An extremely depressing analysis. Even worse, extremely convincing.
As far as the retirement/pension Ponzi aspect of the problem is concerned, I suggest a three-generation form of the family (under two roofs at opposite ends of the garden) with the three generations taking care of each other. That plus a greatly reduced workweek, which would reduce the "need" to retire until much later in life. https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00U0C9HKW
Retirement "need" really depends on the type of work. Physically demanding work will wear people out much sooner than office work (though sedentary work has its own health threats-- e.g., obesity). Also, employers hate employing older workers and in many fields they will manipulate layoffs as much as they can to dump older workers, and they will reject older applicants. In the US age discrimination laws have all the teeth of the average hen-- they might as well not even exist.
You are right about that. As I write in my book, older workers could gravitate to easier kinds of work for even shorter periods of time. Twelve hours at a check out counter (or something similarly less taxing) instead of 24 hours on an assembly line for instance.
To an extent. However, one of the UK's (actually, most of the West's) problems is its reliance on young and cheap immigrants to fill those roles. A sane well-run society would recognise that restrictions in immigration and investment in capital (ie, the deployment new technologies) can lift productivity and reduce the number of labour-intensive roles in the economy. For sure, this comes with a different array of challenges but while we rely on cheap immigration and low-tech, we will continue to consign a large part of our society to the economic dustbin while accelerating inequality.
That's different than in the US. I haven't seen a car wash here that employs people (other than maybe a guy up front to take payment) in years. Some service stations have car washes and they are completely automated.
I agree with a skepticism about bringing in low skill workers (other than in emergency situations when humanitarian concerns do count for something). High skill immigration is another matter. No, I would not open the flood gates, but if we need people (doctors etc.) then we should be open to their immigration-- they will likely prove a net positive.
Very interesting idea, Luke. I have long thought that there must be some kind of multigenerational model for care, both social and medical, perhaps with extended families being granted credits which they can then transfer amongst family members or save for future use.
Thanks, Guy. Your idea for "extended families being granted credits which they can then transfer amongst family members or save for future use" is certainly an interesting one that might have some application for society as it currently exists. If it would save the government money especially as we approach ever closer to a ("the") fiscal cliff. My idea, of course, is much longer term.
Depressing and erudite, on form as ever. I can see that liberal democracy only works in a settled moral landscape. Rather like capitalism, it can work in a free market where there is reciprocity - where the strong doesn’t abuse the weak and the handshake is sufficient. We have forgotten the underpinnings of society in terms of shared enterprise and culture - and all that is left is discordant chaos. Now for another drink.
I’m not sure which comes first, but an ordered (and moral) society produces prosperity which helps maintain an ordered (and moral) society. At some point society becomes decadent and disordered, and then less prosperous. You can have a virtuous circle one way or an anti-virtuous circle, and we are certainly well ensconced in the latter.
Good point. I also think liberal democracy benefits greatly from times of economic expansion where people can see and feel their lives getting better and more prosperous. That was one reason why it worked so well in Western Europe in the decades just after the war.
Re: I can see that liberal democracy only works in a settled moral landscape.
Here in the US we did not have that in the 19th or 20th centuries. The argument about slavery and later civil rights, of course. And maybe even more fraught the argument over women's rights and roles. (And we also had the anti-alcohol crusade which brought us Prohibition-- and with it an explosion in criminality).
I think the arguments we had over slavery or civil rights, as with transubstantiation, were arguments within a (relatively, and more so with hindsight) moral framework. How do we interpret this, and make it work for all?
And I think the degree of difference some people descry in today's world is greatly exaggerated. It's really only on a small handful of hot button issues that there is conflict-- which is normal down through the generations since people first gained the rights of free speech and free religion.
Yes and no. I don’t know if today’s arguments are bigger or smaller. Or just that we have to argue over something. We used to argue over big issues, over the nature of God, now we argue over bathrooms and borders. I did imagine that if we agreed on the bigger picture issues, we could argue over tax rates and healthcare systems. But as you say, the normal is perhaps the perennial conflict between doing what we want to do and what we ought to do.
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." John Adams, 1798
"Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites... Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters." Edmund Burke, 1791
I don't think people in Adams' time were any more moral than they are now. To cite just one matter, we have tax figures for alcoholic beverages back then, and from the amount of booze being sold we have to conclude that a lot of people were drunk as lords by noon. We also have figures for prostitution, then generally legal. In Boston, a rather staid city, the ladies of the evening abounded in such numbers that we're forced to conclude a very large fraction of the male population were their patrons.
I don't agree. I think we're run by people who would like other people to see them as empaths who wish to save humanity, and who would like to think of themselves that way . . . but I think most of them are not at all that sort of person. When I think of "empaths who wish to save humanity" I think of people like Greta Thunberg or Jeremy Corbyn, not Sir Kier Starmer, Yvette Cooper et al.
Good piece, Ed. Also worth noting that Chinese citizens report much greater satisfaction with their government than do citizens of major Western countries:
Any information coming out of unfree nations like China needs to be looked at with a very jaundiced eye. That Chinese fertile rates are swimming with bottom feeders suggests that people there are less than glowingly optimistic about life.
pretty much no one has cracked the fertility problem, it's true. China made a massive blunder with the one-child policy, and now attempts to encourage higher fertility look like coming to nothing.
"a worsening debt problem, a generational welfare Ponzi scheme, unaffordable housing, cities that look increasingly squalid and unsuited to families, widespread drug addiction, collapsing faith in shared institutions and unwelcome demographic change that has in turn spurred the rise of populism, polarisation and political instability."
This is an excellent summary of our predicament. Potentially, the demographic change element could be addressed with more democracy, as it's generally unelected institutions (NGOs, courts, civil servants, etc) who've enabled the open-borders situation. But the welfare-fuelled debt problem is much harder - the reason we have it is that so much of the voting public is in receipt of benefits now that withdrawing it is very difficult. I somewhat pessimistically think that only something catastrophic, like a 2008-style collapse or an IMF intervention, would provide cover for meaningful reforms in that direction.
Too right! The early to mid 1970s were much much worse than anything that followed in Britain - civil strife, blackouts, political inertia, terrorism, hooliganism, street robbery, etc etc. We still have some way to go…
Sizable gay community in Dubai, probably the second biggest in the Middle East outside Tel Aviv. It's the mecca for gay Arabs. Plenty of gay British expats living there as well, including cohabitating and married. UAE operates under a strict don't ask don't tell policy, keep it in the bedroom. And even the don't tell policy isn't enforced in general given the openness of the gay coworkers I had.
In a place like the UAE everyone knows what the rules, and in its way it's quite liberating as it can be easier to orient your life around clearly defined rules rather than shifting sands of social acceptability as is often the case in the West.
I think that it offers many things that attract gays and lesbians; an exquisite variety to choose a potential partner, the entertainment infrastructure is unparalleled in the region, rule of law, safety etc.
"As an example, air pollution in Beijing was seen as totemic of this dystopian state, reflecting a rush to modernisation without any consideration for quality of life. Yet Beijing’s smog is basically fixed, and the number of annual clear days has gone from 13 to 300." This is inaccurate, I do not care what the data says, I live in Beijing and have certainly dealt with rather significant smog. I cannot believe I have experienced 300 smogless days, particularly with how heavy it can be during the winter months.
Another minor note, you comment that not many people would consider moving to China, and while this may be true in the US, I have seen an increasing number of people from particularly the UK given the cost of living crisis, and many immigrants legal and in gray areas from South America, Africa, and the rest of asia (minus Japan and SK).
We in the west greatly underestimate the appeal of China, particularly of those in the global south and with skills China values higher than our western half. I make more here then I did as a University prof in the states after taxes, and with a much lower cost of living.
This was a particularly noteworthy and memorable article of yours. It is indeed sad how many of the elements of liberal democracies that were (real and supposed) strengths in the 20th Century are weaknesses in the 21st. One could say this about "Western Civilization" as a whole. A key reason for the "Great Divergence" of Western Europe (starting with the countries adjacent to the North Sea) from the rest of the world was its fragmented nature. The rivalry between differing nations and the polycentric nature preventing a monopoly on coercion enabled a culture of innovation as Walter Scheidel explored in his brilliant book, "Escape from Rome"
The large, land empires that dominated much of Asia by contrast became despotic and stagnant. Now countries like China have all the resources and land of a pre-modern empire and the fruits of industrial and post-industrial technologies unleashed by the polycentric, fragmentation of Europe. Being a patch-work of small states with, as you say, all sorts of property rights, checks and balances, etc, are now weaknesses of Western nations!
"Decisions are now increasingly made not by democratic institutions but by unelected arms-length bodies, the main block to us enforcing our borders, and the solution is surely to restore power to Parliament. Churchill was right that democracy was the least bad political system available - maybe we just need more of it."
At least it's not the EU Parliament. As Curtis Yarvin noted, "But when you basically… in the EU, they actually talk very explicitly about the democratic deficit, because the EU is the most undemocratic democracy ever devised. There’s this EU Parliament, which basically has the powers of Queen Elizabeth II, not the first. And then you have the European Commission, which is like the deep state, but it’s actually a better centralized, deep state. And everything comes from the European Commission, which is completely profoundly utterly… there isn’t even a pretense that these people are appointed by politicians. They just appoint themselves. It’s the final stage of oligarchy. And the thing is, once people realize that it’s actually fine… life in Europe now is basically fine. It kind of sucks in some ways there’s… it’s not sustainable. "
"Britain might be better run if our political class saw us as ‘merely an economic zone’, as The Critic regular Luca Watson put it:
‘If they thought of Britain as purely an economic zone, there would be no social housing in inner London, no intentional importation of Afghan refugee families, shoplifters would be shot, fracking would be widespread, equality laws scrapped, no bat tunnels or newt survey. Instead we have the opposite: a political class who view getting rich as vulgar and suspect, and who valorise moral commitments - to climate change, refugees, international treaties, ethnic and religious minorities - above all else, no matter the cost.’"
If only there could be what Curtis Yarvin described as a "British Meiji" by a king with Singapore-esque sensibilities:
Good piece Ed, but on the subject of how hard it is to get anything built in Britain because of our property rights. there are examples the other way as well.
Someone in my family was forced to sell his smallholding in mid-Cornwall when the local china clay company discovered that he had mineable concentrations of clay on the land and wanted to expand its operations into the area, and there are also reservoirs such as Rutland Water and Lake Vyrnwy in North Wales (that serves Liverpool) that were created by basically flooding out whole villages.
In the US too, Mayor Richard Daley (the first one) wasn't noted for taking too much notice of Chicago residents' objections when he wanted anything built. I'm not saying I agree with this approach, just making the point that that was how it was.
Curiously, a recent survey by Ipsos shows that the Chinese have the third highest level of ‘nihilism’ in the world measured by the % ‘living for today as the future is too uncertain’ https://www.ipsos.com/en/ipsos-global-trends-9th-edition-release Doesn’t detract from your main thesis however, it’s certainly correct when applied to Ireland.
Wow! I met today a subscriber to ‘The Wrong Side of History,’ a British gentleman living in the UAE, it was a riveting conversation; we touched upon many of the themes in this essay, and he told me many extraordinary things, like
1. He wished that Britain would benefit from the experience and ambition of Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid! (the ruler of Dubai)
Anyway, maybe he was being a bit influenced by meeting one of the locals (it’s alright, mate), but this tells you a lot about the current state of the dying liberal project in the UK!
I have a quick observation: there are many gays and lesbians in Dubai enjoying their lives and securing a better future, but of course, being part of a Muslim-majority country, it's frowned upon to have discussions of legalized rights or ‘Wokish’ displays of politicized identities, etc.
I thought a lot about the issue of guest workers/migrants in the UAE, and I arrived at the scandalously illiberal conclusion that the UAE’s no-path-to-citizenship system works just fine! I mean, it's a win-win situation for everyone. For poor construction workers from South Asia, the UAE is a golden opportunity to improve their lot and break the cycle of generational poverty. For middle-class European, Arab, and Russian members of the managerial class, the UAE represents a pragmatic alternative to what they’re fleeing from! And for the locals, it’s a system that keeps buttressing our cozy lifestyle, without endangering the local Arab identity of the state! And for the rulers of the country, it’s a functioning model that diversifies the economy away from oil without threatening their legitimacy!
Of course, lots of people developed genuine ties to the place; we have second-generation Indians, Brits, and Palestinians here, but I would choose the political/social stability of the country any time, every time.
Usually, I don't comment but given the topic I can't resist. I have been trying to write an essay centring on that Churchill quote for a year but haven’t quite been able to finish it satisfactorily.
My view is that both despite and because of the stated liberal and democratic principles of most places in the west we have narrowed our beliefs of what democracy and freedom mean. There is a (social) media feedback loop that oversimplifies these concepts and creates blind spots. We can’t seem to countenance slight changes in the status quo, and hence are unable to learn from the successful parts of other systems. The popularity of the Churchill quote shows how people don’t really engage with questions of how a democracy should be run. It is used to claim superiority in practice not superiority in theory. This side-steps important principles. IMO the detail of it should matter, not only whether a country is ‘free and democratic’.
On China, it is somewhere I have spent a lot of time in the last few years. There is a lot to like about life there. It is difficult to make a direct comparison to the USA or Europe because the benefits and difficulties are so different in character. I would be happy enough to move there but that isn’t really an option. Immigration is extremely limited by rules that hinder permanent settlement, completely unlike Europe and North America. Although I would be happier to move to China than America the latter is more likely simply because of work visa and permanent residence rules.
I lived in Hong Kong for nine years (both sides of the Handover) and I can say with confidence that the absence of democracy as we in the West understand it was easily offset by the freedoms experienced in every other part of my life. As long as you played by an easy to understand set of rules, you experienced intoxicating levels of liberty.
An extremely depressing analysis. Even worse, extremely convincing.
As far as the retirement/pension Ponzi aspect of the problem is concerned, I suggest a three-generation form of the family (under two roofs at opposite ends of the garden) with the three generations taking care of each other. That plus a greatly reduced workweek, which would reduce the "need" to retire until much later in life. https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00U0C9HKW
Retirement "need" really depends on the type of work. Physically demanding work will wear people out much sooner than office work (though sedentary work has its own health threats-- e.g., obesity). Also, employers hate employing older workers and in many fields they will manipulate layoffs as much as they can to dump older workers, and they will reject older applicants. In the US age discrimination laws have all the teeth of the average hen-- they might as well not even exist.
You are right about that. As I write in my book, older workers could gravitate to easier kinds of work for even shorter periods of time. Twelve hours at a check out counter (or something similarly less taxing) instead of 24 hours on an assembly line for instance.
To an extent. However, one of the UK's (actually, most of the West's) problems is its reliance on young and cheap immigrants to fill those roles. A sane well-run society would recognise that restrictions in immigration and investment in capital (ie, the deployment new technologies) can lift productivity and reduce the number of labour-intensive roles in the economy. For sure, this comes with a different array of challenges but while we rely on cheap immigration and low-tech, we will continue to consign a large part of our society to the economic dustbin while accelerating inequality.
Car washes: used to be automated, now 8 Bulgarians with a bucket and sponge each!
That's different than in the US. I haven't seen a car wash here that employs people (other than maybe a guy up front to take payment) in years. Some service stations have car washes and they are completely automated.
I agree with a skepticism about bringing in low skill workers (other than in emergency situations when humanitarian concerns do count for something). High skill immigration is another matter. No, I would not open the flood gates, but if we need people (doctors etc.) then we should be open to their immigration-- they will likely prove a net positive.
Very interesting idea, Luke. I have long thought that there must be some kind of multigenerational model for care, both social and medical, perhaps with extended families being granted credits which they can then transfer amongst family members or save for future use.
Thanks, Guy. Your idea for "extended families being granted credits which they can then transfer amongst family members or save for future use" is certainly an interesting one that might have some application for society as it currently exists. If it would save the government money especially as we approach ever closer to a ("the") fiscal cliff. My idea, of course, is much longer term.
Depressing and erudite, on form as ever. I can see that liberal democracy only works in a settled moral landscape. Rather like capitalism, it can work in a free market where there is reciprocity - where the strong doesn’t abuse the weak and the handshake is sufficient. We have forgotten the underpinnings of society in terms of shared enterprise and culture - and all that is left is discordant chaos. Now for another drink.
I’m not sure which comes first, but an ordered (and moral) society produces prosperity which helps maintain an ordered (and moral) society. At some point society becomes decadent and disordered, and then less prosperous. You can have a virtuous circle one way or an anti-virtuous circle, and we are certainly well ensconced in the latter.
Good point. I also think liberal democracy benefits greatly from times of economic expansion where people can see and feel their lives getting better and more prosperous. That was one reason why it worked so well in Western Europe in the decades just after the war.
Re: I can see that liberal democracy only works in a settled moral landscape.
Here in the US we did not have that in the 19th or 20th centuries. The argument about slavery and later civil rights, of course. And maybe even more fraught the argument over women's rights and roles. (And we also had the anti-alcohol crusade which brought us Prohibition-- and with it an explosion in criminality).
I think the arguments we had over slavery or civil rights, as with transubstantiation, were arguments within a (relatively, and more so with hindsight) moral framework. How do we interpret this, and make it work for all?
And I think the degree of difference some people descry in today's world is greatly exaggerated. It's really only on a small handful of hot button issues that there is conflict-- which is normal down through the generations since people first gained the rights of free speech and free religion.
Yes and no. I don’t know if today’s arguments are bigger or smaller. Or just that we have to argue over something. We used to argue over big issues, over the nature of God, now we argue over bathrooms and borders. I did imagine that if we agreed on the bigger picture issues, we could argue over tax rates and healthcare systems. But as you say, the normal is perhaps the perennial conflict between doing what we want to do and what we ought to do.
Two quotes this put me in mind of:
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." John Adams, 1798
"Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites... Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters." Edmund Burke, 1791
I don't think people in Adams' time were any more moral than they are now. To cite just one matter, we have tax figures for alcoholic beverages back then, and from the amount of booze being sold we have to conclude that a lot of people were drunk as lords by noon. We also have figures for prostitution, then generally legal. In Boston, a rather staid city, the ladies of the evening abounded in such numbers that we're forced to conclude a very large fraction of the male population were their patrons.
Quote: "But western countries like Britain are now needs-based societies run by empaths who wish to save humanity."
I'm saving that sentence for future use.
I don't agree. I think we're run by people who would like other people to see them as empaths who wish to save humanity, and who would like to think of themselves that way . . . but I think most of them are not at all that sort of person. When I think of "empaths who wish to save humanity" I think of people like Greta Thunberg or Jeremy Corbyn, not Sir Kier Starmer, Yvette Cooper et al.
Fanatics like Thunberg and Corbyn aren't empaths - just opinionated and bossy people who want everyone to dance to their tune and obey them.
Agreed. Young Greta is autistic and - ironically - most likely, lacks empathy.
Amazing article, Ed! One of your best 💪
thanks!
Good piece, Ed. Also worth noting that Chinese citizens report much greater satisfaction with their government than do citizens of major Western countries:
https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/is-china-more-democratic-than-the
Do we trust opinion polls out of China?
That issue is addressed in the article.
Any information coming out of unfree nations like China needs to be looked at with a very jaundiced eye. That Chinese fertile rates are swimming with bottom feeders suggests that people there are less than glowingly optimistic about life.
pretty much no one has cracked the fertility problem, it's true. China made a massive blunder with the one-child policy, and now attempts to encourage higher fertility look like coming to nothing.
The consequences of not being satisfied with the government are quite severe in China.
A really great piece.
"a worsening debt problem, a generational welfare Ponzi scheme, unaffordable housing, cities that look increasingly squalid and unsuited to families, widespread drug addiction, collapsing faith in shared institutions and unwelcome demographic change that has in turn spurred the rise of populism, polarisation and political instability."
This is an excellent summary of our predicament. Potentially, the demographic change element could be addressed with more democracy, as it's generally unelected institutions (NGOs, courts, civil servants, etc) who've enabled the open-borders situation. But the welfare-fuelled debt problem is much harder - the reason we have it is that so much of the voting public is in receipt of benefits now that withdrawing it is very difficult. I somewhat pessimistically think that only something catastrophic, like a 2008-style collapse or an IMF intervention, would provide cover for meaningful reforms in that direction.
Too right! The early to mid 1970s were much much worse than anything that followed in Britain - civil strife, blackouts, political inertia, terrorism, hooliganism, street robbery, etc etc. We still have some way to go…
Sizable gay community in Dubai, probably the second biggest in the Middle East outside Tel Aviv. It's the mecca for gay Arabs. Plenty of gay British expats living there as well, including cohabitating and married. UAE operates under a strict don't ask don't tell policy, keep it in the bedroom. And even the don't tell policy isn't enforced in general given the openness of the gay coworkers I had.
In a place like the UAE everyone knows what the rules, and in its way it's quite liberating as it can be easier to orient your life around clearly defined rules rather than shifting sands of social acceptability as is often the case in the West.
How do you know all of this? If I may ask! Btw, I’m from Dubai
“It’s the Mecca for gay Arabs”. I don’t think so. Morocco? Egypt? Beirut? Many other places (I’D IMAGINE!).
I think that it offers many things that attract gays and lesbians; an exquisite variety to choose a potential partner, the entertainment infrastructure is unparalleled in the region, rule of law, safety etc.
"As an example, air pollution in Beijing was seen as totemic of this dystopian state, reflecting a rush to modernisation without any consideration for quality of life. Yet Beijing’s smog is basically fixed, and the number of annual clear days has gone from 13 to 300." This is inaccurate, I do not care what the data says, I live in Beijing and have certainly dealt with rather significant smog. I cannot believe I have experienced 300 smogless days, particularly with how heavy it can be during the winter months.
Another minor note, you comment that not many people would consider moving to China, and while this may be true in the US, I have seen an increasing number of people from particularly the UK given the cost of living crisis, and many immigrants legal and in gray areas from South America, Africa, and the rest of asia (minus Japan and SK).
We in the west greatly underestimate the appeal of China, particularly of those in the global south and with skills China values higher than our western half. I make more here then I did as a University prof in the states after taxes, and with a much lower cost of living.
This was a particularly noteworthy and memorable article of yours. It is indeed sad how many of the elements of liberal democracies that were (real and supposed) strengths in the 20th Century are weaknesses in the 21st. One could say this about "Western Civilization" as a whole. A key reason for the "Great Divergence" of Western Europe (starting with the countries adjacent to the North Sea) from the rest of the world was its fragmented nature. The rivalry between differing nations and the polycentric nature preventing a monopoly on coercion enabled a culture of innovation as Walter Scheidel explored in his brilliant book, "Escape from Rome"
https://reason.com/2020/02/24/good-riddance-to-the-roman-empire/
https://sethporter.substack.com/p/the-legacy-of-rome
The large, land empires that dominated much of Asia by contrast became despotic and stagnant. Now countries like China have all the resources and land of a pre-modern empire and the fruits of industrial and post-industrial technologies unleashed by the polycentric, fragmentation of Europe. Being a patch-work of small states with, as you say, all sorts of property rights, checks and balances, etc, are now weaknesses of Western nations!
"Decisions are now increasingly made not by democratic institutions but by unelected arms-length bodies, the main block to us enforcing our borders, and the solution is surely to restore power to Parliament. Churchill was right that democracy was the least bad political system available - maybe we just need more of it."
At least it's not the EU Parliament. As Curtis Yarvin noted, "But when you basically… in the EU, they actually talk very explicitly about the democratic deficit, because the EU is the most undemocratic democracy ever devised. There’s this EU Parliament, which basically has the powers of Queen Elizabeth II, not the first. And then you have the European Commission, which is like the deep state, but it’s actually a better centralized, deep state. And everything comes from the European Commission, which is completely profoundly utterly… there isn’t even a pretense that these people are appointed by politicians. They just appoint themselves. It’s the final stage of oligarchy. And the thing is, once people realize that it’s actually fine… life in Europe now is basically fine. It kind of sucks in some ways there’s… it’s not sustainable. "
https://jimruttshow.blubrry.net/the-jim-rutt-show-transcripts/transcript-of-ep-160-curtis-yarvin-on-monarchy-in-the-u-s-a/
"Britain might be better run if our political class saw us as ‘merely an economic zone’, as The Critic regular Luca Watson put it:
‘If they thought of Britain as purely an economic zone, there would be no social housing in inner London, no intentional importation of Afghan refugee families, shoplifters would be shot, fracking would be widespread, equality laws scrapped, no bat tunnels or newt survey. Instead we have the opposite: a political class who view getting rich as vulgar and suspect, and who valorise moral commitments - to climate change, refugees, international treaties, ethnic and religious minorities - above all else, no matter the cost.’"
If only there could be what Curtis Yarvin described as a "British Meiji" by a king with Singapore-esque sensibilities:
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/an-english-meiji-sketch-of-a-royal
My birthday card to Singapore: https://www.johnderbyshire.com/Opinions/Straggler/119.html
Thinking of getting a portrait of LKY for my working spot so it can be prominently placed whenever I'm on zoom.
As you write, one of the greatest statesmen of the modern era.
Good piece Ed, but on the subject of how hard it is to get anything built in Britain because of our property rights. there are examples the other way as well.
Someone in my family was forced to sell his smallholding in mid-Cornwall when the local china clay company discovered that he had mineable concentrations of clay on the land and wanted to expand its operations into the area, and there are also reservoirs such as Rutland Water and Lake Vyrnwy in North Wales (that serves Liverpool) that were created by basically flooding out whole villages.
In the US too, Mayor Richard Daley (the first one) wasn't noted for taking too much notice of Chicago residents' objections when he wanted anything built. I'm not saying I agree with this approach, just making the point that that was how it was.
Curiously, a recent survey by Ipsos shows that the Chinese have the third highest level of ‘nihilism’ in the world measured by the % ‘living for today as the future is too uncertain’ https://www.ipsos.com/en/ipsos-global-trends-9th-edition-release Doesn’t detract from your main thesis however, it’s certainly correct when applied to Ireland.
Wow! I met today a subscriber to ‘The Wrong Side of History,’ a British gentleman living in the UAE, it was a riveting conversation; we touched upon many of the themes in this essay, and he told me many extraordinary things, like
1. He wished that Britain would benefit from the experience and ambition of Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid! (the ruler of Dubai)
Anyway, maybe he was being a bit influenced by meeting one of the locals (it’s alright, mate), but this tells you a lot about the current state of the dying liberal project in the UK!
I have a quick observation: there are many gays and lesbians in Dubai enjoying their lives and securing a better future, but of course, being part of a Muslim-majority country, it's frowned upon to have discussions of legalized rights or ‘Wokish’ displays of politicized identities, etc.
nice! Glad to hear you found another one!
I thought a lot about the issue of guest workers/migrants in the UAE, and I arrived at the scandalously illiberal conclusion that the UAE’s no-path-to-citizenship system works just fine! I mean, it's a win-win situation for everyone. For poor construction workers from South Asia, the UAE is a golden opportunity to improve their lot and break the cycle of generational poverty. For middle-class European, Arab, and Russian members of the managerial class, the UAE represents a pragmatic alternative to what they’re fleeing from! And for the locals, it’s a system that keeps buttressing our cozy lifestyle, without endangering the local Arab identity of the state! And for the rulers of the country, it’s a functioning model that diversifies the economy away from oil without threatening their legitimacy!
Of course, lots of people developed genuine ties to the place; we have second-generation Indians, Brits, and Palestinians here, but I would choose the political/social stability of the country any time, every time.
I wouldn't be surprised if the being "frowned upon to have … displays of politicized identities" wasn't the thing that attracted them.
I wouldn’t be surprised either :)
Usually, I don't comment but given the topic I can't resist. I have been trying to write an essay centring on that Churchill quote for a year but haven’t quite been able to finish it satisfactorily.
My view is that both despite and because of the stated liberal and democratic principles of most places in the west we have narrowed our beliefs of what democracy and freedom mean. There is a (social) media feedback loop that oversimplifies these concepts and creates blind spots. We can’t seem to countenance slight changes in the status quo, and hence are unable to learn from the successful parts of other systems. The popularity of the Churchill quote shows how people don’t really engage with questions of how a democracy should be run. It is used to claim superiority in practice not superiority in theory. This side-steps important principles. IMO the detail of it should matter, not only whether a country is ‘free and democratic’.
On China, it is somewhere I have spent a lot of time in the last few years. There is a lot to like about life there. It is difficult to make a direct comparison to the USA or Europe because the benefits and difficulties are so different in character. I would be happy enough to move there but that isn’t really an option. Immigration is extremely limited by rules that hinder permanent settlement, completely unlike Europe and North America. Although I would be happier to move to China than America the latter is more likely simply because of work visa and permanent residence rules.
I lived in Hong Kong for nine years (both sides of the Handover) and I can say with confidence that the absence of democracy as we in the West understand it was easily offset by the freedoms experienced in every other part of my life. As long as you played by an easy to understand set of rules, you experienced intoxicating levels of liberty.