What would Friedman say

So if he could say what he wanted, what would he say?

This analysis of Friedman's Dream Team column talks about the real kind of immigration that Friedman wants:


His enthusiasm is authentic, but the immigration he's endorsing is of a kind that never figures in any of the tediously repetitive Times editorials in favor of open borders. The immigration Friedman wants – "legal," "orderly," resulting in America's attracting and retaining "the world's first-round aspirational and intellectual draft choices" – can actually be seen as consonant with the Center for Immigration Studies' advocacy of a "pro-immigrant policy of lower immigration" predicated on the national interest.

In fact, it's axiomatic that immigration Friedman-style is wholly antithetical to current immigration policy and "comprehensive immigration reform" – which begins with amnesty, though that's an instrumentality, not remotely an end in itself.

This cataclysmic immigration will come overwhelmingly from oligarchic Latin American cultures with chasm-like divides between the rich and the poor, with oppressive, rigid class systems that give their citizenry, particularly their own poor, little access to learning or the means or motivation to pursue the life of the mind. It will result in the importation of a vast less-skilled demographic that is the inverse of Friedman's "Real Dream Team." According to data from the Pew Hispanic Center, some 30 percent of immigrants from Mexico have not finished 9th grade; some 62 percent lack high school diplomas.

Unlike the 40 finalists, a high proportion of the children of today's legal and illegal less-skilled immigrants from Mexico and Central America have parents with very low levels of education, and the parents' education attainment is one of the best predictors of a child's success. The result is that many children from Latin American immigrant families are dropping out of school and socializing downward. While Hispanics once had the highest rate of intact families of any group, the native-born children and grandchildren of Hispanic immigrants have rates of out-of-wedlock births second only to those in the African-American community, one of the principal causes and symptoms of the crises that beset the black community. Nearly half of Hispanic immigrant families use at least one federal welfare program, and the education system is not providing a basis for upward social mobility. In our knowledge-based, post industrial society it is unlikely that the immigrants who come here from Mexico and Central America will provide many of the finalists for the Intel Talent Search for generations; meanwhile we can predict inverse outcomes: high rates of academic failure, functional illiteracy in two languages, welfare dependency, out-of-wedlock births, and disproportionate rates of incarceration.


Devastating.


If Thomas L. Friedman chose to use his influential voice – one especially resonant among liberal Americans – to help them understand how radically different is the immigration he advocates from the sort being pushed by the cynical, greedy, or ethnically chauvinist "comprehensive reform" crowd, he might actually make a difference.


One is allowed to hope, right?

here is another realistic take on Friedman.

another piece actually accuses Friedman of pro-Asian racism:


In our brave new multicultural world presumably it’s okay to be racist so long as the preferred groups aren’t white. Friedman (or his “brainy Indian friend”) are arguing for more immigration by what used to be called the “model minorities,” East and South Asians, who unlike America’s own minorities apparently possess the human, social, and economic capital to become exemplars of the Protestant Ethic. Of course, arguing certain nationalities inherently possess these superior traits is the essence of racism, the flipside of the Nordicism of historical restrictionism and contemporary Buchananism. Though Friedman does make a passing genuflection for immigration by the world’s “best and brightest,” it’s clear who he thinks they are.


Is that really so bad?

Either way, Mexico is completely hypocritical in it's criticism of the Arizona law

And they are actually trying to push illegal immigrants to the US to remove the powder keg.

Did Thomas Friedman miss the memo? Or did Africa?

So we live in a flat world, right? You know, borders don't matter, instant communication, location is irrelevant, information economy, etc.

At least that's what I thought.

Washington Post has a recent article on second life and the virtual economy.


Second World's economy looks remarkably like that of the physical world. At one end, where most users are, small-business owners such as Moore keep their physical-world day jobs but make a few hundred dollars a year selling niche products such as rain and T-shirts. But as Second Life has grown, some users have built much bigger, full-time businesses: Stiletto Moody sells thousands of high-end shoes for about $8 a pair, and Curious Kitties is a Japanese maker of somewhat risqué clothing.

More than 50 businesses in the virtual world made more than $100,000 each last year.

Second Life's owner, Linden Lab, makes money by selling land plots and islands. An island runs about $1,000, a high barrier of entry for most Second Life users. But to open a strip mall, dance club or office tower, or to build a home, avatars need land. Some Second Life users have taken on Donald Trump-like personas, buying land from Second Life and then leasing plots to small-business owners or would-be homeowners, or flipping their properties as speculators.


I think what we're seeing here is a precursor to a a greater prevalence of virtual reality. As time goes on and the virtual worlds become more sophisticated and people can make a living off of the virtual world, there will be more withdrawal and people will live out entire lives in their apartments since all interaction can be gained through the internet.

Despite it's low rate of success, internet dating has been in the mainstream for several years now.

Apparently, social networking sites are starting to see flattening demand.

Tom Friedman has his latest column on Intel and American Innovation:


While America still has the quality work force, political stability and natural resources a company like Intel needs, said Otellini, the U.S. is badly lagging in developing the next generation of scientific talent and incentives to induce big multinationals to create lots more jobs here.

These local incentives matter because smart, skilled labor is everywhere now. Intel can thrive today — not just survive, but thrive — and never hire another American. Asked if his company was being held back by weak science and math education in America’s K-12 schools, Otellini explained:

“As a citizen, I hate it. As a global employer, I have the luxury of hiring the best engineers anywhere on earth. If I can’t get them out of M.I.T., I’ll get them out of Tsing Hua” — Beijing’s M.I.T.


But there's a problem with this narrative. OK, so talent is everywhere. OK, so people are plugged in and compete with us. I get it.

But what about this:

The Genocide in the Congo with 4-5 million dead in the past decade from disease, starvation, and violence associated with the civil war.

The absolute mess in Somalia that the US is trying to clean up. Funny, I don't hear complaints about US imperialism when we're talking about Africa.

The genocide in Darfur

Continuing rampages of the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda

inter religious violence in Nigeria

breast ironing in Cameroon as a preventative measure to prevent rape of adolescent women.

Female genital mutilation throughout Africa

Modern Slavery in Africa

Honestly, I'm getting a bit tired of these example. We keep looking, and unfortunately it's not too hard to find continuous evidence of dysfunction on the lost continent.

But I think it demonstrates a key problem with the flat world thesis. Yes, technology makes us interconnected, and yes, we do have access to all the world's information. I don't deny that.

What Friedman forgets is a set of fundamental facts:

1) Not all people have the same level of intelligence or propensity to obey the law

2) This difference is highly correlated with ethnicity

3) In the world we live in, geography and nation states are still largely organized along ethnic lines for the majority of countries

4) Interconnectedness and access to information cannot help an individual if the said individual chooses to ignore it

5) Internet usage is different between countries and intelligence is the largest determinant of interest in adopting the internet

6) There is a multiplicative factor. Regions where intelligence is low and people are less likely to adopt the internet are even more likely to fall behind because the few intelligent people will have less access to the internet and will therefore have to spend a greater portion of their lives interacting with stupid people, therefore not gaining sufficient stimulation to utilize their brains

When was the last time Friedman wrote an article about Africa? He may gush on and on about India, but ignores the fact that India has more slaves than the US ever did in it's history.

I think to some degree that he an other flat worlders try to never mention the middle east, Africa, or latin America, or Southeast Asia, or the backwards part of South Asia, is that it really bring HBD into focus.

After all, even though there are more than 4 billion mobile phones in circulation, why has the internet penetrated only 1.4 billion of the world's 6.7 billion people?

After all, if all information is available, why are they still so backwards? If everyone is equal, shouldn't we all be on facebook? Should the stigma of being tagged on your myspace profile while performing a child sacrifice ceremony be enough shame to not do it anymore?

I guess not.

What century are we living in?

I have trouble believing that in the age of the apple tablet we have access to all the recent published books and all the information of the world available over a wireless internet signal,

but in this same world we have child sacrifice.

Do people who are protesting democracy and free speech and open markets in Afghanistan have any clue as to how backwards a good chunk of the world is?

Do the invite the world invade the world cohort realize that most of the world still has not internalized the values that western nations have cherished for the last 100 years?

Is the human race any better than animals?

The Flat world clashes with HBD Part One

So I've been saying for awhile now that we are living in a "flat" world in which distances and national boundaries aren't as important or constricting as they were before. This reality is easily demonstrated in the world economy through the devastation of American manufacturing and the outsourcing of tons of low end white collar jobs.

But no one talks about the real scary culprit of the decline in manufacturing: increasing automation and inability of american workers to keep up.

Considering that 85% of Americans have cellphones and while lagging behind some others, we are still one of the most connected countries in the world. Yet, Thomas Friedman has words of warning that are quite prescient:


“Our education failure is the largest contributing factor to the decline of the American worker’s global competitiveness, particularly at the middle and bottom ranges,” argued Martin, a former global executive with PepsiCo and Kraft Europe and now an international investor. “This loss of competitiveness has weakened the American worker’s production of wealth, precisely when technology brought global competition much closer to home. So over a decade, American workers have maintained their standard of living by borrowing and overconsuming vis-à-vis their real income. When the Great Recession wiped out all the credit and asset bubbles that made that overconsumption possible, it left too many American workers not only deeper in debt than ever, but out of a job and lacking the skills to compete globally.”


Basically, this is the challenge we face right now in maintaining the US as the top dog economically.

But this is where it hits us on a personal level:

“If you think about the labor market today, the top half of the college market, those with the high-end analytical and problem-solving skills who can compete on the world market or game the financial system or deal with new government regulations, have done great. But the bottom half of the top, those engineers and programmers working on more routine tasks and not actively engaged in developing new ideas or recombining existing technologies or thinking about what new customers want, have done poorly. They’ve been much more exposed to global competitors that make them easily substitutable.”

Those at the high end of the bottom half — high school grads in construction or manufacturing — have been clobbered by global competition and immigration, added Katz. “But those who have some interpersonal skills — the salesperson who can deal with customers face to face or the home contractor who can help you redesign your kitchen without going to an architect — have done well.”

Just being an average accountant, lawyer, contractor or assembly-line worker is not the ticket it used to be.


I think that's scary. Steve Sailer agrees too, but points out some basic problems in Friedman's analysis.


I kind of have the impression that quite a few Americans, like, maybe, two or three hundred million of them, don't possess either the IQs or the personalities to be rainmakers. Are they permanently obsolete in the world that Friedman has been such an energetic cheerleader for?


And there you have it folks. While Friedman is fundamentally correct in his assertions about what hurts us, he's blind as to why it will be nearly impossible to overcome. Because everything can be low skilled can be done cheaply in the third world or automated. White collar work that involves thinking can be done over the internet. No one is untouchable from the need to compete with the world.

But what, ultimately, is the quality that determines who wins and who looses their job in the global economy?

Intelligence and IQ.

Flat world folks, meet HUMAN BIODIVERSITY and the fucked up reality:

THE BASIC SKILLS THAT ARE NECESSARY TO SUCEED IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY ARE GENETIC.

Demography is destiny

Oh shit.