Re '...we leave the EU, the immigration figures drop to 10s of thousands and we take no more refugees.' -- that's just utter bull manure! Simply glance at what a report on low-skilled migration (the biggest peeve here) for the goverment that will be still running this country after Brexit says:
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/333083/MAC-Migrants_in_low-skilled_work__Full_report_2014.pdf
As I said many pages ago, if you are solely basing your referendum decision on migration concerns, you'll be swallowing the economic pain for decades without getting anything near to what you want.
Doing some back-of-envelope calculations, I can't see net numbers falling dramatically below 125,000 - 180,000 (especially if more Brits find it difficult to work abroad past Brexit and stay yearly).
That's assuming student numbers take a dip, the war in Syria magically ends and you can persuade more unemployed persons to take up seasonal and unsteady jobs, which may or may not remain static in number.
Now, how many people from the 'desirable' Commonwealth do you wish to bring? Rough number? So, you end up at square one, only with the lower end of the bi-modal labour distribution ending up being shifted from one geographic region to another as the source. And sorry, I don't see Aussies, or other native English speakers, opting to come here to toil the fields or work in meat-packing. Those who do come now tend to concentrate in services, not manual labour via agencies.
Furthermore, lumping refugees together in with the economic migration within the EU is a gaping category error. We've always taken people in on humanitarian grounds, and granted asylum to those who needed it; neither process will stop regardless of where we end up in the world.
kitch9 said:
You arm flappers are funny.
Your head in the sand looks far more amusing.
RaohNS said:
Recessions are manufactured...
They aren't. You're assuming a broad conspiracy, in a sphere of human activity where network effects and incomplete decision making reigns supreme, and you're giving individual agents far more agency and control over events (as opposed to information and expectation about these events) than they really have.
But there are philosophical underpinnings for boom and bust (or more generally instabilities in the markets), or indeed people failing to heed them post-crisis. Off the top of my head the most egregious are:
1) Markets are natural phenomena in the same way any physical (macro-scale)system is; this allows you to borrow some modelling tools from Physics directly, but is a very idealised view for social systems.
2) Markets and agents in them are free, rational and always operate on sufficient (or complete, depending on your school of economics) information. This bit is borrowed wholesale from the cradle of game theory, and again fails badly when conditions become wobbly (stochastic) and time-constrained. Consider what happens in a burning building or a typical poker game.
3) Big market institutions can be considered as individuals in modelling and have no significant market-distorting effects. This is equivalent to asserting the weaker version of 'Monopolies are Good!'
4) Representatives of shared interests act for the rational benefit of their clients and not in their self-interest. This has been blown out of the water since 1997, or even earlier if you want to be harsh.
5) Markets 'naturally' tend to the most optimum equilibrium point. Scots and their invisible hands! It's an attractive notion, but doesn't pan out in reality as per (4) and (6).
6) False information from and errors of one agent do not affect expectations and positions of another agent. Sure, with infinite time all noise can be filtered effectively; trouble is that we have no infinite time in which to make our decisions.
7) More generally, the information we create by participating in the markets is decoupled from both the effects of our decisions and the events we observe; i.e. we do not shape the [social] reality we observe.
8) Linear models are better than non-linear models (or in common tongue: Simple solutions to complex problems are both possible and desirable). I guess intuitionist economists skip the applied maths class in which children learn to adjust their model when it fails disastrously. Linear is easy but requires bags of salt and lots of caution.
9) Markets apply to everything. You hear this line a lot in the States, and even the people who sputter it don't really comprehend what they are saying or believe it (i.e. they still find a sphere of human activity, be it family planning or crime, where moral judgements are necessary... and markets are amoral by definition -- they don't seek to answer what's right or wrong, only what's valuable and quantitatively optimal).
Taken separately, these can lose your hedge fund a few bob now and again but broadly work out in stable conditions. Taken together over an extended period of time, you get a bubble-laden see-saw and lots of head-scratching come turmoil (these core assumptions are infamous for producing prudence blind zones under pressure); followed by panic.
Still, I'm pro-capitalism in the same way I'm pro-democracy and pro-EU: three concrete systems that can be criticised and reformed, which work to structure society and shape our world. No better
concrete alternatives yet emerged. In particular, the Marxist critique is fun, until your realise its core assumptions are both always verifiable (apply to everything, describe everything and hence nothing) and never falsifiable (the theory can never be discarded in the face of new evidence or errors) -- utterly useless as an empirical theory of economics; and the challenges of economics do not disappear when you shift resources and means of production from one type of ownership to another, they are just obscured, as China, NK, Cuba and USSR discovered after their glorious uprisings.
I initially left out violence, but it is a pretty obvious consequence of ideals meeting a rather uncooperative reality, with emotion substituting for reason and a sound plan of action (which must be modifiable in the face of evidence and human error); irregardless of whether you prefer to swing blind from the left or the right.
