1\ Far from an original observation, but I keep thinking about what the advent of the "Gig economy" means for the value proposition of "citizenship"
2\ Under the old model, citizens (and particularly knowledge workers) were bound by financial and commercial ties to one city or country
Politicians used these monopolies to extract taxes, in exchange for which they provided sub-par services
It was a thinly disguised shakedown
3\ Now, hipster/bourgeois culture is global
You can land most places, take an Uber (or a local clone) to an AirBNB, use a food delivery app to order a poke bowl, find a date on Tinder, and then use the cloud to collaborate with co-workers in other countries
4\ A generation ago, there were maybe a half dozen Tier 1 global cities in the cultural mainstream. You had to live in one of them.
Today, there are scores of these cities in dozens of countries, some with better public infrastructure than is available in the sclerotic west
5\ With human capital increasingly mobile, "Passport as a Service" is possible, and it is putting taxing authorities in competition with each other
Californians leaving for Texas, New Yorkers leaving for Puerto Rico or St Kitts, Africans leaving for Mauritius
6\ As ever, when suppliers compete, consumers win
When public schools must compete with e-learning, when SF must compete with Miami, when the US must compete with St Kitts, citizens win
The race is on for better government services, supplied more efficiently
7\ Nobody has to understand this process for it to "evolve" towards efficiency
Californians who move to TX may indeed vote for the same policies that ruined SF, but as long as there is emigration, there is "selective pressure" for polities that chance into good fiscal policies
8\ 200 countries means 200 Petri Dishes in which different policies can be blindly explored
Rwanda, an unthinkable dystopia 20 years ago, is today called (perhaps with a touch of exaggeration), the "Singapore of Africa"
But some countries WILL get it right
9\9 Making big macro predictions is a guaranteed way to end up looking foolish
But I can't help wondering if the globalization of human capital is following fast on the heels of globalization of trade, leading to secular decline in taxes just as global trade exported deflation
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1\ Classism is FAR more invidious than racism and sexism
I suspect this is because, in our evolutionary past, status gradations were the key to reproductive success, whereas ingroup/outgroup distinctions were malleable and not fundamentally about race
2\ Modern society is worm-eaten with classist policy:
Usury laws
Sugar taxes
Vice taxes
Building codes
Minimum wages
We are grossed out by the choices faced by the poor, so we "help" the poor by taking away those choices through regulation
3\ Nobody can point to laws that are actually racist, and when they try, they end up pointing to the classist stuff I mentioned above
In the US, class is often co-extensive with race, so things like minimum wage laws that have disparate race effects are really just classist
2\ They live in a city of a few million where many of the doctors are from a close-knit ethnic community
Well, the Karen side of the family sent around a philipic written by a local doctor, telling of COVID patients dying in hallways, etc, and warning people to mask up
3\ Locally, the thread went viral, mostly on WhatsApp
Well, my lady used to be a local pharma rep, and she knew the doc who was supposedly stepping over bodies to get to his ward
1\ People compare COVID-19 hysteria to the Salem Witch Trials, to various political movements, and to other mass delusions of the fairly distant past
But the best model for understanding lockdowns is 1980s USA, when the world hallucinated a sprawling, satanic child rape pandemic
2\ As with COVID-19, there *was* a small kernel of truth beneath the hysteria
Horrible things did happen to a few kids, just as in a world of 7.7 billion, a handful of healthy youngsters have died from COVID-19
3\ As with COVID-19, the child rape hallucinations were endorsed by credentialed public officials of all stripes: educators, prosecutors, social workers, investigators, doctors
As with COVID-19, *most* experts didn't believe the hype, but only the most hysterical got media play