Geographer. Prof at Temple University. Author of 2 books. Elephants. Maps. Archaeofuturist Transportation.
Philadelphia, USA
Joined December 2016
- Tweets36K
- Following1.2K
- Followers17.9K
- Likes22.7K
Earlier this century, Europe's leaders embraced policies which way back then were justified as economic development policies--but it's been so long now since anyone's believed these policies make societies economically richer, that now the same policies lumber along as policies with "moral" justification, the "morality" being cooked up ex-post-facto and mostly via Europe's academic sector.
I'm noticing the growing possibility that Europe becomes very poor in the course of the next 10-20 years. You have the following factors:
- Heavy industry totally uncompetitive against China, automakers etc. rapidly losing ground
- Services industry totally uncompetitive against AI
- No natural resources, or regulatory hurdles making their extraction impossible
- No access to the new economy (no AI, no data centers, uncompetitive energy sector)
- Client states caught in one-way welfare ratchets, spend reallocation + investment well-nigh impossible
This seems under-contemplated. And we're talking really, seriously dirt poor: taken to its logical conclusion, many countries will have much, much smaller services and manufacturing industries -- economies may become much more heavily skewed toward natural resources and energy markets, where Europe has made it impossible for itself to compete.
And I'm not saying that this is likely to happen, it's an extreme case. But the probability is greater than zero and appears to be growing. The EV of that is so negative that it's surprising to me that it's not coming up more.
I am of course mostly talking about open borders (I still remember when this was justified as a society-wide get-rich-quick scheme); but this applies to green energy too, always politically defined to exclude nuclear, and justified for many years as bringing "green jobs"
You spend 25 years going all-in with those strategies, while the US, China and Russia each have very different kinds of economic plans...well yes Europe seems rather stuck now. Nuclear + AI probably makes the most sense in the abstract--but their governing structures, including in post-EU UK, have been designed to instinctively hate and prevent such things
The "disinformation" exception clause only further expanded the realm of speech that was being banned. "Harm" + "disinformation" (always defined in a partisan and politically self-serving way) and you have a completely censored internet! Really don't want to go back to this.
What happened last decade was the free speech exception clause for violent speech was expanded to include anything that could be construed as "harm," which for many millennials turned out to mean "seeing any opinion I disagree with."
Crush of negative replies here is part of why I think the mid-2020s free speech arrangement on X is actually very politically fragile, and next time there's regime change things will go back to some kind of more oppressive and restrictive framework like before.
Jacob Shell retweeted
Something I'll add is that in my experience, academic conservatives tend to have instincts highly supportive of the idea of ultra-centralized prestige economies. They assume the problem is that the wrong ideas have hijacked the control points, and getting things "back to how they should be" would be a simple matter of enshrining "objectivity and standards" in the mission statement of the high-prestige journals. IMO, this is naive and actually pretty "unconservative" in its assumption that centralized command/control is the best way.
Rings true. Academic rewards flow to conformists, and if theres some pathbreaking figure you admire theyre at a tiny college youve never heard of (and whose pres cant wait for the weirdo to retire). That, or the figure got his start in CIA and thats why he was positioned at Yale
Remembering that time leading millennial neoliberal pundits argued for a neoliberal revival that could deliver order, development and shared GDP growth, but never bothered assessing why neoliberalism became associated with the opposite (laissez-faire, arm-shrugging negligence; moral sanction of disorder and cultural chaos; passive acceptance of irrational "apocalypse" big-narratives) in the first place.
🙂
Airbnb hosts are melting down over a new policy banning them from making guests complete tasks that “would typically be performed by a cleaner,” like “stripping the bed, taking trash offsite, or washing and putting away dishes.”
Read the full story: buff.ly/GHU32S5
I've sometimes thought this would surely make a very logical canal, linking Great Lakes, Upper Mississippi, Lake Winnipeg, Canadian northern lakes, Mackenzie River and Arctic Ocean. Ships could proceed through Bering Strait to East Asian ports
"No border" utopians dont get that the more "open border" a regime is, the more internal borders, and the more endless waiting in lines. There is no such thing as no borders in life.
