Migration and destabilising politics

The destructive non-electoral politics of institutional capture.

Source: Economic Policy Institute.

Have done two new posts on Substack.

On Helen Dale’s Substack, I have posted on how the rate of social change does not de-stabilise conventional centre-right politics, it is change (or the threat of change) that by-passes electoral politics that does so.

The post includes a discussion of how patterns of migration that supress the Baumol effect thereby suppress wages. (The Baumol effect is the way the high productivity/high wage end of the economy drags up wages generally, hence a hair cut in 2022 costs way more than a haircut in 1960 despite being the same service.)

On my Substack, I have extended that point into an analysis of how easy it is to use migration against the local working class.

Not only via suppressing the Baumol effect, but also via the Fogel effect (migration intensifying competition for positional goods), the Borjas effect (migration increasing returns to capital more than labour) and the Granovetter effect (migration supplanting local connections, so breaking up people’s local social capital).

The latter piece concludes with a discussion of why (mainstream Sunni) Middle Eastern Muslim migration generates rather specific problems.