On woke capitalism

Just because you are an idiot doesn't mean you are always wrong. So it is with James Cleverly's denunciation of Ben & Jerry's "virtue-signalling" after the company spoke out against the government's ill-treatment of migrants.

The thing is, he was right. Ben & Jerry's fine words contrast with the company's reluctance to improve the rights of its own workers until it came under huge pressure to do so - thereby demonstrating the truth of Marx's claim that "capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the labourer, unless under compulsion from society."

But of course, Ben & Jerry's are not alone in their hypocrisy. Amazon (among many other companies) has spoken in support of Black Live Matter despite being a notoriously bad employer. Facebook and Twitter bosses have supported BLM whilst allowing race hate speech on their sites. Starbucks enthusiasm for being "an ally to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer community" is matched by its enthusiasm for avoiding tax. And as Sarah O'Connor points out, several "sustainable" fund managers are better at PR than at actually forcing improvements in working conditions. And so on and so on.

Blackwashing is the new greenwashing. Luke Savage is right. What we're seeing here is "the commodification of social justice" - using virtue-signalling to shift more product. Sometimes, the twin goals of capitalism - raising profits and trying to legitimate the system - happen to coincide.

All of which poses the question: is "woke capitalism" feasible or even desirable?

Certainly, capitalism has historically been associated with patriarchy, racism and slavery - although the contribution of the latter to capitalism is still a matter of debate. But of course, so too have been other modes of production.

The question is: are racism and sexism inherent features of capitalism?

There are two reasons to suspect so. One is that racism fulfils a useful function by dividing the working class and promoting national identity at the expense of class consciousness: Tory and media attempts to stir up anti-migrant feeling whilst employment is collapsing is just the latest example of this.

The other is that in capitalism those with little bargaining power lose out relative to others - which means that women and migrant workers often get a raw deal. In this context, the idea that sexism and racism could be eliminated if only capitalists were more woke is a mistake. Some injustices arise from emergent processes independent of intentions. As Marx wrote:

[The fate of the worker] does not, indeed, depend on the good or ill will of the individual capitalist. Free competition brings out the inherent laws of capitalist production, in the shape of external coercive laws having power over every individual capitalist.

Granted, some have been more optimistic about these external coercive laws. Gary Becker, for example, thought that competition could eliminate discrimination - although it seems it is yet to actually do so.

Let's assume, however, that all this is wrong and that capitalism could be woke, in the sense that there were no gender or ethnic pay gaps, that women and minorities were as likely to achieve prominent positions as white men, and that there was no racism or sexism in the workplace. What then?

Well, every criticism Marx made of capitalism would still be on the table. Marx did not criticise capitalism because of its racism and sexism* - a fact that has historically led some Marxists to understate the importance of these. Instead, his complaints were that it was alienating, oppressive, a force for inequalities in wealth and power, and prone to crises and stagnation. The fact that capitalism currently works to the disproportionate benefit of mediocre white men is but one of its flaws.

Of course, you can deny the force of these criticisms. But the point is that Marx's critique of capitalism is independent of racism and sexism. Even if we had the most perfectly woke capitalism, Marxists would find huge problems with the system. (I think rightly, but that's by the by.)

All of which is to endorse Helen Lewis's point, that there's a big difference between social and economic radicalism. Some - maybe many - capitalists might be the former, perhaps sincerely. But they are not the latter.

* With the caveat that the process of primitive accumulation was often accompanied by racism.

Comments

[MJW]

Terms like "blackwashing" and "greenwashing" are hilariously ironic given they're promoted by people making a professional living commercially strip mining social justice.

How do we stop this? Perhaps these evil corporations could purchase services, accreditations and endorsements from suitably qualified purveyors of social justice? Oh, if only there were such enterprising and entrpreneurial woke people out there!

Perhaps the author should consider whether the commodification of social justice really begins with corporate virtue signalling? It's not consumers who decide if the benchmark of virtue has been hit. It's the social justice entrepreneurs who do that.

[Staberinde]

Chris, by your argument only saints can support progressive causes.

You're effectively supporting Cleverly in playing the man and not the ball.

Is there any organisation so innocent? Or are you going to discount anything Save The Children and MSF say about global inequality and refugees' healthcare, because of sexual abuse and racism, respectively?

When the NHS says people from BAME communities suffer disproportionately from Covid-19, will you accuse them of distracting from scandals like Mid Staffs?

You're always banging on about cognitive biases. Perhaps you should re-examine your visceral antipathy to big brands and ask whether the arguments you make against them hold up when generalised?

To paraphrase your opening line: just because you're a tax-dodging bad employer, doesn't mean you're always wrong.

[Hugh Mann]

"racism fulfils a useful function by dividing the working class and promoting national identity at the expense of class consciousness"

At that point I don't need to read on. You've got the whole caboodle base over apex. Diversity (aka imported cheap labour) is what divides the working class, which is why big firms love it, and why I have mandatory diversity training each year.

I guess your continued employment depends on you not seeing what's in front of your face.

If you look at the Annual Survey of Hours and Earning for 1997 and 2017, you'll see that median male weekly earnings were £357.60 in 1997, and £594.10 in 2017, but factor in inflation (from the BoE site) and our median male would need to earn £619 to stand still, so male wages have fallen over 20 years. In that same timeframe real house prices have doubled.

This happens to coincide with the opening of Eastern Europe A8, and a couple of million people hitting the labour market.

Also in that time real GDP has risen 50% (St Louis Fed site)- but none of the benefits of that have accrued to wage earners.

No wonder our employers love immigration and hate 'racism'.

[Paulc156]

@ Hugh Mann.
Need only to read halfway through your own post so obvious it was as to where it was heading.

Racism supplanting class consciousness is still a perfectly valid explantation for the two items you juxtapose. Namely a growing GDP and falling share of it going to wages.
You've just chosen your preferred causal mechanism from your pair of correlates.
If capital seeks to rescue profits from the masses, that it would seek to do so by freeing up migratory labour, liberating international capital flows, hammering unions is precisely what we should expect.

Subsequently, opportunistic and craven political class would seek to deflect the inevitable backlash and profit from it by choosing to encourage the view that the whole messy business is the fault of left wing politicians and European beaurocrats.
So vote for raving xenophobe party or the traditional party of big business (Tory) who will sort it out for you.

No need to tinker too much with the capitalist machinery.

[The truth]

@Paulc156
@Hugh Mann’s explanation is supported by history, facts, and law of supply and demand.

Even someone with basic economics knows that

1. Labour is businesses biggest cost
2. If you increase the supply of something, in this case labour, you decrease the price

Big business everywhere loves immigration, workers not so much. And in most countries it is the left who are more pro immigration. Can you name a mainstream left wing party anywhere with stopping immigration as a core part of their platform?

I can’t so, so whilst it unreasonable they get all the blame, the left deserves most of it.

[Blissex]

«"racism fulfils a useful function by dividing the working class and promoting national identity at the expense of class consciousness"

At that point I don't need to read on. You've got the whole caboodle base over apex.»

But you are both right: reactionary racism and "progressive" anti-racism have been *both* weaponized by tories and whigs (respectively in general) to divide the working class and divert attention from economic/class inequality.
Indeed the very fight between racism and anti-racism can be used as a diversion, because it puts issues of identity ahead of issues of economic/class inequality.

Fighting identity based prejudice is also part of the fight against unfairness, but if people who suffer from identity based prejudice were also not suffering poverty and deprivation the sting would be a lot less nasty, and they may fight back better.

Consider identity based prejudice against light skinned minorities (e.g. irish, jewish, those with "common or northern" accents): those who are CEOs or middle class may still suffer that prejudice, but usually behind their back, and poverty and deprivation are not piled on top of it, and have much better chances of fighting back.

[Blissex]

«Even someone with basic economics knows that»

Basic economics is often wrong... :-)

«1. Labour is businesses biggest cost»

In many industries it is not, but it is often the biggest variable cost that can be easily squeezed.
Businesses try to push down the prices of all their suppliers, but employees are those that utterly depend on their employers and are managed by them, while other suppliers often have other customers or anyhow are not hierarchically subordinate to their customers.

«2. If you increase the supply of something, in this case labour, you decrease the price»

Not always, for example our blogger is fond of cleverly mentioning some studies that show that average wages have not been pushed down by immigration; but that usually means that immigration has pushed up higher end wages and down lower end wages, and while the average has not gone down, most increments in productivity have gone to employers instead of wage increases.

«And in most countries it is the left who are more pro immigration. Can you name a mainstream left wing»

Like very many you confuse "socially progressive", that is "centrist", with "left wing". Many parties described by the tory far-right of "mainstream left wing" are actually "centrist" whigs. Whiggism is not "left wing", and it is globalist and "socially progressive".

As to genuinely "left wing" there are two varieties:

* "conservative social-democrat" parties that are not internationalist but natio, and they do seek to moderate immigration.

* "progressive social-democrat" parties that are internationalist but not globalist, and they don't seek to moderate immigration, but they seek to make it economically irrelevant.

The different between whig "globalist" and progressive social-democratic "internationalism" is:

* Globalists favour unconditional immigration for economic reasons, to drive down wages and job security by establishing a global labour market with an enormous "reserve army" of labour.

* Internationalists accept immigration because class does not stop at the border, and workers should be free to choose where to work and the best employer they can, as long as there is reciprocity, *and* no adverse impact on wages and Ts&Cs, which can be achieved by trade unionism and regulation.

So for example globalists are very much in favour of illegal immigration, because that creates a black market for labour where workers utterly depend on their employers for survival, and this drives down the wages and Ts&Cs of legal workers (whether native or immigrant); internationalist want all immigration to be legal, so all workers have the same rights and there is underclass of black market workers competing with legal workers.

[Blissex]

«Let's assume, however, that all this is wrong and that capitalism could be woke [...] What then?»

There are different cases, but let's imagine a country where racism prevents the 10% irish minority from rising above the poverty and deprivation of the working class, while 30% of the population are middle or upper class.

If anti-irish discrimination were to disappear, 30% of the irish minority, that is 3% of the total population, would become able to reach middle and upper class status, and 3% of the population from the majority would fall into the working class (actually a lot less, because the unleashing of the previously discriminated skills of that 3% would likely increase total incomes a bit, it would not be a zero-sum situation).

Now giving 3% of the population from the 70% who are working class much better middle or upper class living standards may seem a massive change, but perhaps giving all the 70% of the working class better wages and security, nearer to that of the middle class, might be an even bigger change.

My guess is that racists and the anti-racists who are fighting over that 3% are doing something that pleases those with an interest in keeping 67% or 70% of the population on low wages and high insecurity.

[ltr]

While I have no interest in the nutty economics of conservatives, I am reminded of a severe economic mistake that was made in New York not that long ago.  New York City had the chance of having an Amazon headquarters, which several self-styled liberal legislators successfully fought against.  Paul Krugman who wrote extensively on location theory considered the loss of Amazon of no account, while I thought of an indefinitely growing advanced technology company that would in turn attract other such companies.

What I am finding right now in my community, is that shopping has been dramatically changed in the wake of the coronavirus.  Markets and the like are remarkably uncrowded, while everywhere in the neighborhood there are Amazon deliveries being made.  All I hear is how pleasing shopping by Amazon is, which is my experience, and I would guess shopping has been changed for a long time to come.

Yes, I know all about assorted complaints about Amazon, but to have a computer, to Kashi cereal by the carton to, yes, Parmalat milk by the case for the cereal, always at the door, is a revelation.  Amazon can easily be fixed, if actually necessary.

[Blissex]

«but to have a computer, to Kashi cereal by the carton to, yes, Parmalat milk by the case for the cereal, always at the door, is a revelation.»

Such revelation is not exactly unprecedented: low wages and high job insecurity for the servant classes have always gifted cheap, convenient services for the middle and upper classes:

https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2020/01/nicholas-parsons-1923-2020/
“The son of a doctor and a nurse, Nicholas Parsons was raised in a ‘well-to-do, professional, middle-class family’. His parents weren’t rich, but before the war a GP’s wage went a lot further than it does today. His father could afford a butler, a cook, a maid and a nanny.»

I can guarantee that “his parents” had milk and cereal not just “always at the door” but ready in their bowls every morning, just like magic.
To recreate the situation where “a GP’s wage went a lot further” we just have to accept that those of “butler, a cook, a maid and a nanny” wouldn't.

[Blissex]

«To recreate the situation where “a GP’s wage went a lot further” we just have to accept that those of “a butler, a cook, a maid and a nanny” wouldn't.»

Amazon, Uber, Deliveroo etc., for all that they are not quite profitable, are like oven cleaners or nurseries and chopped and washed vegetables and ready-made meals at M&S and Waitrose part of a halfway situation: where cheap but not-so-cheap servants are shared among middle class people thanks to intermediaries (which are essentially agencies, a modern euphemism for gangmasters).

But if UK wages were nearer the world price of labour of less than £1/h I guess that lots more middle class families would have “a butler, a cook, a maid and a nanny” to make their life magically easier and use less of Amazon, Deliveroo, M&S, etc.
Bernard de Mandeville already wrote about it over 300 years ago:

“The plenty and cheapness of provisions depends in a great measure on the price and value that is set upon this Labour, and consequently the Welfare of all Societies, even before they are tainted with foreign luxury, requires that it should be performed by such of their members as in the first place are sturdy and robust and never used to ease or idleness, and in the second, soon contented as to the necessaries of life; [...] From what has been said, it is manifest, that, in a free nation, where slaves are not allowed of, the surest wealth consists in a multitude of laborious poor”

That is the dream of "Britannia Unchained".

I forgot a point related to Amazon or Deliveroo: at the time when an upper-middle class GP could easily afford “a butler, a cook, a maid and a nanny”, most shops had delivery boys whose service was cheap enough for home delivery to be affordable even to lower middle class families:

http://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/item106556.html
«Shopping was often delivered to customers' homes via a delivery boy in a horse and cart or perhaps a newfangled bicycle.»

[The Truth]

@Blissex

I was talking in generalities, but in general

1. Labour is businesses biggest cost
2. If you increase the supply of something, in this case labour, you decrease the price

Business, in general, loves immigration.

Now my question for you, can you actually name a mainstream left wing party that is anti immigration?

You did not actually name one and I’m genuinely interested...

[Paulc156]

@ The Truth
"can you actually name a mainstream left wing party that is anti immigration?"

Can you name a 'genuinely' mainstream left wing party? Clue: Democratic Party of US would be a category error as would various social democratic parties in Europe.

...and if, "Even someone with basic economics knows that... If you increase the supply of something,(even Veblen goods?;) ) in this case labour, you decrease the price"...
(Otherwise known as the lump of Labour fallacy.)
...so if someone who knows 'basic' economics knows this, then why is there... "broad agreement among academic economists that it has a small but positive impact on the wages of native-born workers"?

https://www.epi.org/publication/bp255/

The massive immigration into the US, during the late nineteenth early twentieth century, was consistent with rising real wages. Rising immigration post war UK was also accompanied by rising real wages. So your assumptions on 'basic economics' may need some further thought.

[The truth]

@paulc156

Normal people people call the the Democrats left wing

The USA had an empty continent in 1850. even people at time knew America was going to boom for the next 50 years. But in fact the average American today would be far wealthier if they had restricted immigration completely following the Mexican war, although there would be far fewer obviously.

Everywhere grew after ww2, countries with low immigration actually increased gdp faster.

You are either ignorant or are arguing in bad faith. Either way you have not named a mainstream left wing party that is anti immigration.

[ltr]

Woke capitalism:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/14/us/adolph-reed-controversy.html

August 14, 2020

A Black Marxist Scholar Wanted to Talk About Race. It Ignited a Fury.
The cancellation of a speech reflects an intense debate on the left: Is racism the primary problem in America today, or the outgrowth of a system that oppresses all poor people?
By Michael Powell

[Hugh Mann]

Paul - "Rising immigration post war UK was also accompanied by rising real wages."

Have you got links for that assertion? Remembering how many Brits headed for Oz and Canada post-war I'd be interested to see official net immigration figures.

Remember in 1951, apart from a couple of hundred thousand displaced Poles and Balts, what were then called "coloured" immigrants numbered around 40,000. Not very many.

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/politicspast/story/0,,2142476,00.html

According to that well known nest of right wingers the Migration Museum, 2 million Brits left for Oz and Canada, and net immigration was negative up to the 1980s. Which by strange chance is when wage growth stopped and house prices started rising. How odd!

https://www.migrationmuseum.org/the-last-great-exodus-of-british-migrants/

"Our position has always been that the Migration Museum we are working to develop will be a museum about emigration as much as about immigration, and for two main reasons. The first is that, until the 1980s, Great Britain was a net exporter of people – more people left the country than came into it"

It's almost like supply and demand is a real thing!

[ltr]

American today would be far wealthier if they had restricted immigration completely following the Mexican war...

[ Sorry, but the stupidest comment ever.

No, not sorry. ]

[ltr]

Correcting for the creep:

"America" today would be far wealthier if they had restricted immigration completely following the Mexican war...

[ Sorry, but the stupidest, creepiest comment ever.

No, not at all sorry. ]

[Blissex]

«can you actually name a mainstream left wing party that is anti immigration?»

Name a left wing party that is against the interests of workers and discriminates against workers?
There are centre-right "one nation" parties that do that, but they are not left-wing, obviously.

«in general 1. Labour is businesses biggest cost»

Again, this is not even a gross generalization, in modern economies businesses are usually capital intensive, or else they have low productivity.
A quick web search tells me that wages in retail are 10-20% of sales, and even in hotels and restaurants they are 30%. For many businesses (and many people) the single largest cost is actually rent, or merchandise/inputs wholesale costs.

«2. If you increase the supply of something, in this case labour, you decrease the price»

Again, this is not necessarily the case: prices can re-adjust so that the distribution of prices changes, or simply price stops increasing, but does not actually fall, and the question is how much other factors contributed.

For example my guess is that overall wages in the UK have been affected rather more by the entry in the WTO of China than by A8 immigration, which has affected mostly housing costs (and low end wages rather than overall wages, as low-wage immigration tends to increase higher-end native wages, like those of managers).

But the big point is that lower wages and higher job insecurity in the UK have not been caused by A8 immigration, or by the WTO, those are just tools, the cause is government policy, the thatcherism common to Conservatives, LibDems and New Labour.

Now that A8 immigration has pretty much stopped, non-EU immigration has shot up, and that's because there is the political will to lower wages and increase job insecurity, and if immigration were to stop entirely, other ways would be found to achieve the same effect.

A left wing internationalist but not globalist party can have open immigration without affecting wages and job security, by having suitable policies that ensure that immigrants are not cheaper and easier to get rid of than other workers.

[Blissex]

«2. If you increase the supply of something, in this case labour, you decrease the price»
«Everywhere grew after ww2, countries with low immigration actually increased gdp faster.»

But whether true or false, that's a claim that GDP increases, but less it would otherwise, with immigration, a relative effect, which is very different from the claim that "in general" immigration results in decreased wages, an absolute effect.

Being a bit more precise and consistent is important, because there are people who prevaricate on the impact of immigration on wages by claiming that it does not reduce in absolute terms the average wage, a very narrow claim that is very different from, but is made to sound almost like, a claim that it does not have a negative impact on wages.

[The truth]

@ All the woke cucks

1. Okay Labour, in general is the largest cost of business. With wages at around 50% of gdp in western nations this is fact.

2. Immigration lowers wages history and economics show this is generally the case.

3. Business loves immigration

4. The average American would be FAR richer off they had shut the borders in 1850. This is inarguably really. 23 million Americans with the best part of the North American continent.The average American would be richer than the Norwegians.

I am not defending the centre right btw but again no one here has been able to find a mainstream left wing party that is anti immigration

The betrayal of the working class is astounding and many of you are amongst the traitors.

[Paulc156]

@The Truth. "Normal people people call the the Democrats left wing"
Glad you consider yourself normal.
In what universe would Bloomberg, Newsweb Corp, Time Warner Cable, Walt Disney Corp and Goldman Sachs given the majority of their donations to a left wing party (the Democrats) over the 2002-2016 election cycles? Social democrats are socially liberal folks who wish to preserve economic power relations in the US as much as the average CEO. Which is why so many donate to both parties simultaneously. Republicans and Democrats are both parties of business. The former tend to be socially conservative the latter socially liberal.

@Hugh Mann
I did say rising immigration rather than net positive migration. So large numbers of Poles, Hungarians, Windrush, Asians etc incoming.
're your correlation of 1980s with wage growth halting and rising house prices. Thatchers smashing of unions and forced mass sell off of housing stock from local authorities without replacing stock, combined with opening the easy credit tap for residential mortgages might have something to do with it? Worth remembering we went from Tories campaigning on stable house prices in the 60s to respectable get rich quick property speculating in the 80s.

[Hugh Mann]

@Paul - you were answering another poster who said that increasing the supply of labour lowered the demand (expressed by wages) when you said "Rising immigration post war UK was also accompanied by rising real wages". So either your argument was dishonest or (more likely IMHO) you just didn't know that net immigration was negative up to the 1980s.

Of course who your immigrants and emigrants are can be important = humans are not interchangeable, fungible units of production as the left seems to think - but all things being equal, an increase in the labour force will lead to a deterioration in terms and conditions, and vice versa.

Hence the fall in real male median wages over the last 20 years.

Mind, it's even worse in the States, since the Hart-Celler immigration act of 1965. Real male median wages have been falling there for more than 40 years - since 1973. Working class Americans used to live middle class lives.

https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/the-typical-male-u-s-worker-earned-less-in-2014-than-in-1973/

[Paulc156]

@Hugh Mann. You quote me correctly. There was rising immigration. Hundreds of thousands from the colonies, Eastern Europe, Asia. The rate of increase in immigration was deliberate and marked. There is really no such thing as the term you are using: "net immigration"!
What you are talking about is net 'migration' which was indeed negative.

Still as I said you are laying a whole lot of stuff (e.g. Rising property prices and falling median wage) at the foot of inward migration. It's largely without merit. You ignore the mass of evidence which supports the rise in real wages accompanied by increased immigration. I accept that at the very lower end of the wage scale this is arguably not the case...but you also leave out the huge factor of the deliberate disposal of the housing stock, the opening up of credit markets to the masses, credit being the best determinant of house price inflation and the erosion of powers (by legal means) of the trade union movement. Specifically regarding wages there has been a decision to open up manufacturing ( low paid) to international competition whilst protecting high paid professions from same. But hey let's try and pin falling/stagnant real wages on immigration and leave the other stuff alone!
Which is why it's a weak argument. The data barely supports it at the low end of the wage scale but overall points in the opposite direction.

[Blissex]

«Labour, in general is the largest cost of business. With wages at around 50% of gdp in western nations this is fact.»

I was wondering whether your statements was based on this terminological confusion between costs and income.
GDP (also "equivalent" to GDI) is not the cost of business, it is *value added*, outputs minus inputs, or "gross domestic income", and it is sort of by definition divided between labour and capital. But businesses have other costs.

Of course if one assumes that the cost of inputs and the revenue from outputs are fixed, than a smaller share of GDI for Labour means a higher one for capital, it is a distributional issue. But that does not mean that at the business level wages are a large component of all costs.

Again, correct use of terminology and concepts is important, because otherwise the other side can dissemble easily.

[Blissex]

«since the Hart-Celler immigration act of 1965.»

Legal immigration is highly restricted in the USA, and has been for decades; most immigration, especially from Mexico, has been illegal.

That is because employers know illegal immigrants to be cheaper and more obedient than legal ones. The laws on legal immigration are quite restrictive and also well enforced, while those against illegal immigration are largely not enforced.

«Real male median wages have been falling there for more than 40 years - since 1973.»

Again, immigration is just one of many tools used to achieve that, and the WTO entry of China probably is more significant. But neither matters by itself, what matters is that there has been a political decision to push down wages, and increase job insecurity, which has been done by using several tools. Fighting the individual tools is not going to give any great results.

[Blissex]

«the mass of evidence which supports the rise in real wages accompanied by increased immigration.»

Several of your other points are agreeable, but this is both correct and sort of misleading: that wages still rose despite immigration can well mean that immigration had a negative effect on wages, but not large enough to make wage growth negative, just smaller than it would have otherwise been.

[Blissex]

«the average American today would be far wealthier if they had restricted immigration completely following the Mexican war, although there would be far fewer obviously.»

That's a rather silly argument, because it is really badly formulated, comparing things that cannot be compared, and then it misses out how things really work, i'll rewrite it in a better form:

[The average descendants of the americans citizens of 1850 would be far wealthier today if their ancestors has restricted immigration completely at that time]

And that statement is pretty obviously false: by and large the average descendants of the american citizens of 1850 are far wealthier today than they would have been if they were not able to enjoy the profits from of a large mass of cheap immigrants accumulated since 1850. They would have to run everything themselves, so they would have a 100% of GDI, but of a much smaller GDI, which would probably be rather smaller *in absolute terms* than their share of today's GDI.

Sure some of the descendants of the american citizens of 1850 despite being "insiders" relative to all those arrived later did not prosper, but by and large most did (with the obvious exception of native americans and descendants of slaves).

Most of every wave of USA immigrants benefits from further immigration, as they rise up in class and new immigrants replace them in the shit jobs that make the higher classes lives more pleasant. Each wave of immigration follows a pattern: the first generation are underclass or gangsters, the second generation are working class, the third generation middle class, and then later generations can even ascend in small numbers to the upper class.

That pattern is most obvious in the irish/jewish/italian waves of the early 20th century: sweatshops and gangs full of names like O'Banion, Schultz or Capone, then later Kennedy, Rubin or Cuomo.

[Hugh Mann]

"Legal immigration is highly restricted in the USA, and has been for decades"

There are a LOT of people on this thread who never bother to check the stats.

"The U.S. foreign-born population reached a record 44.4 million in 2017. Since 1965, when U.S. immigration laws replaced a national quota system, the number of immigrants living in the U.S. has more than quadrupled. Immigrants today account for 13.6% of the U.S. population, nearly triple the share (4.7%) in 1970. Most immigrants (77%) are in the country legally, while almost a quarter are unauthorized"

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/17/key-findings-about-u-s-immigrants/

[Blissex]

«Since 1965, when U.S. immigration laws replaced a national quota system, the number of immigrants living in the U.S. has more than quadrupled.»

That simply means that legal immigration became less restrictive, it is still very restricted, even if less than in post-1929 period, and a large part of it was illegal before the 2008 crash, and I made a mistake in not mentioning that it is no longer a majority of the immigration flow, here is from 2007:

https://cis.org/Report/Immigrants-United-States-2007
«The fact that illegals account for at least half of the overall growth in the immigrant population may seem surprising to some, especially since illegal aliens account for 30 percent of the total foreign-born population.»

If legal immigration rules were not so restrictive, illegal immigration, which is dangerous and very inconvenient, would have been a much smaller percentage.

As to numbers and perspective, in 1965 USA population was 196m and now is 328m, and the foreign born population was 9m (around 5%) in 1965 and 44m (around 13%) now.

Overall then total population increased by 132m, and the foreign born by 35m, that is 73.5% of the increase was from the natives (some of them obviously the offspring of the foreign born); the native USA population increased from 187m to 284m, or a rate of 0.78%, while overall USA population, including the foreign born, increased at a rate of 0.94%.

A Cambridge (UK) history and demographic research group found that in England across 8-9 centuries population growth rates of higher than 0.5% resulted in lower wages. In the USA case it looks like native growth already exceeded that.

Add to that the entry in the workforce of many women, which started in the 1960s, and then decades of reaganism reducing output growth rates and the switch of economic policy from targeting full employment to targeting low wage inflation, and the conclusion is that both legal and especially illegal immigration probably contributed to weakening bargaining power for *all* (native or foreign born) workers, but was not a major cause, just a tool.

[The truth]

@blissex

You reformatted what I said because my point was true.

Regardless you are probably wrong, even regarding current descendants, being wealthier. Ireland and Japan are amongst the wealthiest in the world (and the USA has far better resources than both).

But

1. You tacitly admit immigration is a bad deal for those without capital
2. You don’t need to offer citizenship to get someone to work

[Hugh Mann]

"Ireland and Japan are amongst the wealthiest in the world"

In the case of Ireland, that's because they are a tax haven with 12.5% corporation tax the last time I looked, every multinational has its European HQ on Dublin Quays.

Japan's a different story. A successful mercantilist economy, and the model for first Korea and now China. Japan dominates the global market for "producer goods" like carbon fibre, robots, machine tools, ultra pure silicon, and the accurate stepper motors for chip-making machines, which you need before you can make other things.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/eamonnfingleton/2015/04/01/this-is-no-april-fool-japan-is-beating-the-pants-off-the-united-states