![RnaudBertrand's tweet photo. This fascinating Nature study (link in the bottom) by @jasonhickel and others should destroy for ever the myth that workers in the Global South "steal jobs" at the expense of the Global North.
They find an astonishing metric that "while Southern workers contribute 90% of the labour that powers the world economy, they receive only 21% of global income."
Meaning of course that the lifestyle of the North is subsidized by the work of the South: if we lived in a fair world, those contributing 90% of the labor should theoretically receive 90% of the income, not 21%... Concretely, the study calculates that "an extra 826 billion hours of Southern labour [the equivalent to 369 million workers] is effectively appended to Northern economies as invisible “ghost workers”, [which is] more than the total workforce of the United States and the European Union combined".
And before I hear you say "yes but it's all low skilled labor", that's not true at all. As per the study, "the South contributed the majority of labour across all skill levels: 76% of all high-skilled labour, 91% of medium-skilled labour and 96% of low-skilled labour". In fact, astonishingly: "the South now contributes more high-skilled labour to the world economy than all the high-, medium- and low-skilled labour contributions of the global North combined."
You could also say "yes but it's just a temporary situation: as global South countries develop they'll progressively become like the North", but that's precisely what this study shows is impossible because "the North’s development model relies on appropriation from elsewhere".
This implies two things: 1) the North has no incentive for the South to develop because their very model depends on appropriation from the South and 2) the South can't develop like the North because they have no South of their own to exploit. They need to find their own model that doesn't rely on exploitation, akin to China who developed with their own workers (and is progressively using more and more robots as its workforce gains in skills).
Also, the South catching up with the North is not the direction at all, except for some rare exceptions. The studies shows that, on average, "wages of Southern workers are 83–98% lower for work of equal skill within the same sector" and these wage gaps "have increased substantially over time, across all skill levels and all sectors, indicating a steady increase in absolute North–South income inequality".
So what's the solution? The study concludes that "development and poverty eradication, and any plausible trajectory for reducing global inequality, requires a shift in the balance of power between North and South, such that the latter is able to reclaim its productive capacities to meet human needs. Toward this end, international wage floors and minimum resource prices could help reduce price inequalities and limit value transfers. Ending unequal exchange will also require ending structural adjustment conditions on finance, and democratising the institutions of global economic governance, so that global South governments are free to use industrial, fiscal and monetary policy to pursue sovereign development and reduce their dependency on Northern capital. Such reforms are unlikely to be handed down from above, however. It will require a political struggle for national self-determination and economic sovereignty similar in scope to the anti-colonial movement of the 20th century."
Link to the study: https://t.co/6RZ4U7Hhcs](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GUc0jbsXcAAEiFw.jpg)
Olivia
Online
Basil Dogra
@DograBasil
Aspiring researcher in the social sciences. Daydreamer. You can find me on
Lahore, Pakistan
Joined October 2012
4.7K Following
520 Followers
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I would expect nothing less from a neoliberal 🤦🏻♂️
Instead of arguing for expansion of education, welfare, prosperity and social institutions, this one argues for a greater acceptance of bigotry and doing away with regulations that seek to protect the interests of the vulnerable.
Thinkers in the liberal tradition used to have a much more expansive view, emphasizing human fallibility, community and ethical responsibilities – not just radical individualism and an overarching emphasis on autonomy. They were also diverse: Hayek, for example, should be thought of as a liberal (something today’s progressive would vehemently deny).
More important perhaps, though less emphasized by Rosenblatt: they were typically in opposition. They were in a position of speaking truth to power in the 18th and 19th centuries. Liberalism was thus, in part, a philosophy of a criticism of how power was exercised by traditional economic and political elites.
So my hypothesis is that liberalism failed because it came to power and it did not adjust to this new reality. It became too dominant and not sufficiently self-critical. Let me explain this point using the US case, though I believe the story is similar in many other parts of the world (including Turkey, though in most of the developing world, liberalism never became completely dominant and it often merged with globalism, so creating some similar and some different tensions).
For the US, in a 1965 book, M. Stanton Evans wrote: “the chief point about the Liberal Establishment is that it is in control.” He was referring to New Deal liberalism. Republicans accepted many important tenets of liberalism, from Dwight Eisenhower (who described himself as a “moderate Republican” meaning that he accepted the New Deal) to Nixon (who, despite his conservatism, signed many of the iconic regulations of the era). https://t.co/SOGHA4QJlz
True, the Goldwater-Reagan revolution rolled back some of the New Deal era regulations, reduced taxes, and favored large corporations, but three tenets of New Deal liberalism survived and gradually became stronger: (1) cultural liberalism, with emphasis on individualism, autonomy and progressive cultural attitudes (which was weaker in the United States when Democrats were the party of the Deep South and became dominant later); (2) the empowerment of educated elites, in the form of both technocracy and meritocracy, but going beyond just technical matters and extending to issues such as moral values; (3) an emphasis on establishing procedures for predictable implementation of laws and regulations.
Each one of these three tenets had positives and negatives. The problem was that there was little balance of power. These tenets were not seriously questioned from within the Democratic Party in the United States and many center-left parties in Europe after the 1980s. Any criticism from the outside were not powerful or coherent enough.
The hypothesis I am entertaining is that the ascendance of these three tenets – without adequate opposition – is the source of liberalism’s failure.
Cultural liberalism: first we have to admit it has paid off in many respects. Civil Rights is one of the most important achievements of 20th-century America, and ethnic, religious and sexual minorities face much less discrimination today than they did before. But the balance here is a delicate one. It is one thing to defend minorities (and this is very consistent with liberalism as an opposition movement); it’s an entirely different thing to impose values on people who do not hold them (for example, telling people what language they can and cannot use). Without the adequate balance of power, cultural liberalism shifted more and more towards the latter.
Empowerment of the educated elites: Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit tells the story brilliantly. https://t.co/x4YpqL5cJB
The last four decades have seen a steady increase in the economic, social and political power of college graduates and more recently of post-graduates and those with degrees from elite universities. College graduates also became the dominant force in center-left parties in Europe and in the Democratic Party and the United States. They justified their ascendance with meritocracy and identified their social power with “rule by expertise”.
The rest of society, in part as a reaction, came to view meritocracy as a rigged game and a way of blaming the victim – a type of sermon that almost claimed “if you are not acquiring college education and not adjusting to the post-industrial economy, then it is your fault that you are poor”. It also supported a non-responsive, insular technocracy that complemented cultural liberalism, imposing things top-down without consent on the population.
Procedures: a big promise of liberal democracy was to deliver widely accessible, high-quality public services. This is what the UK poet laureate John Betjeman pithily summarized when he wrote “Our nation stands for democracy and proper drains.” Yet, democracy came not to stand for proper drains anymore. The 20th century witnessed a proliferation of regulations to deal with safety and risks from new products, ranging from cars to pharmaceuticals. Additional paperwork to deal with federal regulations on the environment and anti-discrimination provisions followed. These procedures have multiplied over time. Worse, special interest groups have been able to use these procedures to push their own agendas (from NIMBYs stopping public housing to progressive groups piling on additional anti-discrimination paperwork on federal contracts). The consequence has been a pronounced decline in the efficiency of public service provision. Recent research Leah Brooks and Zachary Liscow finds that from the 1960s to the 1980s, government spending per mile of highway increased more than threefold. https://t.co/7CRAcTXtwt
The authors blame this staggering increase on additional regulations and procedures often introduced to ensure that different groups of citizens are not harmed by new highway construction (and in practice policed by activists and special interest groups).
Other economists have found similarly mounting inefficiencies in the construction industry. Their explanation is also similar: onerous land-use regulations. https://t.co/67GXqvwqwP
In fact, there may be structural reasons why a procedure-based agenda could run into such problems, which go back to ideas articulated by James Scott in Seeing It Like a State. https://t.co/IZ7elnTnfI
In a nutshell, a procedure-based agenda will have to make society “legible”, by forcing it to conform to its rules and procedures so that it can understand this world, which is a precursor to regulating it. But this agenda often does not work as well as originally planned and creates discontent among the people.
These three tenets combined create the impression among many people that liberalism is hectoring them, is arrogantly putting them down, and is not even efficient in what it attempts to do. It is true some of this discontent is manufactured by talk shows and right-wing media and social media. But some of it is real. The title of a recent Pew Research Center report says it all: “More than 80% of Americans believe elected officials don’t care about what people like them think.” https://t.co/iUW85fb4B6
I see these tensions in other liberal democracies as well, though the extent of liberal domination varies (and in Europe, “liberal” means something else, so there this would be more “social democratic” or “liberal democratic” domination).
If this hypothesis is correct (a big if I admit), then we need a new liberalism, both because the older liberal ideas on freedom and constraints on power are sound and even more necessary today in the age of mega firms and super-powerful governments, and because I believe the center-left (including American Democrats) need liberalism.
I think it could start with the following principles:
1. Much greater emphasis on freedom of speech and a repudiation of “thought-policing”. This doesn’t mean that certain types of social media cannot be regulated. But it does mean that liberals themselves should welcome diversity of viewpoints and criticism, and should give up on social pressure on those who deviate from the accepted lines, whichever topic it is. It also means that elite universities should be more welcoming of different ideas, including conservative thinkers. They should also more generally try to diversify their social-economic base.
2. An explicit attempt to have greater social economic diversity among political activists and elites. Part of the problem and a major source of the lack of balance of power is that progressive activists are all from the upper middle classes, with elite education degrees (and no ties to working-class people or manual work). Center-left parties explicitly welcoming and promoting more working-class people, more manual workers and more people without college degrees into their leadership ranks would be an important first step.
Such policies can work. Research by economists Timothy Besley, Olle Folke, Torsten Persson and Johanna Rickne shows how gender quotas implemented in the 1990s by the Swedish Social Democrats, requiring local candidates to alternate between men and women, were effective in both raising the representation of women and increasing the quality of the candidates. https://t.co/8xvKmEjk0a
3. Reduce paperwork and regulatory roadblocks. The modern state, and especially liberal parties and politicians, have to find a way of implementing necessary regulations with minimal paperwork and procedural roadblocks. One way to do this is to empower politicians more so that they can streamline the regulatory process, and are then made accountable ex post – meaning that rather than restricting what politicians and bureaucrats can do before policies are implemented, the accountability should come after policy implementation and according to the success of the policies.
In all of these cases, the devil is of course in the detail. Experimentation is key (which is by the way another liberal idea that has been forgotten).
Where can this start? Perhaps among the US Democrats? The Democratic Party may be viewed as the worst offender for all of these problems. But now there is soul-searching among the Democrats, and why not try something new?
44 scientists have issued a stark warning about the threat of a major ocean circulation change, causing a detrimental disruption of climate patterns lasting for centuries to come.
Check out this short video explaining what this is all about.
Doing good science is 90% finding a science buddy to constantly talk to about the project.
How serious would it be if the Atlantic Ocean overturning circulation (#AMOC) winds down in response to global heating?
Briefly explained at the New York Times last week.
Who to follow
Nick The Curious
@Nbarroll
Kamal Ahmed Pasha
@KAP_80
عشق اللَّهِ ہی اللَّهِ۔
حق سچ کی بات کریں، اور سنے،
یقیناً ہم مل کر، نکال سکتے ہے، نتائج-
کوشش صرف، کوشش محبت
Diego Malo Rico
@dmalorico94
Assistant Professor at the University of Navarra and Research Fellow at the NCID. Interested in Development | Political Economy | Conflict | Identity
Very interesting. Either this study is way ahead of its time or it’s getting something wrong.
This fascinating Nature study (link in the bottom) by @jasonhickel and others should destroy for ever the myth that workers in the Global South "steal jobs" at the expense of the Global North.
They find an astonishing metric that "while Southern workers contribute 90% of the labour that powers the world economy, they receive only 21% of global income."
Meaning of course that the lifestyle of the North is subsidized by the work of the South: if we lived in a fair world, those contributing 90% of the labor should theoretically receive 90% of the income, not 21%... Concretely, the study calculates that "an extra 826 billion hours of Southern labour [the equivalent to 369 million workers] is effectively appended to Northern economies as invisible “ghost workers”, [which is] more than the total workforce of the United States and the European Union combined".
And before I hear you say "yes but it's all low skilled labor", that's not true at all. As per the study, "the South contributed the majority of labour across all skill levels: 76% of all high-skilled labour, 91% of medium-skilled labour and 96% of low-skilled labour". In fact, astonishingly: "the South now contributes more high-skilled labour to the world economy than all the high-, medium- and low-skilled labour contributions of the global North combined."
You could also say "yes but it's just a temporary situation: as global South countries develop they'll progressively become like the North", but that's precisely what this study shows is impossible because "the North’s development model relies on appropriation from elsewhere".
This implies two things: 1) the North has no incentive for the South to develop because their very model depends on appropriation from the South and 2) the South can't develop like the North because they have no South of their own to exploit. They need to find their own model that doesn't rely on exploitation, akin to China who developed with their own workers (and is progressively using more and more robots as its workforce gains in skills).
Also, the South catching up with the North is not the direction at all, except for some rare exceptions. The studies shows that, on average, "wages of Southern workers are 83–98% lower for work of equal skill within the same sector" and these wage gaps "have increased substantially over time, across all skill levels and all sectors, indicating a steady increase in absolute North–South income inequality".
So what's the solution? The study concludes that "development and poverty eradication, and any plausible trajectory for reducing global inequality, requires a shift in the balance of power between North and South, such that the latter is able to reclaim its productive capacities to meet human needs. Toward this end, international wage floors and minimum resource prices could help reduce price inequalities and limit value transfers. Ending unequal exchange will also require ending structural adjustment conditions on finance, and democratising the institutions of global economic governance, so that global South governments are free to use industrial, fiscal and monetary policy to pursue sovereign development and reduce their dependency on Northern capital. Such reforms are unlikely to be handed down from above, however. It will require a political struggle for national self-determination and economic sovereignty similar in scope to the anti-colonial movement of the 20th century."
Link to the study: https://t.co/6RZ4U7Hhcs
![RnaudBertrand's tweet photo. This fascinating Nature study (link in the bottom) by @jasonhickel and others should destroy for ever the myth that workers in the Global South "steal jobs" at the expense of the Global North.
They find an astonishing metric that "while Southern workers contribute 90% of the labour that powers the world economy, they receive only 21% of global income."
Meaning of course that the lifestyle of the North is subsidized by the work of the South: if we lived in a fair world, those contributing 90% of the labor should theoretically receive 90% of the income, not 21%... Concretely, the study calculates that "an extra 826 billion hours of Southern labour [the equivalent to 369 million workers] is effectively appended to Northern economies as invisible “ghost workers”, [which is] more than the total workforce of the United States and the European Union combined".
And before I hear you say "yes but it's all low skilled labor", that's not true at all. As per the study, "the South contributed the majority of labour across all skill levels: 76% of all high-skilled labour, 91% of medium-skilled labour and 96% of low-skilled labour". In fact, astonishingly: "the South now contributes more high-skilled labour to the world economy than all the high-, medium- and low-skilled labour contributions of the global North combined."
You could also say "yes but it's just a temporary situation: as global South countries develop they'll progressively become like the North", but that's precisely what this study shows is impossible because "the North’s development model relies on appropriation from elsewhere".
This implies two things: 1) the North has no incentive for the South to develop because their very model depends on appropriation from the South and 2) the South can't develop like the North because they have no South of their own to exploit. They need to find their own model that doesn't rely on exploitation, akin to China who developed with their own workers (and is progressively using more and more robots as its workforce gains in skills).
Also, the South catching up with the North is not the direction at all, except for some rare exceptions. The studies shows that, on average, "wages of Southern workers are 83–98% lower for work of equal skill within the same sector" and these wage gaps "have increased substantially over time, across all skill levels and all sectors, indicating a steady increase in absolute North–South income inequality".
So what's the solution? The study concludes that "development and poverty eradication, and any plausible trajectory for reducing global inequality, requires a shift in the balance of power between North and South, such that the latter is able to reclaim its productive capacities to meet human needs. Toward this end, international wage floors and minimum resource prices could help reduce price inequalities and limit value transfers. Ending unequal exchange will also require ending structural adjustment conditions on finance, and democratising the institutions of global economic governance, so that global South governments are free to use industrial, fiscal and monetary policy to pursue sovereign development and reduce their dependency on Northern capital. Such reforms are unlikely to be handed down from above, however. It will require a political struggle for national self-determination and economic sovereignty similar in scope to the anti-colonial movement of the 20th century."
Link to the study: https://t.co/6RZ4U7Hhcs](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GUc0yU-XEAEQnKv.jpg)
Why did past societies build so much "useless" beauty everywhere — and why did we stop?
It might be a measure of a culture's health... (thread) 🧵
😂😂😂A brilliant example of how questionnaires can be drawn to lead respondents to specific conclusions.
Yes Minister on bringing back national service
@AhmadIqbalCh Amazing.🫡 Thank you so much Ahmad bhai. If only we had more MPAs like you.
Detachment (2011) is one of the most beautiful movies I’ve ever seen. It a kind of movie that stays with you forever.❤️
Some of you need to hear this... 🙏🏻❤️
Hot-take: I have now come to believe that PTI, Imran Khan, Faiz Hameed & company are the best thing that happened to Pakistan. The disruptions they've caused have been and will keep playing an important role in re-setting the Pakistani political order for several years to come.
This is too simplistic but still interesting.
The strongest country/empire of every century.
[🎞️ sepsi_history]
https://t.co/gDqe4a5SrH
The boiling continues in #India. Millions have no access to air conditioning, and water supplies in many regions are being stretched. A global 2C increase will make many parts of this region #uninhabitable during the #summer months. #Adaptation and #mitigation are urgent.
@_alice_evans As I understand it, India was a multicultural society with different faith groups co-existing together but the work of Christian missionaries led to an opposite effect: most of my favorite scholars agree that they increased religious fundamentalism in Islam & Hinduism.
Using fire to visualise sound waves
@MiftahIsmail The paradox of any democracy is that you have to bring electables on board to win elections, and in the process, you compromise the party's integrity. Though unlikely, I hope this is different.
I found a guy who goes around the US asking 70 to 100-year-olds their:
• Biggest Regrets
• Biggest Lessons
• Advice to their younger self
Oddly enough, most of their answers are the same…
Here are my top 8:
Mother earth!
Places on Earth that don't look real - thread 🧵
1. Namibia, where the desert meets the ocean
Does President Bukele know that artists, philosophers, and social scientists can create conditions that lead to revolts against dictatorial regimes?
We're offering 5,000 free passports (equivalent to $5 billion in our passport program) to highly skilled scientists, engineers, doctors, artists, and philosophers from abroad.
This represents less than 0.1% of our population, so granting them full citizen status, including voting rights, poses no issue.
Despite the small number, their contributions will have a huge impact on our society and the future of our country.
Plus, we will facilitate their relocation by ensuring 0% taxes and tariffs on moving families and assets. This includes commercial value items like equipment, software, and intellectual property.
Stay tuned for more details 🇸🇻
Presumably, this is how regression line fitting was done before the invention of computers. Wow!
this is how statisticians computed linear regressions prior to the invention of the computer:
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