Like, you fully understand that you are misusing "flywheel," but you enjoy seeing engineers wince in pain?
Okay, I'll go over this once again: a flywheel does not accelerate the system around it. Instead, it acts against changes in velocity. It's just a big disc of concentrated inertia; it doesn't want to slow down, and it doesn't want to speed up. It does not want to speed up! It resists acceleration!!
If you want a system to enjoy positive feedback, so that inputs build on each other constructively and produce acceleration, then do not -- do not! -- put a flywheel into that system. It'll only slow you down.
I don’t object to metaphorical uses of language. If you want to say that, I don’t know, the Fed’s counter-cyclic policies act as a flywheel on the economy, then that will be accurate and illuminating: the Fed’s policies will smooth out the quick lurches and lags in the economy; they will tend to slow the economy down if it speeds up, and speed it up if it slows down. That’s what a flywheel does; its inertia smooths out the curve of velocity.
But flywheels are simply not a metaphor for positive feedback systems. You might as well step inside from a snowstorm and say, "it's as cold as a raging inferno out there!" You would only say that if you were completely ignorant of what raging infernos really are. And you would only think that flywheels are positive feedback mechanisms if you were completely ignorant of what a flywheel really is. Please, find a phrase that makes even minimal sense to the minimally well-informed. Please, don't torture engineers.
On the topic of pedantry, it can’t possibly be true that for most of human history most people were farmers, right? We’ve had agriculture for what, 10,000 years? Humans have been around for millions of years!
Given that agriculture can support many more people, its probable that there have been more people who lived in the agricultural period than all the time before. Therefore, in terms of total human hours, most of them have been farmers...
I do wonder, given this plus population growth and advancing tech, when we hit the point (since the start of recorded history or otherwise) were it is no longer true that most humans-who-ever-lived or human-life-years-experienced were spent farming.
Speaking as an engineer I also use the “flywheel” analogy to mean “virtuous cycle” despite knowing it is physically wrong, because people know what is meant by the idiomatic use.
It is one of those words like "decimate" that is incorrectly used by almost everyone. It now has a new meaning and the engineers just need to accept that about "flywheel" and get back to work. Back to work designing and building flywheels that accelerate exponentially!
I get your point, but a flywheel analogy seems rather apt to me in a more nuanced way.
The inertia contained in the spinning flywheel of abundance is culture and norms. The key for policymakers is to make sure flows of immigrants don't overwhelm the inertia of our culture and norms.
Flywheels are quadratic growth - the amount of effort you put in compounds because your old efforts are not lost. This is in contrast to linear growth, which is like dragging a bag of bricks. 1 unit of effort gives you 1 unit of progress.
You are complaining because people think flywheels mean exponential growth. The two look the same over short time scales so people mix them up a lot. Human brains have bad intuitions about what exponential growth really means, and usually picture exponential growth as closer to quadratic anyway (e.g. only 50 people in NYC have covid, it’s gonna take a long time before it gets to everyone). Second, people often apply the reverse fallacy to be overly optimistic. A company grows 70% year over year. The CEO assumes this will happen forever. But growth is 60% the next year and 40% the year after that. Something must be wrong with the company! But no, the underlying behavior was never exponential to begin with. So I think flywheels actually match real world behavior pretty often, except for population growth and economic growth.
I would be perfectly content with quadratic growth in housing construction, I don’t need it to be exponential. As long as it’s not like dragging a bag of bricks.
"Flywheels are quadratic growth - the amount of effort you put in compounds because your old efforts are not lost."
Huh? Flywheels don't magically remove whatever frictional forces are sapping energy from your system. They just slow the rate at which loss of energy translates to loss of velocity. If your inputs generate linear growth without a flywheel, then they'll generate linear growth with one too.
Good point. I most often hear “flywheel” used in the context of “once you get the thing going it’ll get easier,” which I think is pretty reasonable as a metaphor for many political things (strong bias against change). But you’re right, people are also using it in context that suggests “acceleration,” which is silly now that I think about it. Thanks for posting, I enjoyed noodling on this :)
Very similar. I hear in a context of small wins building momentum - so it’ll be hard to get started but east to maintain. Think about a business built on subscription revenue. To me a “virtuous circle” would be different. There the sequential inputs amplify.
The advantage of the flywheel here is that it smooths things out, many positive feedback systems actually get a bit scary, as an engineer you usually want negative feedback to keep things stable. So maybe resisting acceleration on the way up is a feature here. Would you rather “the epidemic of abundance”? “The atomic bomb of abundance”? “The Venusian greenhouse effect of abundance”?
"Spiral" would be the right word here, I believe. "The spiral of abundance"
"Spiral" definitions from Google:
"a progressive rise or fall of prices, wages, etc., each responding to an upward or downward stimulus provided by a previous one." -- "an inflationary spiral"
Isn't he saying that Malthusian fears are the flywheel though? Such that the system would be accelerating much more rapidly except for the Malthusian fears that slow that growth and prevent additional abundance? That's what I read his point about changing the rules to facilitate population growth to mean- he's saying that Malthusian fears about population growth are the flywheel preventing economic growth that would improve lives, and if you remove that flywheel then you would accelerate growth and improve improve lives even faster.
Or am I misreading what you're saying about what a flywheel is? As a lawyer, I am admittedly dimwitted on engineering, math, and all sorts of other actually useful bits of information ;)
"Isn't he saying that Malthusian fears are the flywheel though? Such that the system would be accelerating much more rapidly except for the Malthusian fears that slow that growth and prevent additional abundance?"
That would get the physics of flywheels right, but I'm afraid it is not what Matt is saying here. As David R. notes, there is an "idiomatic usage" of "flywheel" to mean "virtuous cycle," and Matt has used it in several previous columns.
Maybe in previous columns, but I still read that section the way you're defining the usage of the term above. He starts off the section with this passage:
"The irony is that Malthusian-inspired fear of new housing generates the Malthusian circumstance whereby an influx of new residents results in higher housing costs."
The influx of new residents (which should cause accelerating economic abundance) results in higher housing costs (decreasing the amount of abundance experienced) because of the drag that Malthusian fears cause on the potential for growth.
"Doing that would unlock a financial windfall for incumbent homeowners (they could sell their houses to developers and make a lot of money) and also ameliorate rent growth. People simply didn’t want to do it, so fear of an influx of people actually made the influx more problematic than it otherwise would have been."
Again, there is a financial windfall available to people, but it's being curtailed by the fear of the very thing that would result in the windfall. So the growth is being stymied by the fear, or, to put it using the terms you included above, the growth is decelerated by the Malthusian fears. So it still strikes me as an accurate use of the term if we read the section properly. I think it's useful to highlight that the whole point of the article is discussing the negative impacts of Malthusian outlooks rather than economic abundance. With that framing, the section headings are referring back to the central theme, which is Malthusian fears- again, under that view, that section is discussing how focusing on Malthusian fears is actively harming outcomes and decreasing the amount of economic prosperity and abundance societies are experiencing.
I agree with the piece and the policy prescriptions regarding growth. However I think it's helpful to look outside the US where we can (hopefully) be a bit more dispassionate.
Think about the situation in Sweden, where anti immigration sentiment has broadly been on the rise and changed their politics in important ways. It isn't hard to figure out the reason if you do a little digging. Since they have resettled huge numbers of people from Africa and the Middle East they have been experiencing hundreds of grenade and other explosive device attacks, linked to these communities. While not America, there has also been an increase in high profile homicides involving firearms (I know, in Europe where guns don't even exist!). They are still not remotely on American levels of criminal violence or homicide, but they've never experienced anything like it in modern times. Do we really have to wonder why this registers with people, perhaps more than technocratic arguments about growing prosperity, built on population growth? Even where those arguments are basically right? I don't think so.
What it says to me, is that in order for those technocratic arguments to prevail, the perception of immigration needs to be that it is orderly, and involves both assimilation and immigrants who are themselves very ready and willing to assimilate.
Our issues in the US are of course far less acute than Sweden, in the sense that we are not bringing in people from war zones with religious beliefs and customs that may be fundamentally incompatible with secular modernity. However, our immigrants do bring central American gangs and associated problems with them. And they do overwhelm immigration infrastructure in highly visible ways, to say nothing of the violation of peoples' fundamental sense of fairness when immigrants are allowed to enter and work illegally. Even a perfect immigration system will have opposition and there will be some xenophobia. But, as Matt is fond of reminding us, there are cross pressured voters and people can switch their preferences based on how issues of public policy are managed and presented.
>However, our immigrants do bring central American gangs and associated problems with them.<
It's possible Americans' views on immigration would grow more negative if the majority of its newcomers were (to use your phrase) "people from war zones with religious beliefs and customs that may be fundamentally incompatible with secular modernity." I might well be less gung ho about immigration myself were this the case.
But, just to correct what is perhaps a misperception: the overwhelming evidence, I think, suggests that, in the United States at least (though maybe not elsewhere), immigrants tend to be *more* law-abiding than native-born American citizens. This is likely a big part of the reason New York City enjoys relatively low rates of violent crime, for instance. It's also, I think, why the same can often be said of many places near the country's border with Mexico.
Donald Trump would love to have us all think otherwise, but immigrants don't make Americans unsafe.
I don't necessarily disagree as far as it goes but I think it also misses the argument. If the choice is a lot of peaceful immigrants but also MS-13 now operates in your city or no immigrants a significant number of people will pick no immigrants. If you want broad based support for a lot of immigrants you need to convince those people that the MS-13 base isn't inevitable.
Except MS-13 grew out of the particulars of how our immigration system interacted with Salvadoran politics at the end of the Cold War. It was founded in LA.
The peculiarities of how immigration enforcement helped MS -13 make it a bad example. The Italian Mafia would be a much better example. It was a clear case of an immigrant group bringing a pre-existing foreign criminal network into the US. The Wall Street bombing was carried out by an Italian anarchist. When the Italian Mafia started in the US, the seeds of Italian fascism were already coalescing. However, if a modern person today said that Italians shouldn't have been allowed to immigrate to the US, nobody would take such a person seriously today.
"However, if a modern person today said that Italians shouldn't have been allowed to immigrate to the US, nobody would take such a person seriously today."
I have little interest in 2nd-guessing the immigration choices from 100 years ago to say "should" or "shouldn't". But I am interested in learning from history and recognizing that Italian immigrants brought a form of organized crime with them that was uniquely dangerous to the state and costly to our shared prosperity. In some alternate history universe where the mafia grew from the 1970s instead of shrunk, it could have pushed us in a very bad direction.
I think it's worth recognizing that and not too easily shrugging our shoulders and saying "it all worked out for the best".
There's not an immigrant-based organized crime equivalent to the mafia that I'm aware of, unless MS-13 and the like is growing into aa more serious problem than I think, but if there were one I would take it seriously.
If we'd disallowed Italians the right to immigrate, we wouldn't have the Mafia! Problem solved, no? Kick all the Italians out? Individual people are collectively responsible for crimes committed by other members of their ethnic group?
Or if we hadn’t deported young men who grew up in LA to Central America in the 90s we also would have avoided it and those immigrants would likely be law abiding workers in the US.
No, gangs form because law enforcement policies in the area make the economics right. If the Salvadoreans hadn't been in LA to form MS-13, somebody else in LA would have done so, and they would have been deported to some other country. Chances are, that other country would also have had as weak a rule of law as El Salvador, and then we're back to same situation. (Now, it is true that if we had no immigration to LA/the US, then we couldn't have deported the members of this MS-13 analogue, b/c they'd all be US citizens. But do we really want to eliminate all immigration towards that end? It seems much easier just to reform LA policing to eliminate the tendency to form gangs.)
"No, gangs form because law enforcement policies in the area make the economics right."
Then why did the Italian Mafia form and grow into the form it took while Irish and Jewish mafias withered within a generation? The economics were almost entirely the same.
Also, economics in low-income LA is little different from other big cities, but the gang structures there are entirely different and much more organized and terriorial.
All of this stands for the proposition, which I think is correct, that aesthetic notions of pastoralism and purity and nostalgia are doing a lot of the work that Matt is instead assigning to Malthusian fears of scarcity.
The two are not the same thing, and I see more of the former on these issues. When you zoom narrowly in on NIMBY political activism there's a stronger note of that scarcity fear, especially around parking, but even there I think sheer resistance to change and things not being "the way they've always been" drives a lot of it.
Is crime a Malthusian concern? I don't think it is, because crime is more about safety than resources. Your point, while important for immigration policy, seems tangential to Matt's argument.
Absolutely. Immigration policy requires discernment and where applied well I think it really does create the kind of win-win scenario we all should want.
What we shouldn't be is blind to what happens in democratic societies when the policy seems to have become divorced from normal mechanics of popular government. If there's anything that Trump, Brexit, and the reinvigorated European far right should tell us it's that this particular issue when not dealt with well can be the source of cascading political crisis that are losses for everyone, and where the technocratic math won't work out the way it does on paper.
"Had Sweden taken in Vietnamese and Indians and Brazilians instead of its current mix, it would have fewer problems."
I think it's worth remembering that most Vietnamese/Indians/Brazilians emigrate voluntarily, whereas the Syrians did so relatively involuntarily. Voluntary immigrants typically have a plan for how to do better in their destination country, and a fewer ties to their homeland which makes it easier for them to immigrate. Involuntary immigrants may long for their homeland and find themselves adrift in their new home, both of which make it harder to assimilate and find a law-abiding profession.
(Incidentally, this suggests that a country which restricts immigration until most migrants are asylum-seekers might well be shooting itself in the foot.)
The biggest argument against taking in Vietnamese refugees, to the best of my knowledge, was that communist spies were going to sneak into the country as part of it. (I remember arguing with John Birch-types back in the 1990s on conspiracy forums about it. If any of them are still alive, I presume they will think "The Sympathizer" is a hard-hitting documentary when it comes out next year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5VwtC7Yvqo )
No, seriously, that's what these guys would argue if you pointed out that waiting 15+ years (this whole discussion took place after the fall of the Soviet Union!) to activate sleeper cells seemed like a dubious plan.
There's obviously good policy proposals about shifting to an immigration system that incentivizes the arrival of more doctors, etc, along with granting asylum to the people that need it. But total exclusion of certain groups is wrong and doesn't seem very American to me.
You may think it's "not American" to fear immigrants who view women as inferior, will make gay men fear walking the streets, and mean the Jews can no longer go to public schools. Many of your fellow Americans whose life will be ruined as a result will beg to differ.
The issue that I don't think these views are hereditary man. Just because some members of various ethnic groups feel that way doesn't mean their children will. Anyways, I don't see a problem with immigrants importing these kind of views *to the US* (I agree Europe is a different kettle of fish). Frankly, we have enough of these views from the natives.....
Of course, we can't exclude certain groups without specifying what they are. So which ethnicities or nationalities should be excluded from American society?
I don't think we need a blanket exclusion from some countries, but a much stricter standard for admission would be reasonable. I know a professor originally from Syria, for example, and it would have been a shame if he had *absolutely* no way to come.
I don't think that analogy works because African-Americans are already Americans by definition. It's a little like if you described a person with whatever sort of problem. If they were your sister or brother or kid it it would have to be a pretty horribly bad problem for most people to consider severing ties with them. But if the person was being considered for marriage INTO your family then that's another situation entirely.
>> there will always be a minority who dissent from their own cultures and who would be good fits for a Western life
Yes, but you need to propose a policy that actively seeks those out. I am reminded of the boat of refugees/migrants from ME where the muslim asylum seekrs on the boat pushed the christians out (to their death at sea!) before arriving to Europe's shores. The typical far leftiss can't conceive what most healthy adults know: you can be both a victims and a perpetrator at the very same time, both have bad and unjust things happen to you and be unjust, both be a victim of bigotry and racism and a bigot and racist etc. etc.
I know multiple people here in Boise that complain about the fast growth that's happening here, and just wish that it would either stop, or they could move to some place smaller. Eventually with one of these people, it got to the point where I said "Well, if you're whining about wanting to move so much, why don't you do it?" He said that aren't enough jobs in where he wants to move. So I asked him why that is. He eventually said there's not enough customers where he wants to move. So I observed what can create more customers. At this point he senses I've used economist brain on him, he knows the answer is "growth", and he says he can't wait to be able to retire to he doesn't have to worry about that and can go off to his super small town paradise.
I let the conversation end at that point, but even then, that's not enough. I think it demonstrates that being able to thrive in a low population community means that you have some sort of established privilege of wealth that gives you the resources to thrive in such a community. But even then, who is going to produce the goods and services you want to consume with your wealth? People!
I'm one of these people, in that I strongly dislike being in high density areas. Like...I don't want to deal with the traffic, and definitely not public transport, and definitely definitely not direct personal proximity to other people.
That being said, I like having a good paying job and some minimal access to the goods and services that an urban center provides.
So I like living in the distant periphery of urban areas. Access (though not close/easy) and yet away from most people.
Increased growth/density pushes what was formerly a peripheral area into the core, and I hate that, and it inconveniences me because I have to either deal with the hated proximity to others, or uproot and move further out (only for the process to repeat in 10-15 years).
It's not the end of the world, but I don't like it. And while I rationally know that the world is not static and I have to deal with it to some extent, that doesn't mean that I'm not going to resist to a certain degree.
If the country embraced Matt's One Billion Americans concept and immigration skyrocketed...the peripheral area-to-core transition process is going to accelerate.
Which means that I cannot reasonably adapt by moving further out. It would be too frequent and the recurring cost would be too high.
I suspect that a lot of people like me have at least some dim intuition of the process, and even though they cannot verbalize it, they know it is real and it drives resistance.
I think even most of the commentariat here isn’t actually literally in favor of 1 billion people here.
I have been there and done that and am deeply aware of the trade-offs of those sorts of population densities.
I support a combination of pro-natalist policy (and cultural norms) and immigration that lets us hit the 2000’s projection of 450-500 million Americans at century’s end, with a balance tilted towards skilled immigrants that enhances strategic competitiveness, increases growth, and supercharges demand for working class labor to force wage compression.
No more is necessary and too much more is undesirable.
"I think even most of the commentariat here isn’t actually literally in favor of 1 billion people here."
Raises hand - I'm down for it. Amusingly, I'm probably closer to Belisarius point of view than you are based on your discussions about living in Philly. But the key thing is that if you actually followed Matt's prescriptions on zoning and allowing density, then you would have places get much more dense, but still have lots of exurbs that weren't that densely populated.
"The flywheel of abundance"
Do you do this because you just hate engineers?
Like, you fully understand that you are misusing "flywheel," but you enjoy seeing engineers wince in pain?
Okay, I'll go over this once again: a flywheel does not accelerate the system around it. Instead, it acts against changes in velocity. It's just a big disc of concentrated inertia; it doesn't want to slow down, and it doesn't want to speed up. It does not want to speed up! It resists acceleration!!
If you want a system to enjoy positive feedback, so that inputs build on each other constructively and produce acceleration, then do not -- do not! -- put a flywheel into that system. It'll only slow you down.
I don’t object to metaphorical uses of language. If you want to say that, I don’t know, the Fed’s counter-cyclic policies act as a flywheel on the economy, then that will be accurate and illuminating: the Fed’s policies will smooth out the quick lurches and lags in the economy; they will tend to slow the economy down if it speeds up, and speed it up if it slows down. That’s what a flywheel does; its inertia smooths out the curve of velocity.
But flywheels are simply not a metaphor for positive feedback systems. You might as well step inside from a snowstorm and say, "it's as cold as a raging inferno out there!" You would only say that if you were completely ignorant of what raging infernos really are. And you would only think that flywheels are positive feedback mechanisms if you were completely ignorant of what a flywheel really is. Please, find a phrase that makes even minimal sense to the minimally well-informed. Please, don't torture engineers.
Wheels make things go faster,but what about a flying wheel? Super fast!
Seriously, I love this kind of pedantry. All chaps are assless!
On the topic of pedantry, it can’t possibly be true that for most of human history most people were farmers, right? We’ve had agriculture for what, 10,000 years? Humans have been around for millions of years!
"...it can’t possibly be true that for most of human history most people were farmers, right? ...Humans have been around for millions of years!"
Pedantically speaking, most of those millions of years constitute the prehistory of humanity, i.e. before the era of recorded history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistory
So, during the historical era, sc. since the rise of writing systems, most people were farmers.
Homo sapiens have been a distinct species for a couple hundred thousand years, most of which were spent as hunter-gatherers.
Yes, but we call them “prehistoric” for a reason.
"Yes, but we call them “prehistoric” for a reason."
Exactly: because it *really* irritates them.
Came here to pedant this.
Given that agriculture can support many more people, its probable that there have been more people who lived in the agricultural period than all the time before. Therefore, in terms of total human hours, most of them have been farmers...
I do wonder, given this plus population growth and advancing tech, when we hit the point (since the start of recorded history or otherwise) were it is no longer true that most humans-who-ever-lived or human-life-years-experienced were spent farming.
Speaking as an engineer I also use the “flywheel” analogy to mean “virtuous cycle” despite knowing it is physically wrong, because people know what is meant by the idiomatic use.
Right. And that's what people don't get. Language is about communication. It isn't a logical system and doesn't have to be.
If people understand the meaning conveyed, language has served its purpose even if the analogy is faulty.
It is one of those words like "decimate" that is incorrectly used by almost everyone. It now has a new meaning and the engineers just need to accept that about "flywheel" and get back to work. Back to work designing and building flywheels that accelerate exponentially!
It’s the exception that (doesn’t) prove the rule
I think you're just throwing a flywheel into the ointment
"...throwing a flywheel into the ointment."
No, no -- that's just a mixed semaphore.
Keep butchering the English language like this and you're going to make some real anemones.
"...you're going to make some real anemones."
It's not my fault -- I never went to school, because I was an urchin!
I get your point, but a flywheel analogy seems rather apt to me in a more nuanced way.
The inertia contained in the spinning flywheel of abundance is culture and norms. The key for policymakers is to make sure flows of immigrants don't overwhelm the inertia of our culture and norms.
Would you prefer a treadmill of abundance?
I was with you right up until the last sentence. As someone with an engineer sibling, "don't torture the engineers, is just too big an ask.
""don't torture the engineers, is just too big an ask."
Don't torture them linguistically? Go straight to the practicum?
In defense of the flywheel
Flywheels are quadratic growth - the amount of effort you put in compounds because your old efforts are not lost. This is in contrast to linear growth, which is like dragging a bag of bricks. 1 unit of effort gives you 1 unit of progress.
You are complaining because people think flywheels mean exponential growth. The two look the same over short time scales so people mix them up a lot. Human brains have bad intuitions about what exponential growth really means, and usually picture exponential growth as closer to quadratic anyway (e.g. only 50 people in NYC have covid, it’s gonna take a long time before it gets to everyone). Second, people often apply the reverse fallacy to be overly optimistic. A company grows 70% year over year. The CEO assumes this will happen forever. But growth is 60% the next year and 40% the year after that. Something must be wrong with the company! But no, the underlying behavior was never exponential to begin with. So I think flywheels actually match real world behavior pretty often, except for population growth and economic growth.
I would be perfectly content with quadratic growth in housing construction, I don’t need it to be exponential. As long as it’s not like dragging a bag of bricks.
"Flywheels are quadratic growth - the amount of effort you put in compounds because your old efforts are not lost."
Huh? Flywheels don't magically remove whatever frictional forces are sapping energy from your system. They just slow the rate at which loss of energy translates to loss of velocity. If your inputs generate linear growth without a flywheel, then they'll generate linear growth with one too.
I think I overcomplicated it. I’m just saying bikes are better than walking.
Thank you.
This is, in fact, what the idiom refers to.
Good point. I most often hear “flywheel” used in the context of “once you get the thing going it’ll get easier,” which I think is pretty reasonable as a metaphor for many political things (strong bias against change). But you’re right, people are also using it in context that suggests “acceleration,” which is silly now that I think about it. Thanks for posting, I enjoyed noodling on this :)
Very similar. I hear in a context of small wins building momentum - so it’ll be hard to get started but east to maintain. Think about a business built on subscription revenue. To me a “virtuous circle” would be different. There the sequential inputs amplify.
The advantage of the flywheel here is that it smooths things out, many positive feedback systems actually get a bit scary, as an engineer you usually want negative feedback to keep things stable. So maybe resisting acceleration on the way up is a feature here. Would you rather “the epidemic of abundance”? “The atomic bomb of abundance”? “The Venusian greenhouse effect of abundance”?
"Would you rather “the epidemic of abundance”? “The atomic bomb of abundance”? "
The criticality accident of abundance. It's raining neutrons!
"We're gonna abundance the shit out of you!"
you say "rubble bounce," I say "abundance," it's all the same.
But growth is the first derivative of output. If it is sufficiently positive, the flywheel method is ideal.
He did correctly use "raise the question", instead of the common, and incorrect, "begs the question". I really, really apreciate that.
"Spiral" would be the right word here, I believe. "The spiral of abundance"
"Spiral" definitions from Google:
"a progressive rise or fall of prices, wages, etc., each responding to an upward or downward stimulus provided by a previous one." -- "an inflationary spiral"
"show a continuous and dramatic increase."
"decrease or deteriorate continuously."
I too enjoy pendantry, and in that spirit I will note that the last para should read "But flywheeLS..." (plural, not possessive).
Please don't torture the editors either. Carry on! 😉
Thank you! Edited to remove the vagrant apostrophe.
SBers united in pedantry!
Also thank you for the post, I'm not an engineer and TIL a lot about flywheels!
Isn't he saying that Malthusian fears are the flywheel though? Such that the system would be accelerating much more rapidly except for the Malthusian fears that slow that growth and prevent additional abundance? That's what I read his point about changing the rules to facilitate population growth to mean- he's saying that Malthusian fears about population growth are the flywheel preventing economic growth that would improve lives, and if you remove that flywheel then you would accelerate growth and improve improve lives even faster.
Or am I misreading what you're saying about what a flywheel is? As a lawyer, I am admittedly dimwitted on engineering, math, and all sorts of other actually useful bits of information ;)
"Isn't he saying that Malthusian fears are the flywheel though? Such that the system would be accelerating much more rapidly except for the Malthusian fears that slow that growth and prevent additional abundance?"
That would get the physics of flywheels right, but I'm afraid it is not what Matt is saying here. As David R. notes, there is an "idiomatic usage" of "flywheel" to mean "virtuous cycle," and Matt has used it in several previous columns.
Maybe in previous columns, but I still read that section the way you're defining the usage of the term above. He starts off the section with this passage:
"The irony is that Malthusian-inspired fear of new housing generates the Malthusian circumstance whereby an influx of new residents results in higher housing costs."
The influx of new residents (which should cause accelerating economic abundance) results in higher housing costs (decreasing the amount of abundance experienced) because of the drag that Malthusian fears cause on the potential for growth.
"Doing that would unlock a financial windfall for incumbent homeowners (they could sell their houses to developers and make a lot of money) and also ameliorate rent growth. People simply didn’t want to do it, so fear of an influx of people actually made the influx more problematic than it otherwise would have been."
Again, there is a financial windfall available to people, but it's being curtailed by the fear of the very thing that would result in the windfall. So the growth is being stymied by the fear, or, to put it using the terms you included above, the growth is decelerated by the Malthusian fears. So it still strikes me as an accurate use of the term if we read the section properly. I think it's useful to highlight that the whole point of the article is discussing the negative impacts of Malthusian outlooks rather than economic abundance. With that framing, the section headings are referring back to the central theme, which is Malthusian fears- again, under that view, that section is discussing how focusing on Malthusian fears is actively harming outcomes and decreasing the amount of economic prosperity and abundance societies are experiencing.
"Maybe in previous columns, but I still read that section the way you're defining the usage of the term above."
I like this reading! If that's what Matt intended, then I apologize to him, profusely.
I agree with the piece and the policy prescriptions regarding growth. However I think it's helpful to look outside the US where we can (hopefully) be a bit more dispassionate.
Think about the situation in Sweden, where anti immigration sentiment has broadly been on the rise and changed their politics in important ways. It isn't hard to figure out the reason if you do a little digging. Since they have resettled huge numbers of people from Africa and the Middle East they have been experiencing hundreds of grenade and other explosive device attacks, linked to these communities. While not America, there has also been an increase in high profile homicides involving firearms (I know, in Europe where guns don't even exist!). They are still not remotely on American levels of criminal violence or homicide, but they've never experienced anything like it in modern times. Do we really have to wonder why this registers with people, perhaps more than technocratic arguments about growing prosperity, built on population growth? Even where those arguments are basically right? I don't think so.
What it says to me, is that in order for those technocratic arguments to prevail, the perception of immigration needs to be that it is orderly, and involves both assimilation and immigrants who are themselves very ready and willing to assimilate.
Our issues in the US are of course far less acute than Sweden, in the sense that we are not bringing in people from war zones with religious beliefs and customs that may be fundamentally incompatible with secular modernity. However, our immigrants do bring central American gangs and associated problems with them. And they do overwhelm immigration infrastructure in highly visible ways, to say nothing of the violation of peoples' fundamental sense of fairness when immigrants are allowed to enter and work illegally. Even a perfect immigration system will have opposition and there will be some xenophobia. But, as Matt is fond of reminding us, there are cross pressured voters and people can switch their preferences based on how issues of public policy are managed and presented.
>However, our immigrants do bring central American gangs and associated problems with them.<
It's possible Americans' views on immigration would grow more negative if the majority of its newcomers were (to use your phrase) "people from war zones with religious beliefs and customs that may be fundamentally incompatible with secular modernity." I might well be less gung ho about immigration myself were this the case.
But, just to correct what is perhaps a misperception: the overwhelming evidence, I think, suggests that, in the United States at least (though maybe not elsewhere), immigrants tend to be *more* law-abiding than native-born American citizens. This is likely a big part of the reason New York City enjoys relatively low rates of violent crime, for instance. It's also, I think, why the same can often be said of many places near the country's border with Mexico.
Donald Trump would love to have us all think otherwise, but immigrants don't make Americans unsafe.
I don't necessarily disagree as far as it goes but I think it also misses the argument. If the choice is a lot of peaceful immigrants but also MS-13 now operates in your city or no immigrants a significant number of people will pick no immigrants. If you want broad based support for a lot of immigrants you need to convince those people that the MS-13 base isn't inevitable.
Except MS-13 grew out of the particulars of how our immigration system interacted with Salvadoran politics at the end of the Cold War. It was founded in LA.
Do you think that hurts or helps the argument I am making?
The peculiarities of how immigration enforcement helped MS -13 make it a bad example. The Italian Mafia would be a much better example. It was a clear case of an immigrant group bringing a pre-existing foreign criminal network into the US. The Wall Street bombing was carried out by an Italian anarchist. When the Italian Mafia started in the US, the seeds of Italian fascism were already coalescing. However, if a modern person today said that Italians shouldn't have been allowed to immigrate to the US, nobody would take such a person seriously today.
"However, if a modern person today said that Italians shouldn't have been allowed to immigrate to the US, nobody would take such a person seriously today."
I have little interest in 2nd-guessing the immigration choices from 100 years ago to say "should" or "shouldn't". But I am interested in learning from history and recognizing that Italian immigrants brought a form of organized crime with them that was uniquely dangerous to the state and costly to our shared prosperity. In some alternate history universe where the mafia grew from the 1970s instead of shrunk, it could have pushed us in a very bad direction.
I think it's worth recognizing that and not too easily shrugging our shoulders and saying "it all worked out for the best".
There's not an immigrant-based organized crime equivalent to the mafia that I'm aware of, unless MS-13 and the like is growing into aa more serious problem than I think, but if there were one I would take it seriously.
Sounds like disallowing Salvadorans the right to immigrate would have avoided this problem entirely.
If we'd disallowed Italians the right to immigrate, we wouldn't have the Mafia! Problem solved, no? Kick all the Italians out? Individual people are collectively responsible for crimes committed by other members of their ethnic group?
Or if we hadn’t deported young men who grew up in LA to Central America in the 90s we also would have avoided it and those immigrants would likely be law abiding workers in the US.
Especially since the fast and chaotic way the deportations were carried out played a role in the growth of the gang.
No, gangs form because law enforcement policies in the area make the economics right. If the Salvadoreans hadn't been in LA to form MS-13, somebody else in LA would have done so, and they would have been deported to some other country. Chances are, that other country would also have had as weak a rule of law as El Salvador, and then we're back to same situation. (Now, it is true that if we had no immigration to LA/the US, then we couldn't have deported the members of this MS-13 analogue, b/c they'd all be US citizens. But do we really want to eliminate all immigration towards that end? It seems much easier just to reform LA policing to eliminate the tendency to form gangs.)
"No, gangs form because law enforcement policies in the area make the economics right."
Then why did the Italian Mafia form and grow into the form it took while Irish and Jewish mafias withered within a generation? The economics were almost entirely the same.
Also, economics in low-income LA is little different from other big cities, but the gang structures there are entirely different and much more organized and terriorial.
Can you link your sources? Genuinely curious.
Thanks!
All of this stands for the proposition, which I think is correct, that aesthetic notions of pastoralism and purity and nostalgia are doing a lot of the work that Matt is instead assigning to Malthusian fears of scarcity.
The two are not the same thing, and I see more of the former on these issues. When you zoom narrowly in on NIMBY political activism there's a stronger note of that scarcity fear, especially around parking, but even there I think sheer resistance to change and things not being "the way they've always been" drives a lot of it.
Is crime a Malthusian concern? I don't think it is, because crime is more about safety than resources. Your point, while important for immigration policy, seems tangential to Matt's argument.
It’s so depressing how western elites basically refuse to acknowledge this until it’s too late and they’re replaced by the far right.
Egalitarianism acknowledges gaps and seeks to close them. This is more accurately to be termed cultural nihilism.
“Are” and “should be” aren’t the same thing, and most of the time they are in fact contradictory propositions.
Absolutely. Immigration policy requires discernment and where applied well I think it really does create the kind of win-win scenario we all should want.
What we shouldn't be is blind to what happens in democratic societies when the policy seems to have become divorced from normal mechanics of popular government. If there's anything that Trump, Brexit, and the reinvigorated European far right should tell us it's that this particular issue when not dealt with well can be the source of cascading political crisis that are losses for everyone, and where the technocratic math won't work out the way it does on paper.
Did he? Poilievre is blaming rising cost of living on housing!
"Had Sweden taken in Vietnamese and Indians and Brazilians instead of its current mix, it would have fewer problems."
I think it's worth remembering that most Vietnamese/Indians/Brazilians emigrate voluntarily, whereas the Syrians did so relatively involuntarily. Voluntary immigrants typically have a plan for how to do better in their destination country, and a fewer ties to their homeland which makes it easier for them to immigrate. Involuntary immigrants may long for their homeland and find themselves adrift in their new home, both of which make it harder to assimilate and find a law-abiding profession.
(Incidentally, this suggests that a country which restricts immigration until most migrants are asylum-seekers might well be shooting itself in the foot.)
I mean, did we think that about the Vietnamese when they came here, or did we think they’d be parasites? I genuinely don’t know.
The biggest argument against taking in Vietnamese refugees, to the best of my knowledge, was that communist spies were going to sneak into the country as part of it. (I remember arguing with John Birch-types back in the 1990s on conspiracy forums about it. If any of them are still alive, I presume they will think "The Sympathizer" is a hard-hitting documentary when it comes out next year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5VwtC7Yvqo )
One of my favorite books, though the author is nuts. 😍
But would this really be different than refusing to accept Muslims because they might be terrorists?
tEHy ARe lULliNG uS IntO cOMpLaCeNcy!!1!!
No, seriously, that's what these guys would argue if you pointed out that waiting 15+ years (this whole discussion took place after the fall of the Soviet Union!) to activate sleeper cells seemed like a dubious plan.
Much like Cuban-Americans, and I presume for similar reasons!
There's obviously good policy proposals about shifting to an immigration system that incentivizes the arrival of more doctors, etc, along with granting asylum to the people that need it. But total exclusion of certain groups is wrong and doesn't seem very American to me.
You may think it's "not American" to fear immigrants who view women as inferior, will make gay men fear walking the streets, and mean the Jews can no longer go to public schools. Many of your fellow Americans whose life will be ruined as a result will beg to differ.
The issue that I don't think these views are hereditary man. Just because some members of various ethnic groups feel that way doesn't mean their children will. Anyways, I don't see a problem with immigrants importing these kind of views *to the US* (I agree Europe is a different kettle of fish). Frankly, we have enough of these views from the natives.....
Of course, we can't exclude certain groups without specifying what they are. So which ethnicities or nationalities should be excluded from American society?
I don't think we need a blanket exclusion from some countries, but a much stricter standard for admission would be reasonable. I know a professor originally from Syria, for example, and it would have been a shame if he had *absolutely* no way to come.
I don't think that analogy works because African-Americans are already Americans by definition. It's a little like if you described a person with whatever sort of problem. If they were your sister or brother or kid it it would have to be a pretty horribly bad problem for most people to consider severing ties with them. But if the person was being considered for marriage INTO your family then that's another situation entirely.
>> there will always be a minority who dissent from their own cultures and who would be good fits for a Western life
Yes, but you need to propose a policy that actively seeks those out. I am reminded of the boat of refugees/migrants from ME where the muslim asylum seekrs on the boat pushed the christians out (to their death at sea!) before arriving to Europe's shores. The typical far leftiss can't conceive what most healthy adults know: you can be both a victims and a perpetrator at the very same time, both have bad and unjust things happen to you and be unjust, both be a victim of bigotry and racism and a bigot and racist etc. etc.
Just to nitpick, I wouldn't say necessarily smarter but definitely more resourceful and resilient.
To bad elite unviersities now increasingly refuse to look at SATs!
I know multiple people here in Boise that complain about the fast growth that's happening here, and just wish that it would either stop, or they could move to some place smaller. Eventually with one of these people, it got to the point where I said "Well, if you're whining about wanting to move so much, why don't you do it?" He said that aren't enough jobs in where he wants to move. So I asked him why that is. He eventually said there's not enough customers where he wants to move. So I observed what can create more customers. At this point he senses I've used economist brain on him, he knows the answer is "growth", and he says he can't wait to be able to retire to he doesn't have to worry about that and can go off to his super small town paradise.
I let the conversation end at that point, but even then, that's not enough. I think it demonstrates that being able to thrive in a low population community means that you have some sort of established privilege of wealth that gives you the resources to thrive in such a community. But even then, who is going to produce the goods and services you want to consume with your wealth? People!
I'm one of these people, in that I strongly dislike being in high density areas. Like...I don't want to deal with the traffic, and definitely not public transport, and definitely definitely not direct personal proximity to other people.
That being said, I like having a good paying job and some minimal access to the goods and services that an urban center provides.
So I like living in the distant periphery of urban areas. Access (though not close/easy) and yet away from most people.
Increased growth/density pushes what was formerly a peripheral area into the core, and I hate that, and it inconveniences me because I have to either deal with the hated proximity to others, or uproot and move further out (only for the process to repeat in 10-15 years).
It's not the end of the world, but I don't like it. And while I rationally know that the world is not static and I have to deal with it to some extent, that doesn't mean that I'm not going to resist to a certain degree.
Yeah, I don't have a problem with people disliking things--we all do!--as long as we acknowledge tradeoffs, which you do here.
I think it's a rate of growth thing.
If the country embraced Matt's One Billion Americans concept and immigration skyrocketed...the peripheral area-to-core transition process is going to accelerate.
Which means that I cannot reasonably adapt by moving further out. It would be too frequent and the recurring cost would be too high.
I suspect that a lot of people like me have at least some dim intuition of the process, and even though they cannot verbalize it, they know it is real and it drives resistance.
I think even most of the commentariat here isn’t actually literally in favor of 1 billion people here.
I have been there and done that and am deeply aware of the trade-offs of those sorts of population densities.
I support a combination of pro-natalist policy (and cultural norms) and immigration that lets us hit the 2000’s projection of 450-500 million Americans at century’s end, with a balance tilted towards skilled immigrants that enhances strategic competitiveness, increases growth, and supercharges demand for working class labor to force wage compression.
No more is necessary and too much more is undesirable.
"I think even most of the commentariat here isn’t actually literally in favor of 1 billion people here."
Raises hand - I'm down for it. Amusingly, I'm probably closer to Belisarius point of view than you are based on your discussions about living in Philly. But the key thing is that if you actually followed Matt's prescriptions on zoning and allowing density, then you would have places get much more dense, but still have lots of exurbs that weren't that densely populated.