Europe submits voluntarily

[Jokodo]

Of course, strictly speaking, what I said only holds at the global level. A retirement fund from a country with a growing retiree population may well keep paying out acceptable pensions to retirees without increasing the burden on a shrinking number of local workers - by investing primarily in countries which still have a higher ratio of working-age people.

The only other way would be if retirees hoarded 20 year old canned food, pharmaceuticals, christmas cards... hang on

Indeed (though they'd have to deliver their christmas cards themselves, either by foot or driving a 20-30 year old unserviced or self-serviced vehicle, with hoarded 20-30 year old fuel, and only using roads that haven't been serviced in 20-30 years).

I wonder how they're going to use their hoarded 20 year old haircuts, though?

 

[Vork]

The Germans have tried to increase the number of children. They pay "kinder gelt" - child money. They have tried everything to increase the number of children. They provide child care.

Apparently there has been a shortage of child care, and Germans can now sue over the issue. So maybe conditions for family haven't been that perfect.

They have generous maternity leaves. Etc. It is not just that raising a child is expensive, it is that women want to have careers too. And few men want to stay at home. It is the same in the US except that we do very little to offset the costs of having children.

OK, it may be an entrenched social thing, that is difficult to change.

But it seems wrong in principle for a society to be needing to rely on outside immigration for its population. What if those immigrants suddenly decide that they aren't interested in moving to country X anymore? Wouldn't the country then be in a lot of trouble? Surely it's better to have a cultural change that will stabilize the population numbers, or your society is always at risk of changing world conditions.

The second generation of the immigrants are as likely to be atheist as they are to be religious.

You can point to a study for this specifically on Muslims?

In my own country (UK), when Muslims were first coming in, we didn't seem to have the problems with religious fundamentalism that we do now, and certainly a part of that will be second or third generation kids.

Quote:

"A bleak picture of a generation of young British Muslims radicalised by anti-Western views and misplaced multicultural policies is shown in a survey published today.

The study found disturbing evidence of young Muslims adopting more fundamentalist beliefs on key social and political issues than their parents or grandparents."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1540895/Young-British-Muslims-getting-more-radical.html


It may also be worth considering the total numbers in play. Let's assume for the sake of argument that immigrants will integrate to some degree towards the values of a more secular host society. What happens as you increase the size of a religious subculture? How about society becomes less secular overall, and so there is less of a pull towards secularization for new immigrants?

You are deflecting, calling my premise false.

That isn't precisely what I said. I actually said something more nuanced than that:

"Unless you know for a fact this wouldn't work, then your question may be starting from a false premise in the first place."

Which is logically correct yes?

We know that all of the Mexicans who come to the US to work are drug dealers and rapists because Mexico doesn't send us their best people. Our president told us this.

He was talking about the problem of *illegal immigration*, and even then, he allowed that some of them were "good people". Of course you shouldn't tolerate illegal immigration right?

That's quite different to letting in vetted people to work. Are you saying that there is something wrong with Mexican legal migrants?

Merkel saw the refugees as a large number of potential immigrants than were available from other countries and the Germans aren't as bigoted against muslims as seems to be the case here.

Is it really "bigotry" when many Muslims agree with you?

Quote:

Two polls that received very little fanfare were released late last month, and found that the majority of Christian and Jewish Canadians think Islam is "irreconcilable" with the West - it also found 42% of Canadian Muslims agree with that assessment.

The polls, conducted by Leger Marketing, were published in the Vancouver Sun and found 63% of Protestants, 62% of Jews and 60% of Catholics felt Islam cannot coexist with Western culture.

That assessment was shared by 46% of non-religious Canadians, and in a large admission, by 42% of Muslims who felt their religion cannot be reconciled with the country they live in.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/193969

 

[whichphilosophy]

Visit India a few times, then wonder where all this growth is. Ask the auto rickshaw driver or the man with the illegal foodstall on Connaught Place one of the largest financial, commercial and business centres in New Delhi. Sure the chairman of Reliance built himself a 27 story house in Mumbai

https://www.indiatimes.com/news/ind...s-family-doesn-t-defecate-in-open-331183.html
Mumbai Auto Driver Wants To Build Toilet In His Village So His Family Doesn't Defecate In Open

Developing countries have a long way to go.

When I was born, most Indians could not read and write.
Today (or rather, as of the latest census in 2011), that number is down to one quarter and what feels like half the contributors on Quora are writing from India.

That puts India below about 145 countries. Education itself does not develop a nation. Zimbabwe claims over 85 per cent literacy but look at it.
Given its size there will be a lot of intellects worldwide.
Indians work hard and achieve a lot abroad. Is there a brain drain?

 

[Hermit]

Your graph shows the "shit hole" countries birth rate much higher than Western nations!

You wrote the birth rate in the " shithole " countries that can't even afford to feed their present populations is out of control, Angelo. I provided a graph showing that it is far from out of control - that it is in fact dropping at a significantly faster rate than the birthrates of the non-"shit hole" countries.

Full marks for backpedalling, but why did you bother? Is it impossible to admit to having been wrong?

Visit India a few times, then wonder where all this growth is.

Even though you have quoted the actual words, you obviously have not noticed that I was arguing about birthrates with Angelo, who ignorantly described them as "out of control in "shithole" countries". Since you mentioned India, which indeed has huge problems, including a massive lack of shithouses, that's yet another "shithole" country in which the birthrate is well and truly under control:

 

[Canard DuJour]

Of course, strictly speaking, what I said only holds at the global level. A retirement fund from a country with a growing retiree population may well keep paying out acceptable pensions to retirees without increasing the burden on a shrinking number of local workers - by investing primarily in countries which still have a higher ratio of working-age people.

The only other way would be if retirees hoarded 20 year old canned food, pharmaceuticals, christmas cards... hang on

Indeed (though they'd have to deliver their christmas cards themselves, either by foot or driving a 20-30 year old unserviced or self-serviced vehicle, with hoarded 20-30 year old fuel, and only using roads that haven't been serviced in 20-30 years).

I wonder how they're going to use their hoarded 20 year old haircuts, though?

I had an uncle like that, but he was baldy.

 

[Jokodo]

Don't use people with children? That way, you aren't paying for education. You aren't paying for high healthcare costs in old age. You aren't paying for pensions.

In other words, you want third world countries to pay for raising and educating the children that will be the West's workers, than they should come here and work for us, and when they're old their home countries, who never the fruits of their work, should pick up the ball again and care for them in old age?

Sounds like a reasonable and equitable scheme. Not.

 

[whichphilosophy]

Don't use people with children? That way, you aren't paying for education. You aren't paying for high healthcare costs in old age. You aren't paying for pensions.

In other words, you want third world countries to pay for raising and educating the children that will be the West's workers, than they should come here and work for us, and when they're old their home countries, who never the fruits of their work, should pick up the ball again and care for them in old age?

Sounds like a reasonable and equitable scheme. Not.

This is the deal for those who work in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. I worked in China and the ME. Once the contract finished, my visa was cancelled.

 

[bilby]

LOL - do you think that the money you put into Super is securly stored somewhere to be paid out to you in the future?

It's not.

The amount you can claim on retirement is completely dependent on the state of the economy when you retire. That is, it's dependent on the people who are working at that time - just as the money available in Super to retirees today depends on the economy as it is now (and not as it was back when today's retirees were contributing to it).

What crock pot of a reply! Many European countries have had a form of superannuation for decades and it works just fine. There are some retirees in Italy for example who now receive more income in retirement than they received salaries when they working.
They, or their employers paid into a retirement scheme. An uncle of mine who worked as a prison guard for over 40 years in various Italian prisons now collects over 2000 Euros per month in retirement, while when working received under 2000 per month after tax.

Jesus wept.

Surely nobody is really as dense as your answer here suggests you to be.

 

[Jokodo]

Don't use people with children? That way, you aren't paying for education. You aren't paying for high healthcare costs in old age. You aren't paying for pensions.

In other words, you want third world countries to pay for raising and educating the children that will be the West's workers, than they should come here and work for us, and when they're old their home countries, who never the fruits of their work, should pick up the ball again and care for them in old age?

Sounds like a reasonable and equitable scheme. Not.

This is the deal for those who work in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. I worked in China and the ME. Once the contract finished, my visa was cancelled.

Does that make it reasonable and equitable?

 

[Bomb#20]

It's a logical necessity that, if people consume who do not produce, those who produce will have to produce more than they're consuming. This fact is independent of <snip>

That does not appear to be a logical necessity. Why should we believe it's a fact?

If those who produce on average consume as much as they produce (directly or indirectly - the production of investment goods to uphold and enlarge production is included), it logically follows that collectively, they'll consume all that is produced, leaving nothing to consume for the retirees. You understand manna isn't a thing in the real world?

If you think otherwise, care to spell out the alternative?

Been there, done that, and you quoted it back to me. Why are you repeating your claim, and repeating that it logically follows, without even a new argument, when I already showed you a counterexample? You are simply doubling down on your incorrect implicit premise: that everything consumed must have been produced by someone.

When a caveman found a banana in the forest and ate it, how did this cause another caveman to bang the rocks together into an extra hand-axe he didn't get to use?

Retirees don't tend to find the products and services they consume in the forest,

What's your point? You made a general statement not limited to retirees. Further, the fact that consumables not produced by someone can be found in a forest does not rule out the possibility that such things might also be found in nonforests; in fact, it kind of undermines your assumption that they cannot.

and cavemen sure as hell didn't find any bananas (as we know them) - the banana's wild form is barely a recognisable relative of its cultivar due to centuries of selective breeding.

Which selective breeding was, no doubt, performed for centuries in the altruistic hope that eventually future generations would benefit when the barely recognizable resulting future fruit would finally become edible.

Of course, strictly speaking, what I said only holds at the global level.

Of course, strictly speaking, what you said doesn't hold at any level.

A retirement fund from a country with a growing retiree population may well keep paying out acceptable pensions to retirees without increasing the burden on a shrinking number of local workers - by investing primarily in countries which still have a higher ratio of working-age people.

But admitting that while upholding your dislike of immigration

Excuse me? Where the heck do you get off accusing me of dislike of immigration? I'm pro-immigration and my credentials are impeccable: I personally worked on five third-worlders' immigration cases. Have you worked on the cases of that many people who wanted to immigrate to your country?

would be the highest level of hypocrisy, as it would in effect be saying "yes, we do need young able-bodied people from third world countries to work for the upkeep of our retirees, but I want them to stay put where they are while doing so".

Entirely apart from your dubious economic reasoning and your false imputations of motivations you find distasteful, you appear to be making a false equivalence. What the heck is supposed to be hypocritical about "yes, we do need young able-bodied people from third world countries to work for the upkeep of our retirees, but I want them to stay put where they are while doing so" when we aren't talking about taxing those young able-bodied people to work for the upkeep of our retirees, but rather paying them to do it?

 

[Jokodo]

If those who produce on average consume as much as they produce (directly or indirectly - the production of investment goods to uphold and enlarge production is included), it logically follows that collectively, they'll consume all that is produced, leaving nothing to consume for the retirees. You understand manna isn't a thing in the real world?

If you think otherwise, care to spell out the alternative?

Been there, done that, and you quoted it back to me. Why are you repeating your claim, and repeating that it logically follows, without even a new argument, when I already showed you a counterexample? You are simply doubling down on your incorrect implicit premise: that everything consumed must have been produced by someone.

If you want to babble on about cavemen and bananas, there used to be a fiction subsection of these forums. I was giving you the benefit of the doubt in assuming that you wanted to have a meaningful discussion about the real world. My bad for not recognising that you aren't at all interested in that.

In the real world, what is your best guess of the percentage of goods and services consumed by the retiree population of an advanced economy in the 21st that are not produced by someone? Including the many products that are produced, directly and indirectly, through the collective effort of 100s of thousands of people in several dozen countries?

I'll tell you mine: not exactly zero, but clearly low enough to be negligible. But if you give me yours, we can play this game with concrete figures.

 

[Derec]

To get back on topic, I found this little gem at a German news weekly's site:
Gestrandet in der Ruine von Sid
It's in German but you can always let your browser translate ...

It's about the 10,000 or so migrants that are "stuck" on the border between Serbia and Croatia because they want to get into the EU.
The left-leaning Spiegel keeps referring to these migrants as "refugees" even though almost all - if not all - are economic refugees from places such as North Africa. For example they focus on this 26 year old from Algeria who wants to go to Sweden not to escape any wars but because he wasn't making much money in Algeria. They even talk about a group of Iranians who are paying thousands of dollars for a more luxurious trafficking service. But to Spiegel, all of them are "refugees". That is simply the way to manipulate people of Germany into accepting millions of these Muslim mass migrants.

 

[Vork]

Don't use people with children? That way, you aren't paying for education. You aren't paying for high healthcare costs in old age. You aren't paying for pensions.

In other words, you want third world countries to pay for raising and educating the children that will be the West's workers, than they should come here and work for us, and when they're old their home countries, who never the fruits of their work, should pick up the ball again and care for them in old age?

Sounds like a reasonable and equitable scheme. Not.

It's entirely fair to offer someone a 5 year visa, or 10 year visa, to come and work in your country. If they aren't interested then that's their choice. The Western world isn't responsible for educating the children of foreign guests! It's not some act of oppression that you arrange mutually beneficial work for someone, without wanting to take on the costs of raising their children.

And of course their own country will likely benefit as the workers will be sending money back home.

 

[Jokodo]

Of course, strictly speaking, what I said only holds at the global level.

Of course, strictly speaking, what you said doesn't hold at any level.

It does hold in our world.

You're (kind of - in a pedantic way) right that is not a logical necessity. A world in which it doesn't hold is conceivable and might exist somewhere out there in outer space, or in the distant past or future: A world in which all or most of what people consume falls from the skies or grows on the trees in front of their homes in its finished form, with little to no effort required for gathering and post-processing.

The fact that it holds in this world, the real one, can however be deduced from well known and rather basic properties of the world - properties which every sane adult should be able to agree upon.

- - - Updated - - -

Don't use people with children? That way, you aren't paying for education. You aren't paying for high healthcare costs in old age. You aren't paying for pensions.

In other words, you want third world countries to pay for raising and educating the children that will be the West's workers, than they should come here and work for us, and when they're old their home countries, who never the fruits of their work, should pick up the ball again and care for them in old age?

Sounds like a reasonable and equitable scheme. Not.

It's entirely fair to offer someone a 5 year visa, or 10 ten year visa, to come and work in your country. If they aren't interested then that's their choice. The Western world isn't responsible for educating the children of foreign guests! It's not some act of oppression that you arrange mutually beneficial work for someone, without wanting to take on the coats of raising their children.

And of course their own country will likely benefit as the workers will be sending money back home.

It is an act of taking money out of their home countries' public coffers, whatever else it may or may not be.

Turning a baby into an adult worker costs many thousands of dollars.

Disposing of a ex-worker in a humane fashion by letting them live out their days useless as they have become costs many thousands of dollars.

Looking from the perspective of macroeconomics, those are investments, and the return is the labor the worker provides in between.

One national economy harvesting only the returns (or even just some of the returns) while another pays all the costs is inherently an exploitative relationship.

I'm talking at the level of countries. This does not imply that it is oppressive to the individual (anymore than wage labor generally is).

 

[Vork]

You are giving people a chance to earn money they otherwise couldn't. They then send a lot of the money back home, or spend it when they move home, which helps the economy of the foreign country. It's a perfectly fair arrangement.

The foreign country, having spent money to educate its own children, may get a better return *this way* than if said workers just stayed at home working there, or being unemployed as the case may be.

What is better for the foreign nation? That they stay at home unemployed, or work abroad and send money home? -- that's "exploitative" when it will help grow the economy of the nation? Either way they will have costs in taking care of their citizens.

 

[Bomb#20]

By the way, I didn't ask Jokodo those questions about his replies to other posters to be pedantic -- to make an issue of how his calculation needs a 0.1% correction. This is about his original reply to me, quoted below. Unfortunately, my internet access is about to become slow and sporadic for a while, so I'm not going to have time to Socratic Method him into remembering why he's wrong, so I'm just going to have to skip ahead to the end. There's an unstated assumption all those posts of his appear to rely on: the Labor Theory of Value. It appears he thinks it's okay to say "work more than they consume" because he thinks of consumables as measurable in hours of work to produce them. It appears he discounts finding and eating an unproduced edible barely recognizable precursor of a banana-as-we-know-them because he values it at its hours in production cost, zero.

But this isn't just a problem with accounting for the gifts of nature. What, after all, is a gift of nature, but a thing produced by some mindless mechanism, be it a banana plant or plate tectonics crushing dead vegetation into oil? So once we recognize that useful valuable consumable things don't have to be the product of labor, that opens a whole can of worms. When a good or service is produced jointly by a human worker, a naturally occurring mindless mechanism, and an artificial mindless mechanism invented and implemented by different humans, some of them long dead, how are we to decide how much the worker produced and how much the various mechanisms produced?

The discussion is about your claim "Germany needs immigration to avoid the fate of Japan". The notion that overcrowding is not relevant to the discussion is insane. Too much immigration will give Germany the fate of Japan.


Maybe, maybe not. It depends on the cost of living, the retirement age, life expectancy at retirement, what sources of retiree income there are besides the payroll tax, yada yada. Sure, you can say "all things equal"; but why should all things be equal? The policy decisions and cultural changes that affect whether there are eight or two workers per retiree will probably affect those other factors too.
<snip>

Actually, the retirement age and life expectancy at retirement affect the ratio of workers to retirees but do not affect the payroll tax an individual worker has to pay given that ratio.

"[W]hat sources of retiree income there are besides the payroll tax" does affect the payroll tax but it does not, on average, affect the workers' purchasing power corrected take home wage (as long as retirees' and society's expectations about retirement living standards don't change). Whether retirees receive their income from payroll tax, as profits from a fund, or buy their goods and services with gold they stashed away while they were themselves earning wages doesn't negate the simple and inevitable fact that in order for retirees to have access to goods and services, those producing the goods and services will have to be, collectively and on average, allocated less than they produce, and the more so the higher the ratio of retirees (and the living standard they expect).

This is true when the worker pays a payroll tax, it is true when his wage is suppressed because the fund owning the company demands high dividends, and it remains true when retirees flooding the market for consumer goods with large quantities of stashed gold leads to inflation, depressing their real wages even as their nominal take-home pay stays constant.

Jokodo's solution to that conundrum appears to be to credit the human worker with all the production and credit the various mechanisms with none of it. The retiree gets his goods and services by trading his stashed gold to the company, which gives the gold to the shareholders in dividends, in return for the mindless mechanisms the shareholders paid to set up, mechanisms that partly created the goods and services for the retiree. This trade -- a lifetime of earned gold in exchange for mindless-mechanism-setting-up -- Jokodo labels "the worker's wage is suppressed". But "suppressed" relative to what? Well, suppressed relative to what the wage would have been if the shareholders had paid to set up that mindless mechanism to create goods and services and then gifted the entirety of the resulting goods and services to the workers who help their machines make goods and services, less the hours of labor it took to build the machinery.

Which, according to the Labor Theory of Value, is the correct wage comparison point, because when goods and services are made jointly by labor and non-labor, the correct way to calculate how much was produced by each is to credit the labor with all of it. From the point of view of the Labor Theory of Value, a widget-making robot is just a funny kind of banana plant; and a banana plant's contribution to the making of a banana is the effort that went into growing the banana plant, whether that's a contribution of several man-hours on a plantation, or a contribution of two minutes a hunter-gatherer spends crapping out seeds in a forest from the banana he ate, or, in the case of a banana plant that grew all by itself from a banana that fell off another wild banana plant, a contribution of 0.0%.

Of course it's also 100%, there being no other contributor to a naturally occurring banana; and the only thing you can be simultaneously 0% of and 100% of is zero. That is why eating a wild banana in the forest doesn't count as consumption. That is why it appears to Jokodo to be a logical necessity that if people consume who do not produce, those who produce will have to produce more than they're consuming. That is why I'm making an issue out of a banana.

ETA: I see that while I was writing that, you were writing this:

If you want to babble on about cavemen and bananas, there used to be a fiction subsection of these forums. I was giving you the benefit of the doubt in assuming that you wanted to have a meaningful discussion about the real world. My bad for not recognising that you aren't at all interested in that.

In the real world, what is your best guess of the percentage of goods and services consumed by the retiree population of an advanced economy in the 21st that are not produced by someone? Including the many products that are produced, directly and indirectly, through the collective effort of 100s of thousands of people in several dozen countries?

I'll tell you mine: not exactly zero, but clearly low enough to be negligible. But if you give me yours, we can play this game with concrete figures.

Let us agree to consider your ill-considered put-down withdrawn.

 

[Jokodo]

You are giving people a chance to earn money they otherwise couldn't. They then send a lot of the money back home, or spend it when they move home, which helps the economy of the foreign country. It's a perfectly fair arrangement.

I've edited my last post to be more explicit.

I'm not talking in individual, micro-economic terms.

 

[Hermit]

To get back on topic, I found this little gem at a German news weekly's site:
Gestrandet in der Ruine von Sid
It's in German but you can always let your browser translate ...

It's about the 10,000 or so migrants that are "stuck" on the border between Serbia and Croatia because they want to get into the EU.
The left-leaning Spiegel keeps referring to these migrants as "refugees" even though almost all - if not all - are economic refugees from places such as North Africa. For example they focus on this 26 year old from Algeria who wants to go to Sweden not to escape any wars but because he wasn't making much money in Algeria. They even talk about a group of Iranians who are paying thousands of dollars for a more luxurious trafficking service. But to Spiegel, all of them are "refugees". That is simply the way to manipulate people of Germany into accepting millions of these Muslim mass migrants.

The article does not say there are 10,000 migrants stuck on the border between Serbia and Croatia. It says there are about that number of asylum seekers in all of the Balkan countries. About this 26 year old from Algeria, the article says he has next to no chance of being granted asylum even if he makes it to Sweden, presumably because he is an economic opportunist rather than a bona fide asylum seeker.

Derec, if you comment at all, try to comment on what is actually written rather than distorting things through your ideological filter.

 

[Jokodo]

Let us agree to consider your ill-considered put-down withdrawn.

I do not know what you mean by that.

I will agree that the wording logical necessity was a bit too strong when in fact it's only a logical consequence of the way things are in this world of ours, when a world in which it does not hold is conceivable.

 

[Vork]

You are giving people a chance to earn money they otherwise couldn't. They then send a lot of the money back home, or spend it when they move home, which helps the economy of the foreign country. It's a perfectly fair arrangement.

I've edited my last post to be more explicit.

I'm not talking in individual, micro-economic terms.

Ok I just edited my post also. I don't see that one nation is exploiting another by giving temporary work to foreigners, when the person may otherwise just be unemployed anyway. It may be better for *both* countries that they work and send money home. Yes the foreign nation will have costs in looking after that citizen and educating their kids, but they have those costs anyway. When you educate someone, there isn't typically a contract saying "you have to work at least 30 years in this country to pay us back". And this ignores that country X may be very happy to be having lots of dollars sent home into its economy.