Big Sandwich

South Korea is distinctive in that it slipped into below-replacement territory in the 1980s but lately has been falling even more — dropping below one child per woman in 2018, to 0.8 after the pandemic, and now, in provisional data for both the second and third quarters of 2023, to just 0.7 births per woman.

A country that sustained a birthrate at that level would have, for every 200 people in one generation, 70 people in the next one, a depopulation exceeding what the Black Death delivered to Europe in the 14th century. Run the experiment through a second generational turnover, and your original 200-person population falls below 25. Run it again, and you’re nearing the kind of population crash caused by the fictional superflu in Stephen King’s “The Stand.”--nyt

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Results are consistent with the larger literature that finds “Across the developed world today, support for welfare, redistribution, and government provision of public goods is inversely correlated with the share of the population that is foreign-born and diverse.” (Nowrasteh and Forreseter 2020). Similarly, one explanation for the smaller US welfare state is that white-black salience reduces people’s interest in universal redistribution.

Contra Milton Friedman, it is possible to have open borders and a significant welfare state but it may be true that the demand for a welfare state declines with immigration, especially when the immigrants are saliently different.

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An interesting project trying to understand what young people in the West understand about Socialism.

A quote: There’s also the question of what its 21st-century supporters actually mean by “socialism.” The traditional definition—government controlling the means of production—garners the least support among socialist supporters today who, instead, think of socialism as more government programs or even a guaranteed minimum income.

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Big Sandwich

Some observations on the esteemed Sen. Elizabeth "Big Sandwich" Warren:

Elizabeth Warren's attack on America’s alleged “sandwich shop monopoly” scores new points for pettiness. It also shows just how broad (and therefore meaningless) the word “monopoly” has become in modern political discourse.

The FTC and the Senator will no doubt face a great deal of skepticism around the idea that Subway’s new owner can prevent competitor Jersey Mike’s from continuing to serve consumers. But there is a critical, logical point: how can any company exert monopoly control over a product that consumers easily make on their own? (culled from somewhere)

This silliness has no shame. And, like the testimony of the Ivy League presidents, it has a cult-like isolation and protection. All of those people thought they were making good points to Congress despite how insane it sounded. And so, too, with Big Sandwich.

Isolated, reinforced, uniform, hostile to opposition--these positions are as weak and inevitable as algae. The secret of their success is they are trivial and innocuous in small doses. And they never stop.