wade? Pretty close to zero because doing so is political suicide in their next election.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2019/06/07/730183531/poll-majority-want-...
I thought Canada was far easier. I knew a software engineer who, about 15 years ago, got the Canadian equivalent of a green card as a "backup" without ever having actually lived there, in case she had problems with her US immigration. It sounded like a box ticking exercise, though this person had two masters degrees (IIRC, the second was to keep her status since she graduated from the first into a recession).
If you try to illegally immigrate into Canada, they will deport you
To list a few different people find concerning: depressing wages of domestic population, rapid cultural change of domestic population, brain drain from foreign population, strain on tax / social systems, ineffective vetting allowing cross-border contraband and criminal activity, and so on.
All of these are valid and deserve scrutiny and investigation. Obviously there are many beneficial aspects to immigration, and nearly all examples of very successful civilizations in history were at a crossroads of many cultures. Just wanted to make it clear that the immigration debate won't "die with boomers", and it shouldn't, because it is an important discussion to have.
Moreover, mostly in the places where productivity is not happening. Their growing irrelevance and sociocultural aversion to change are primary reasons for their vocality.
1. Dying out.
2. Not in places immigrants want to immigrate to.
There's reason to doubt that. A lot of Trump's support was rural, and a lot of immigrants are farm laborers.
I don't see why Europe would suffer a much different fate from the US.
I think the main thing holding the EU back is their love for austerity. They could do a lot more to invest in their economy.
EU as a concept is still highly supported amongst adults and young adults. And if anything Brexit strengthened that, since UK is a now a clown that everyone laughs at with all the issues they are going through.
A lot of young people migrate between EU countries and just that is the biggest visible positive that all working adults recognise. Its something people would not want to lose willy-nilly. Something realllly serious would have to happen for EU to fail catastrophically.
The EU is a globalization project in an era where globalization is on the decline. It was held together by US warships and will fall apart as they recede, a vacuum filled by local, competing powers. Europe will not be immune to it, since it is after all composed of many cultures and many economies with competing aims.
It’s not a matter of what people want, it’s a matter of economic realities that will impugn any high-minded desire for unity and collaboration.
https://www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2021-01/astrazeneca-eu-k...
MSN Money: "Bild tore apart Von Der Leyen's explanation of the vaccine delays and threat to stop supplies heading to the UK line by line, accusing her of placing 'junk' orders for vaccines three months behind Britain. 'She says: "We know that there is no time to lose in a pandemic," but what she means is: "We may have wasted time. But we will NEVER admit that",' the newspaper wrote. Meanwhile 'Brexit Brits continue to receive full supplies,' the paper added.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/german-media-savages-e...
New York Times: "E.U. Makes a Sudden and Embarrassing U-Turn on Vaccines"
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/30/world/europe/covid-vaccin...
The Telegraph: De Standaard, a Belgian newspaper, said the success of the Prime Minister’s move was a source of great frustration to the French, in particular, who are lagging far behind in their vaccine programme. It suggested that Brexiteers would take heart from that because Paris had regularly taken a hardline stance in the Brexit negotiations. The Flemish newspaper said that Mr Johnson liked to take risks and in this case, as opposed to in Brexit, the gambit had worked.
An El Mundo editorial accused the EU of a "failure" on vaccine procurement, citing a "lack of coordination between member states to articulate a homogeneous process" which is "ruining the prospect of achieving herd immunity after the summer"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/01/28/best-advertiseme...
Daniel Stelter, Manager Magazin: It is dawning on the German and European population that the political class has failed across the board in meeting the enormous economic and social challenges of the Corona crisis. It marks the accelerating decline of the EU. Everybody in the economic sphere now knows that whenever there is a problem at a production site in the EU, there is a risk of being hit with an export ban: vaccines today, biotech tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow what? This destruction of trust in the EU as a place of business (Standort EU) is all of a piece with its tendency towards over-regulation and planned-economy control. The gap between wish and reality in the EU is greater than ever. By failing to procure vaccines, the EU has validated Brexit and given all EU citizens an objective reason for euroscepticism.
https://www.manager-magazin.de/unternehmen/autoindustrie/exp...
But yeah sure, it's a clown and everyone is laughing ... all the stuff I just quoted is fiction only happening in a political thriller.
I command you for putting effort to writing a post.
But you probably have no idea of british politics beyond headlines for newspapers. Uk dealing with covid was a circus on fire.
Here [0] UK has highest death per capita behind Belgium (super high pop density) and Slovenia (they had also excelent ideas on dealing with covid - have slovenian friend).
Johnsons gov did multiple 180 when dealing with covid, recently promised schools will stay absolutely open, only to closed them after 1 day that they were open.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1111779/coronavirus-deat...
I am not going to change you mind anyhow so have a great day living in your political thriller.
Here [0] UK has highest death per capita behind Belgium
No, it has one of the highest numbers of "people who died within 28 days of a positive test" which isn't the same thing. COVID is highly infectious but not very deadly, so with this definition the more you test the more such events can be found. This problem becomes obvious when you look at excess death stats and discover more people have died of COVID than the overall increase in deaths.
The UK does more than double the amount of testing Belgium has done [1]. This will automatically lead it to reporting more deaths in proximity to a positive test.
Johnsons gov did multiple 180 when dealing with covid, recently promised schools will stay absolutely open, only to closed them after 1 day that they were open
Like almost everywhere except Sweden the UK has a problem with any attempt to reopen being sunk by supposedly 'expert' scientists who seem to consider lockdowns to be free. Johnson is trapped by the public's expectation that scientists know what they're doing, which in this case they don't. Constant see-sawing, announcing garbage numbers and other problems have been seen in many countries, not just the UK. Really only Sweden has managed to avoid this, thanks to Anders Tegnell who has been both (a) consistent and (b) correct. It'd be great if the UK had Tegnell too, but no such luck.
I am not going to change you mind anyhow so have a great day living in your political thriller.
You could change my mind if you raised points I hadn't previously considered months ago, or weren't claiming things that are obviously false about how the UK and Brexit are currently being reported.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToS...
Of course there will always be problems in the EU, but I don't see it breaking apart any time soon.
Namely: Peter Zeihan. I'm a fan of the guy - his logic and rough predictions certainly seem to be bearing fruit over the last decade. If he's right about the coming decade we are in for a bit of a bumpy ride.
Re: your comment about being in for a bumpy ride: I think his logic is solid in that the bumpy ride is only in relation to the unprecedented post-WWII/post-cold-war era. We know from history that the norm in the world is instability.
https://www.cepal.org/en/pressreleases/latin-america-and-car...
(Side note: Japan's cost of living has also not increased with the rest of the world, which is why it's much more affordable to travel there these days than it was before.)
One thing I don't understand (due to my own lack of knowledge) is related to real estate. Japan has been excellent by supplying enough medium and high density housing to keep housing prices relatively low and ensure individuals and families have access to that basic need. Presumably partially because of this (also because people generally don't want used houses), housing there isn't really considered an investment because the house is amortized over a 20-40 year period and demolished at the end of it. For those who know, how does this affect inflation and growth rates? (And feel free to correct anything I'm incorrect about.)
So who knows ?
The zero-risk mentality is silly.
If the R0 number is somewhere around 3 (and I think this is perhaps a rather conservative estimate), then you should expect the R number to approach near R0 again if we lift all the lockdown restrictions. If R is around 3 with nobody vaccinated, then the virus will grow if fewer than 2 in 3 people have antibodies (something like 90%+ of those who are vaccinated and an unknown proportion of those who have had the disease). If we declare the high risk demographic safe because they have all been vaccinated, and therefore we can go back to licking each others' eyeballs, then you would expect the entire population to become infected in a matter of a few months.
0.3% of the entire population is more people than have died in the UK so far from the virus.
But more importantly, a much greater proportion of people will require medical help, and then survive, when infected. If you allow the virus to run rampant, then you will end up with the health service overwhelmed with people who need help. Those poor health service workers need a break. If we overwhelmed them, then we might discover just what proportion of infected people die without medical intervention.
To stop the virus growing in the population, we need at least 2 in 3 people to have antibodies. In order for that to happen, we need to have about 75% of people vaccinated, in order to account for the small proportion of people who won't develop effective antibodies after vaccination. We can only lift all the restrictions once that has happened. That is the point at which the herd immunity prevents the virus from growing, and protects the unvaccinated.
Am I wrong to expect that corporate valuations in Europe and the U.S. will not appreciate in the coming decades as they have in past decades?
Edit: Yes, the U.S. and Europe are indeed in different economic positions, the U.S. can still avoid the spiral if it continues to attract skilled immigration and remains a low bureaucracy, easy-to do business environment.