1. Thread about why we see so much incoherence from working-class movements in Europe (i.e. right-wing populism).
2. People in the income distribution's bottom half have 3 ways to get ahead: economic growth, income compression, higher percentile rank.
3. Economic growth in a developed country is capped by the general state of technology growth, around 1.5-2%/year nowadays.
4. It's possible to do better with some demand-side treatments like not imposing austerity in a recession, but in good times, it isn't.
5. It's @BrankoMilan who noted that even the broad prosperity of the Blair era didn't produce anything near China's catchup growth rates.
6. The second strategy, income compression, is available in relatively high-inequality, low-tax countries like the US.
7. It's not available in the core of Europe, where incomes are already compressed and marginal taxes aren't far from the Laffer maximum.
8. To a good approximation, income redistribution here can't come from the rich, but from favored classes, like retirees.
9. The third strategy can work in places with rentier elites, like the Gulf states, but even in the low-mobility US and UK, it can't.
10. For the most part, people here are in higher income percentiles because they do more skilled work.
11. Thus, the only way to climb up the income ladder is to take not from useless elites but from politically unpopular people: minorities.
12. Even woke people retch at the idea of the state taking from their racist grandparents to give to the immigrants changing their diapers.
13. But the other direction - taking from the immigrants changing old white people's diapers to give to old white people - is popular.
14. The problem, of course, is that there aren't enough immigrants and we don't make enough money for the state to seize.
15. Moreover, admitting more high-skill immigrants runs into the problem of creating an economically powerful class with opposed interests.
16. A France with 5 million more high-skill naturalized citizens could afford more pensions but would have a less pro-pensioner electorate.
17. Regardless of what I think of my racist relatives, they don't live here and don't benefit from France keeping its retirement age at 62.
18. So nativism could give the native white working class here more money, but not a lot of it - there just aren't enough minorities.
19. This forces nativism to insist on giving the natives higher status than immigrants and minorities, and not just higher income.
20. Thus threats of violence against foreigners, Jews, and nonwhites. The message: "you may be more skilled and richer, but I can kill you."
21. Thus also random culture war crap. Here it's a moral panic about halal food; in the US it's a moral panic about black people's hair.
22. The state can't loot us to give the white workers much money, but it can promise them to harass us if we make them uncomfortable.
23. When the state declares martial law in response to riots in Reunion but surrenders to riots among whites here, it sends this message.
24. You can't fix that with liberalism, because economic growth won't go to 9%, or with socialism, because income inequality is already low.
25. You fix that by recognizing that there's a political fight between the racists and their targets and defeating the racists. /end
