Social dominance, marriage and the origin of the state

Not all early states were autocratic.

Pericles, the leader of democratic Athens,
revealingly portrayed wearing a military helmet.

In 1970, anthropologist Robert Carnerio advanced the circumscription theory of the origin of the state. The idea being that in environmentally (and socially) circumscribed environments, population pressure leads to warfare between communities that ends up resulting in the violent amalgamation of villages into chiefdoms and chiefdoms into states. Carnerio argued that voluntarist theories of the state fail as smaller units would not give up their sovereignty voluntarily. The “penning in” circumscribing factors could be either physical (deserts, mountains, coasts) or social (complete occupation of arable land by other social units).

Carnerio identified clearly a problem with automatic theories of the origin of the state — that many farming communities did not produce any significant surplus. Though he mis-identified this as a social mechanism failure when in fact it the key constraining factor was whether the crops cultivated in a region were sufficiently seasonal to produce stored food that could be appropriated. That this was a necessary condition for the rise of chiefdoms and states can be seen by the case of New Guinea, which had all the farming, warfare and geographical and social circumscription one could want but never developed any chiefdoms as its entirely non-seasonal crops did not produce the stored food necessary for the required resource (i.e., tribute and tax) base for chiefdoms and states to develop.

Demographer Peter Turchin has added two elements to this model of the origin of the state: first, that power accrues to a group, not just an individual and second, that the cultural means to legitimate chiefly power had to evolve. I am not overly fond of the concept of legitimacy in descriptive analysis, but Turchin’s second factor can reasonably be reformulated as the normative support for chiefly power had to evolve so as to create patterns of systematic deference.

(My problem, building on political scientist Xavier Marquez’s critique, with the concept of legitimacy as a descriptive tool of analysis, is that once we have systematic deference plus analysis of norms, it is not at all clear to me what legitimacy as a descriptive term adds to the analysis. Any collapse in systematic deference can be successfully analysed without using legitimacy at all. The same applies to the development of systematic deference.)

More recently, Carnerio reformulated his theory, seeing physical and social circumscription as an accelerating rather than a necessary factor. Carnerio stated his reformulated theory succinctly as:

A heightened incidence of conquest warfare, due largely to an increase in population pressure, gave rise to the formation of successively larger political units, with autonomous villages being followed by chiefdoms, the process culminating in certain areas with the emergence of the state.

This might reasonably called the coercive-conquest theory of the origin of chiefdoms and states. Alas, this still has a problem: the evidence strongly suggests that conquest wars are a consequence of increased political centralisation, not a cause of it.

If we class wars as wars for plunder, wars for land and wars of conquest, then the wars of non-chiefly societies are overwhelmingly plunder wars while wars of state societies are overwhelmingly conquest wars, with the movement from wars for plunder →wars for land →wars of conquest being more a result of increased political complexity than a cause of it.

Another way to look at it is that the (social and physical) technology of aggression tended to develop ahead of the (social) technology of exploitation. It is only when the technology of exploitation develops sufficiently that war moves from the land and plunder wars of kill the men and boys, take the women, to the conquest wars of force the conquered men to provide taxes and labour service. But for that shift to take place there needs to be the level of social organisation that can achieve the systematic deference and appropriation of resources that we call conquest.

The period after the development of improved technologies of aggression, but before the development of sufficiently effective technologies of exploitation, created what is known as the Neolithic y-chromosome bottleneck, when most male lineages went extinct.

But the warfare theory of state origins can be reformulated without requiring conquest warfare to be the driver. As Carnerio himself has done:

Nonetheless, with each successive war, military leaders tended to enlarge their powers and entrench their position. Moreover, they became increasingly reluctant to surrender these powers when the fighting had stopped. Finally, either through a chief’s peremptory refusal to relinquish his once-delegated war powers, or (less likely perhaps) through the outright conquest of neighboring villages by the chief of the strongest one, the first permanent chiefdoms were established.

It then becomes what we can call the violent conflict theory of the origin of chiefdoms and the state. With the addition of systematic access to stored food to provide the necessary tribute-and-tax base, it has a great deal of evidence to back it up.

There are, however, two striking wrinkles: religion and autocracy. The majority of early states were autocratic. That is, they were dominated by polygynous rulers who sat at the apex of both military power and religious authority and who often functioned as both war leader and priest. Such rulers were typically both the pinnacle of human service to divinity as well as an avatar of divine authority.

The priestly or sacred role of early kingship points to the role of ritual and religion in the development of human cooperation and so the development of human societies. Ritual predates language (non-human animals engage in ritual). Ritual centres are the oldest free-standing human constructions. It is clear that ritual and religion was the other purpose, apart from warfare, for which resources could be collectively acquired and used at significant scale. (While exchange is at least as old as Homo sapiens, commerce as a mechanism for acquisition and use of resources on significant scale was a comparative historical latecomer compared to fortifications, palaces and temples.)

Ritual and religion, and the support of faith intermediaries (priesthoods, religious scholars, etc.), constitute a third pillar of states (along with coercion and resources), at least until recent centuries. Ritual and religion are also compatible with, and a feature of, all forms of government. They thus seem unlikely to be a key driver of differences in nature of states and the evolution of polities.

The wrinkle with autocracy is not all the early states were autocratic. On the contrary, in Mesoamerica, in the ancient Mediterranean, and in classical Northern India, there were a significant number of non-autocratic states. The band →chiefdom →state hierarchy of social complexity is complicated by the existence of more consultative societies. The Greek polis is an obvious example of such non-autocratic polities, but hardly the only one.

Access to resources, particularly appropriated (taxed) resources, and coercion are the two distinctive pillars of the state. They are mutually supporting pillars, as appropriation requires coercion and coercion is funded by appropriation. Indeed, there is a certain chicken-and-egg problem involved. This meant that the development of chiefdoms and states had to be something of a spiralling-up process as instruments of coercion and appropriation mutually scaled up.

In understanding the development of either autocratic or consultative polities, the question then becomes, regarding coercion and appropriation, how widely dispersed is leverage in each? It is a conspicuous feature of the city-states of the classical Mediterranean that citizenship and fighting for your city-state were intimately connected. If you needed the demos, the free poor, to row your war galleys, they had the leverage to gain the vote and you were a society where the demos had the kratos, the authority. If you were not a naval power, the demos typically didn’t have the leverage to gain the vote.

This association between fighting and bargaining leverage turns up elsewhere. The republics of northern India are sometimes referred to as Kshatriya republics. While the governing body of the republic of Tlaxcala was made up of warriors who had passed gruelling public ordeals. (As such public ordeals were tests of character and commitment, they were a reasonable way of choosing decision makers.)

Anthropologist Robert Blanton has developed a dual process theory of state politics, based on strategies of either elite network use seeking exclusory power or a more corporate strategy. I find it an inadequate analytical framework, precisely because bargaining power in polities has so often been based on coercive leverage.

Blanton is clearly, however, correct in that autocracy was not the only way early states were organised. Instead, there is something of a spectrum, across various mixtures of bargaining and dominance strategies.

Autocratic government was predominantly dominance, albeit often entailing implicit social bargains, typically based around differentiated capacity to resist various rules. Non-autocratic governments were based on explicit bargaining, though those outside the bargaining processes were still dominated by the state. (Democracy just meant that the explicit bargaining processes incorporated all free males.)

Dominance needs agents to scale up. Assembling and sustaining reliable agents is the key to successful autocracy. Provided that can be managed, unless explicit bargaining polities incorporate the representative principle, dominance-with-agents scales up far more than does bargaining politics. (I.e., without the representative principle, autocracy scales up more than does non-autocracy.) Across history, that which scales up generally dominates that which does not.

States and marriage patterns

Evidence suggests that the most favourable situation for developing non-autocratic states is societies with nuclear/conjugal families and where elite marriages are monogamous. A possible factor in generating this pattern is that polygyny leads to father-absent child-raising, which leads to more aggressive, dominance-oriented personalities among boys, with the effect being stronger the less co-wives cooperate.

Aggressive, dominance-oriented elite males is not a good basis for non-autocratic social arrangements.

Extended families are associated with more vertical (elder/younger) relations and dependency training, to ensure compliance with assigned tasks and dependence on the family, both of which discourage self-reliance. Again, not a good basis for non-autocratic social arrangements.

But there are differences in social dynamics between elite marital monogamy and elite polygyny, and between conjugal and extended families and kin groups, that are likely more important than these personality-development patterns.

Kin groups and extended families limit the role of bargaining, as they limit the ability of people to move between bargaining proposals and factional groupings. They also create intense loyalties that impede identification with the wider polity. That is particularly problematic for potential office-holders.

It is conspicuous that the three classical Mediterranean city-states whose constitutional history we know most about (Sparta, Athens and Rome) all worked to override kin groups.

Athens and Rome both abolished tribes based on lineage, turning tribes into strictly territorial categories based on where in the city you lived. So they replaced a kin identity with a territorial identity directly linked to the city. Similarly, everything about the raising of a Spartiate encouraged them to identify either with Sparta or with their comrades-in-arms based on age cohorts.

The linguistic evidence suggests that kin groups disappeared from Greek society as the polis became the dominant political form (though extended families lingered on in some rural areas), with the linguistic terms differentiating between male-side and female-side relatives largely dropping out of Greek in the fifth to third centuries BC. The disappearance of kin terms differentiating between who is, or is not, in the kin group is a powerful linguistic marker of the disappearance of kin groups. If the distinction no longer matters, you don’t need the associated terms in your language.

As for polygynous versus monogamous marriage, polygynous marriage is a manifestation of elite dominance as elite males acquire extra wives and concubines at the expense of low-status males. This creates a pool of low-status males without in-group marriage prospects who are likely to be a highly disruptive element in society, not invested in whatever bargains are agreed to.

The bandits that are such a notable feature of Chinese history and literature are a predictable product of a society with a highly polygynous elite whose low-status males had no chance of acquiring women from other societies. (Those people over there have women, steal theirs being a standard response to polygyny creating males without in-group marriage prospects; one displayed by the Norse going a-Viking, every pastoralist raiding culture ever and sanctified by Islam; notably in the “those your right hand possesses” verses in the Quran but also by comments in various hadiths and provisions within Sharia, topped off by the service of houris in the after-life.)

Given that social stability tends to increase wealth and income inequality, and such inequality tends to increase elite polygyny, as Chinese dynasties aged, the bandit problem tended to get worse. Bureaucratic corruption also tended to get worse over time, further undermining law and order. Peace and social stability meant that the population tended to increase, squeezing living standards. Given these patterns, that Chinese dynasties recurrently collapsed in an upsurge of banditry, secret society insurgencies and peasant revolts is not surprising.

Polygyny encouraged autocracy but also undermined it in various ways. Rulers with large harems surrounded by women and eunuchs in palaces that no un-castrated male could stay in overnight led to rulers isolated from their societies to a degree unheard of in the marital-monogamy West.

Elite polygyny also meant that marriage alliances had less value (as any wife or concubine might end up producing the heir) and created elite households that were divided against themselves, as wives competed for the prospects for their children. An elite male with a sole wife who was the mother of his legitimate children could use her as a partner and deputy in a way not open to an elite male with a collection of wives and concubines.

Conversely, a society that adopts monogamous marriage for elite males as well is already engaged in an implicit bargain, paying attention to the interests of lower-status males. This creates the basis for embedding more explicit bargaining into political arrangements.

With elite marital monogamy, there is no significant pool of men without marriage prospects to be socially disruptive. Fathers are much more likely to be involved in raising their children, leading to more self-reliant, but less aggressive and dominance-focused, sons.

Marriage alliances have more value, as an elite male’s (sole) wife is the presumptive mother of his heir(s). His wife becomes a partner and deputy, making it easier to invest in political bargaining.

There were, however, plenty of autocratic states among societies with marital monogamy. So, while elite male marital monogamy (and lack of kin groups) facilitated non-autocratic politics, they did not guarantee it.

Bargaining and leverage

We come back to the matter of leverage. A relatively small polity, not so large that bargaining was impractical, with a limited tax base that wished people to invest in their own military equipment and training, was likely to develop some form of political bargaining, which is to say citizenship, politics. This is still a state-origins-through-violence story, but one where the war leader does not become (or failed to remain) an autocratic ruler but instead evolved into officeholder(s) for a warrior-cum-citizen elite. This could mean a more group-oriented social form (as tribes can be) persisting all the way through the evolution of a state. Alternatively, the normal process of band →chiefdom →state could split off in a different direction.

An armed soldier-citizenry (or warrior-magnates) also has leverage over taxation, as their consent is going to be required to levy taxes. The one thing that historically was relentlessly deadly for bargaining politics was a ruler acquiring a tax base they did not need consent for. For a large enough tax base meant that citizen-soldiers could be replaced by professional soldiers. This is, after all, what happened to Rome. And to post-medieval Spain, which, upon the Spanish crown acquiring access to the gold and silver of the Americas, moved from being a pioneer of parliamentary politics to autocracy (albeit an increasingly inefficient and feeble one).

Of course, modern states have professional armies. What modern democracies rely on is the pervasive adherence to democratic norms, particularly (but not only) by the agents of the state. The hope and expectation is that no would-be autocrat will be able to assemble enough reliable agents to achieve dominance. Generally speaking, it is a case of so far, so good. Though the systematic attack in contemporary Western societies on bargaining politics via the attempt to control what it is deemed legitimate to express, including characterising particular (mass) voting choices as delinquent, is not a healthy trend for democracy. Especially as it is associated with attacks on the status and standing of citizenship. “Punch a Nazi” conveys a very different message than does “Nazis are citizens too”. If citizenship is downgraded, so is the citizenship one relies on your professional soldiers identifying with.

Be that as it may, it is clear that a presumption of autocracy cannot be a satisfactory basis for a good theory of the origin of the state. Yes, autocracy has been the most common path in the development of the state, but it has not been the only one.

Cross-posted from Medium.

Imperial ideology: how elite networks push local connections and concerns out of the public space

Much of what has been going on Western societies is a struggle between the somewhere politics of local connections and the anywhere politics of elite networks.

Social analyst David Goodhart identifies the somewheres as people who are rooted in their local communities. Suppliers of labour, small business folk and others, often without university education, somewheres typically are born, live and die within the same local area. Anywheres are typically folk with university educations, so possess human capital, many with professional qualifications, who congregate in the major metropolises. They often travel for work and frequently reside in a very different community from where they grew up. They also often have more in common with anywheres in other countries than the somewheres of their own country. The dramatic fall in transport and communication costs have tended to expand and strengthen their networks.

It is the transnational nature of the networks of the anywheres, including their transnational commonalities in outlooks, perspectives and interests, that generates much of the rhetoric about globalism.

The decline of churchgoing, the decline of private sector unionism (and the takeover of the union apparatus by the university-educated), the decline of local sporting clubs and networks, the retreat into private entertainment, the flow of newcomers into urban neighbourhoods, the flow of the educated out of local neighbourhoods, the movement of women into the workforce (and so out of local networking), the decline of mass manufacturing, have all undermined local connections.

Thus, an interlocking web of economic, social and technological changes have tended to systematically undermine local connections and expand and empower elite networks. The anywheres, and their perspectives, more or less completely dominate the cultural commanding heights — arts and entertainment, media, IT, universities and much of education generally.

The one major political lever the somewheres still have is the vote. This is a less powerful lever than one might think, as having the vote on its own is not enough, there have to people to vote for who reflect your concerns and interests. As economist Thomas Piketty has nicely documented, politics has become increasingly dominated by a struggle between possessors of human capital (who he labels the Brahmin Left) and business capital (in his terms, the Merchant Right). That is two different set of anywheres trying to get the votes of the somewheres.

Increasingly, the somewheres do not hear their concerns and interests being articulated in the public and political spaces, so they retreat into not voting. Worse, attempts to articulate their concerns and interests are often de-legitimised; are construed as racist, xenophobic or otherwise beyond the moral pale.

Here we need to distinguish between being critical — you are wrong because of (insert facts and logic) — and de-legitimising — only evil and malicious people say such things. To de-legitimise a point or concern is to say that it does not belong in the public space at all. It is not even worth arguing over. De-legitimisation is all the more powerful if the person expressing such concerns is sanctioned for saying such things.

(As an aside, much of the hatred of President Trump can be explained by the way he deliberately, even gleefully, mocks such legitimacy plays.)

The phenomena of “cancel culture” (seeking to destroy livelihoods and reputations, seeking to exclude from the public space) is an attempt to impose social norms on what can be expressed in public (and private) via social sanctioning. To set the limits of opinion legitimacy. It is typically a form of mobbing, with all the problems that mobs, and mob “justice”, has. It is a mechanism of de-legitimising, not of criticism. It is, of course, fundamentally hostile to free speech.

It is also, fairly obviously, not a tactic of the somewheres, but of anywheres.

Throughout history, the possessors of human-and-cultural capital have been a significant class in complex societies. Their origins go all the way back to the shamans of foraging societies. They are often, but not only, priesthoods and religious scholars.

The Brahmins of Indian society are an example of possessors of human-and-cultural capital. So are the ulema, the religious scholars, of Islamic society. In both cases, they have traditionally controlled legitimacy: what it was, or was not, legitimate to do or say.

Granting-and-denying legitimacy is a standard social-dominance device of the possessors of human-and-cultural capital. Provided, of course, they can coordinate well enough to wield it. In contemporary society, much of the quality media fulfils that coordination role — selling a congenial sense of being informed around the opinions packaged as being what the good-and-smart people believe. In recent years, this coordination role has been hugely augmented by online media, particularly Twitter.

We live in an age with an ever-expanding list of linguistic and opinions taboos. Setting taboos is all about setting the limits of legitimacy. Piketty’s label of Brahmin Left is very much on-point.

It does not take much to see that granting-and-denying legitimacy is a powerful weapon in the hands of anywhere networks. If they can set the norms of legitimacy in a way that supports their status and resource claims, they can channel the votes of the somewheres, who outnumber them, into directions that minimise the conflict with anywhere interests.

Voting matters because it empowers social bargaining, it makes people’s concerns and interests matter. But if you can wield the weapons of setting legitimacy successfully, you can restrict the avenues of “legitimate” political bargaining in a way that systematically restricts, and so undermines, the value of the vote. Concerns that cannot be legitimately expressed can be quarantined off among designated political untouchables or simply do not enter into the processes of political bargaining in any effective way.

You can see this process at its most perfect in totalitarian states. The ruling Party completely controls what can be legitimately expressed, sanctioning (often severely) anyone who crosses the set lines. Elections are thus turned into rituals; rituals of dominance (we can get you to go through this ritual act) and of legitimacy (see, the people voted for us).

When people respond to the current American troubles by invoking comparisons with the Chinese Cultural Revolution or the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution, there are similarities in underlying dynamics to point to. Pulling down statues, censoring cultural products, having diversity(tm) struggle sessions, street violence, mock executions and so forth have an evocative similarity with those earlier social paroxysms. We are seeing networked efforts to so narrow what it is legitimate to say or do so as to establish the dominance of the wielders of yet another ideology of socially transformative virtue.

An ideology that manages to combine the worst of the Counter-Enlightenment — the primacy of emotion and feeling, the primacy of racial identity — and the worst of the Radical Enlightenment — the belief that social transformation is achieved by forcing everyone to act and believe together — in a single, highly potent, set of status claims presented as being what the virtuous believe. Virtue that requires adherence to a matrix of very specific assertions, paraded as moral necessities, opposition to which is declared to be inherently illegitimate.

As economist Glenn Loury and linguist John McWhorter have pointed out, the way racist! is currently being bandied about is much the same as previous uses of witch!. I would add in the examples of heretic!, infidel! and counter-revolutionary!. They are all ways of saying “evil and so not-legitimate”.

Even in its relatively mild forms, the politics of de-legitimising advantages the anywheres and disadvantages the somewheres.

Once the de-legitimising dynamic starts, however, it has no natural stopping point. On the contrary, it has an inherent tendency to spiral towards violence, as it empowers the virtuous to take any “necessary” actions to block those designated as evil and illegitimate.

Multiculturalism as cultural marker

In the struggle between the somewhere politics of local connection and the anywhere politics of elite networks, the shift in migration policy from assimilation to multiculturalism was a major cultural milestone.

The flood of new people into a local area can obviously break up local connections. The local connections that working folk in particular rely for various forms of social protection and ability to organise for common interests. The policy of assimilation was the implicit promise that newcomers would be brought in at a sufficiently low rate, from sufficiently diverse origins, and with strong expectations of “fitting in”, so as to minimise the disruption of local connections, either in their local communities or their workplaces.

While working-class concerns were still dominant in centre-left politics, migration was tied with assimilation.

With the postwar expansion of higher education, the number and reach of university-educated possessors of human-and-cultural capital steadily expanded. These were elite-network anywheres, not local-connection somewheres. Moreover, the social position of the anywheres is improved if their elite-network politics trumps local-connection politics.

As possessors of capital, anywheres generally get significantly more economic benefit from migration than do providers of labour. Migrants are much less likely to directly compete with anywheres (as anywhere skills are much more likely to be niche or otherwise remain relatively scarce). Generally migrants increase the demand for anywhere services/return on their capital (and do so whether or not the migrants work). The downward pressure on labour incomes increases access to goods and services by making them cheaper. An effect that is magnified, as anywheres have higher incomes.

So, on one hand, anywheres disproportionately benefit from migration. On the other, the disruption of local connections not only does not adversely affect them, it increases the relative power of their networks as against the politics of local connections.

It is not hard to see that anywheres will tend to be very pro-migration and not only indifferent to the costs of large-scale migration for local connections, but actually benefit from that disruption. It is even better if these effects can also be turned into a status play: such as getting a sense of moral prestige from one’s support of migration.

We see here a social selection opportunity laid out before us. A social selection opportunity that was, indeed, fulfilled.

Enter multiculturalism. (Or, as it has since become, diversity-inclusion-equity.)

Whereas the implicit promise of assimilation was that local connections would not be seriously disrupted, multiculturalism made no such promise. On the contrary, it rules any complaint about the newcomers not “fitting in” out of court. Their ability to do their own things in their own ways becomes sacrosanct. If newcomers come in in large numbers, if they stick to their own, that is just a wonderful contribution to cultural diversity, it being hard to maintain a culture in a new land without plenty of specific connections. And any complaints are clearly motivated by nothing more than racism and xenophobia.

Multiculturalism (and, in its expanded version, diversity-inclusion-equity) is more or less perfect anywhere politics. It serves anywhere economic interests. It serves their status interests — it being what good-and-smart people support and so shows their moral goodness. It breaks up local connection politics and elevates elite-network politics, not merely by relatively advantaging elite-network politics but by actively supporting and empowering such politics.

How so? By creating a multicultural bureaucracies, multicultural advocacy groups and multicultural political networks. (All now re-packaged as diversity bureaucracies, diversity advocacy groups, diversity training firms and diversity political networks.) All of them providing jobs, status and institutional power to the anywheres and their networks. A process nicely documented by political writer Ben Cobley in his book The Tribe.

Multiculturalism is an imperial ideology. It is so in two sense. First, because it can expand into almost any institutional or organisational space. As its expanded version, diversity, inclusion and equity, is currently demonstrating.

But multiculturalism is also an imperial ideology in a much more direct sense. All empires are, in one sense or another, multicultural. They are all diverse. It is inherent tendency of empire. It increases the number of subjects, it divides subjects into competing groups and generates jobs for imperial officials in managing those divisions.

When the British Empire imported Tamils into what is now Sri Lanka and Indians into East Africa, the West Indies, South Africa and Fiji, this was justified on the grounds that the newcomers would increase local commerce, local economic activity. Which they did. But scholars since have had no problem identifying that it also served imperial control by generating divide-and-dominate politics, creating competing groups that the imperial authorities could “manage” and who were unlikely to combine against the imperial authorities.

Well quite. But what is different about doing the very same thing in Birmingham, London’s East End or any major American city?

That it is being done within a democracy instead of an empire? Except, as we can see, it can be an excellent mechanism for breaking up the effective bargaining power of local, especially working class, voters.

So, how different is it really?

In American cities we can see rioters burning down local businesses in the name of classic anywhere diversity and anti-racism political tropes. This is not the somewheres fighting back (though there are now some signs of that), this is the next stage in anywhere politics. (With folk who like rioting along for the ride.)

And the politics of control through controlling legitimacy are not the politics of free speech, free citizens or open political bargaining.

We have in various forms, experienced patterns like these before. A good hard look at the events and patterns of the Cultural Revolution, and the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution, is entirely appropriate.

A climate change election, just not in the intended way ...

Based on a comment I made here.

In its dynamics, the 2019 Australian federal election was 1993 re-run: an Opposition expected to win pre-releases an extensive policy manifesto which a "small target" "devil you know" Government is able to run a scare campaign on the awkward bits.

But it also seems to have turned out to be the climate change election, just not the way the fashionable folk thought. The regional/provincial working class is beginning to not only realise that the inner city elites want to sacrifice regional/provincial working class jobs on the altar of climate change, but to also vote accordingly.

Nothing Australia could do on climate change can make a lick of difference (at about 1% of world GDP, we are not a big enough economy and no one pays attention to what we do[, beyond the odd headline grab]) so the politics of "climate emergency" is sin-and-salvation politics, not practical trade-off politics.

The sacking of a star (Pacific Islander origins) rugby league player (Israel Folau) for quoting a biblical verse on social media probably did not help either. When the diversity totalitarians start coming for sporting heroes, folk you would not otherwise expect are likely to take notice.

Migration complexities and the campaigns against social bargaining

This is based on a comment I made here.

Coming from a country (Australia) with a much higher proportional immigration flow than the US, I find US debates over migration odd.

First, the level of illegal immigration in the US is clearly a huge problem. It distorts the debate, creates a black market in labour and gives lots of voters the feeling of having no effective say (because they don’t). Without effective border control, and with significant inflows of illegal migrants, the effective value of the lever of the ballot is greatly reduced, and and ordinary voters have no other lever other than the vote to influence a policy area fundamental to the future evolution of any polity.

Second, treating immigrants as an undifferentiated mass is just silly. I know economics lends itself to that, with people as interchangeable utility-maximising machines, but what is missed is that culture affects framing, expectations and preferences so that the same situation can create quite different incentives to people of different cultural heritages. (See, for example, the ethnic complexities in who voted leave in the Brexit 2016 vote.)

It is an observable fact that, for example, (1) different groups of migrants have different crime rates and (2) mainstream Sunni Muslims, given that mainstream Sunni Islam is a religion of domination, create problems no other group of migrants do, and the more so the proportionately larger group they are. (As adherents of "permanent minority" forms of Islam Ibadis, Alevis, Ismailis and Ahmmadis are not an issue: they have gone down the same path that rabbinical Judaism did, abandoning the tendency to become homicidally enraged over God's law being trumped by pagan/goy/infidel law.)

Denmark, for example, seems determined to be not-Sweden and to minimise the welfare/crime/cultural difference costs of migration. Cultural difference costs are particularly significant when operating a welfare model which effectively requires high degree of cultural homogeneity to work in order to minimise free riding and maximise information flows between officials and recipients.

Third, treating migrants as having no (negative) effect on incentives within the country of receipt is just silly. For example, the combination of lots of non-voting housing market entrants with positional goods is more or less guaranteed to create regulatory restrictions on the supply of housing land, with consequent upward effects on rents and house-prices. An effect likely to be particularly strong in coast cities with nice hills: economist Paul Krugman's Zoned Zoned versus Flatland effect. [Which means more of GDP goes to land rent.]

Fourth, I am deeply sceptical about “(all) migrants are (always) an economic positive” arguments. See the point about migrants not being an undifferentiated mass, the effect on housing markets, variable social welfare costs and differentiated effects on residents depending on access to capital and place of residence.

Obviously significant migration is a positive to capital holders if it thereby increase the relative scarcity premium from such capital. The effect on labour income is rather more complicated.  For high levels of migration on labour income to not lead to lower-that-it-would-otherwise-be income from labour for the resident providers of labour requires that demand for their labour increase, even though the overall supply of labour is increasing due to the inflow of other providers of labour. Robert Fogel, in his Without Consent or Contract (which I reviewed here) provided strong evidence that mass C19th migration to the US was not good for native-born workers.

Australian migration policy is essentially set up to not disturb the capital/labour balance. (We are the only country in the Western world, that is not a micro-state, whose migrants are a net gain to average human capital.)

Fifth, even in Australia, where popular opinion is generally strongly pro-migrant (but not illegal migrant: conflating the two issues poisons migration debates [and polling results are tending towards having less migration [pdf]), the congestion costs are beginning to wear away at support for current levels of migration. Making sure your physical, social and political infrastructure is up to a significant migrant influx is actually quite difficult. Especially as aforementioned housing market effect actually militates against having adequate physical infrastructure (by raising its costs and lowering its tax revenue benefit). The US political system does not strike me as currently functional enough to well manage such. The EU political system(s) in some ways, even less so.

Sixth, when reviewing "migration is a net positive" papers, relevant questions to ask are:

(1) Does it differentiate between effects on labour income and capital income for the existing residents? If the answer is no, the paper is useless to the point of effective dishonesty, as who gets what benefit (and what costs) is crucial to understanding the effects of migration. Even if it does look at resident labour and capital income effects separately, does it incorporate wage stickiness effects? In particular, does it incorporate that the most likely negative effect on labour income from migration is not to lower wages, but to block their rise? Merely observing that there is little evidence that wages are being actually lowered is not, in itself, proof that wages are not being "flattened".  See here for a relatively simple model which works from precisely that effect.

(2) Does it measure the fiscal/welfare effects? Including any crowding or congestion effects on access to government services and support? Different migrants groups and profiles have very different effects on demand and use of welfare services. It is not helpful, or even analytically sensible, to treat immigrants, in the felicitous words of one study (pdf), “as a homogeneous huddled mass”.

(3) Does it measure crime/distrust effects? Raising the level of ethnic diversity tends to decrease levels of social trust which tends to increase the level of crime even if the newcomers commit less crimes on average than the existing residents. If an incoming group has a higher tendency to commit crimes than the residents, the effect is magnified. (And popular views of relative level of criminality among different migrants groups can be relatively accurate [pdf], though in the US general stereotypes about migrants seems to be dominated by [pdf] perceived patterns among Hispanic migrants.) These effects are, however, likely to be highly localised, with little or no impact on national crime trends, which again points to distributional effects mattering. Though enough localised effects can start adding up, as in Britain's rape gang scandals.  [CORRECTION: It appears that economist Bryan Caplan's criticism of Putnam's original paper on diversity was spot on, that it is not diversity per se which lowers trust, but other features associated with high migrant neighbourhoods: which adjusts, rather than refutes, the point.]

(4) Does it incorporate infrastructure effects? If the paper effectively assumes that physical, social and political infrastructure is infinitely flexible, then it is pushing nonsense on stilts. Simply considering physical infrastructure effects alone, as noted above, the effect of raising the proportion of housing entrants who are non-voters in a situation of positional goods (normal in coastal cities, for example, particularly if there are also scenic-hill effects) greatly increases the likelihood of regulatory limitation of use of land for housing which raises the (opportunity) cost of building infrastructure (as the value of land-for-housing is increased) and reduces the net revenue value of building infrastructure (as regulatory restriction of land use drives up value of taxes on such land in itself).

In my own city of Melbourne, for example, anyone outside the inner city "bubble" is well aware that (1) traffic congestion has got noticeably worse in recent years and (2) the main reason is the failure of transport infrastructure to keep up with the migrant inflow. So people are experiencing, from more and more time spent in heavy traffic, a significant daily cost to them from high levels of migration.

As for political infrastructure, there was much pointing and laughing/sneering that anti-migrant sentiment was an element in the Brexit vote, yet support for leaving was highest in areas with the least number of migrants. There is no contradiction here; if people observe that issues connected to migration take up a great deal of public debate and attention, but there are very few migrants in their area, then that means all that debate and attention is directed away from where they live. An example of the point about political infrastructure not being infinitely flexible.

Status sacralising
What makes all this worse is that members of what economic historian Thomas Piketty calls The Brahmin Left (pdf), but I prefer to think of as Brahmin Progressivism (since key ideas are neither Enlightenment-based nor class-framed, so not "Left" in the sense that applied from 1789 to 1991), have become addicted to using migration as a sacred idea (especially the sacred value of "diversity") for Brahmin Progressivism's moralised, taboo-generating status claims. (Taking the notion and use of 'sacred' from social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, see here [pdf].)

Migration is moved out of the realm of social bargaining, operating according to various perceptions and calculations of costs and benefits, and moved into the realm of sacred status-markers where disagreement with any key status-marker position is direct evidence of sin, and one does not, of course, bargaining with sinners! because that is to negotiate with evil. This secular sacralisation (in this case of diversity) creates, for example, sinful books.

Suggesting that diversity has costs, that different migrants groups tend to provide different costs and benefits, even that there should be effective border enforcement, all become attacks on the sacredness of diversity (which, being sacred, cannot be discussed in terms of trade-offs without being tainted). Diversity should also, of course, being sacred, reach everywhere. But not, "obviously", cognitive diversity, because that means sin and evil. This despite cognitive diversity being the form of diversity which studies regularly find does have positive benefits while the forms of diversity which are sacralised have no identifiable connection with, for example, better decision-making or group performance. But such benefits-and-costs analysis are not to be permitted to taint the sacred value of diversity.

Economic papers that essentially "leave out" the hard bits of the effects of significant levels of migration become one-sided chips to be played in in these sacralised status games. They become, rather than contributions to public debate, weapons in a drive to undermine the operation, even the concept, of effective social bargaining over migration conceived as manifesting the sacred value of diversity. [And the politics of migration are hard enough as it is.]

There is a religion-size hole in many WEIRD psyches and, to a significant degree, in Western societies in general. Using politics to feed that hole is disastrous, as politics is about the arrangement and direction of society via public policy, so politics-as-substitute-religion turns policy and politics, not into a system of bargaining and trade-offs, but an exercise in personal salvation centred around barred-from-trade-offs sacred objects and involving a (naturally escalating) war against sin and sinners.

It would be helpful if economists played a little less into such games and rather more into grappling with the genuine complexities of migration.  After all, the Western world has previously gone through a period where politics became about salvation and wars against sin, and it was not a happy experience.


[Cross-posted at Skepticlawyer.]