Engineers versus the high priests of Set

We must always remember that human societies are nothing if not complex, and there are many angles that one can observe them from.  Nevertheless, even if they don’t explain everything 100%, there are some viewpoints that explain quite a lot.  For example, the idea that a lot of human activity is explained by personal greed (‘follow the money’) is surely a useful simplification.

Here I want to explore how it is that some societies respect honest and productive labor, and others denigrate practical labor and instead value parasitic, bureaucratic or abstract scholarly forms of labor.  I will refer to the former as the engineers, and the latter as the high priests of Set.

Now I mean no specific insult to the high priests of Set, but I wanted to pick a religion that (as far as I know) has no current adherents to avoid offending anyone living.  (If there are any surviving acolytes of Set reading this I apologize – make your will known and I’ll find something even more obscure.  I do point out, however, that if you are trying to remain hidden, nothing is better at hiding something than spreading the meme that it’s ridiculous to believe in it…)

So in ancient Egypt there were various religious cults, and one of these worshipped the God known as “Set.”  The high priests did no useful work, and their knowledge had no practical applications in the real world.  They could not predict the weather (at least, no better than any person who was not a high priest of Set), they could not heal the sick, or build bridges, etc.  Still, they did have a lot of knowledge - but it was knowledge of the internal workings of their own cult.  It was specialist political and bureaucratic knowledge.  However, even if not objectively useful, their insider knowledge was very useful to the high priests personally: it let them rise in the hierarchy, and they had much better lives than the farmers and weavers and cooks who actually did useful work.

There will always be two classes of human labor: productive and parasitic.  Even if the boundary between these two is sometimes less than absolute (example: a priest who also has some practical medical knowledge, an administrator who mostly shuffles paper but does do some useful scheduling), the fundamental distinction is still valid.   The issue is, why do some societies value the practical labor of engineers (and farmers and machinists and janitors etc., but I’m partial to engineers so let’s use them as an exemplar of the class), and some societies value the high priests of Set (and lawyers and diversity consultants and tax collectors and courtiers etc.).

In the 19^th century New England in the United States, the culture valued the self-reliant man, the person who could do practical jobs, the engineer.  An example of this is the protagonist in Mark Twain’s book A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.  Now the book is enjoyable if a little silly in spots – there is no way that real human beings in the middle ages could possibly have been so credulous.  The point is that this is an illustration of a culture that valued hard work and practical values.  The hero doesn’t have time for fairy tales, but he knows how to forge metal and build generators and so on.  He is self-reliant, not afraid of getting his hands dirty, and proud of his practical skills.

Compare this to much of the history of classical China, where manual labor of all kinds was denigrated.  In this culture what people most wanted to be was a member of the imperial court, or a tax collector, or a scribe, or a priest of some sort. 

Why do some cultures go one way, while other cultures go the other way?  Obviously it’s complicated.  A significant factor must be momentum: a culture values practical labor because it has for a long time, and vice-versa.  But I propose that one of the main forces that push a society one way or the other is demographics.

When a society has a low sustained fertility rate, wages rise.  The power and prestige of landowners and rentiers falls, and that of workers rises.  But more, such a society by its very nature will favor practical work over the administrative.  On the other hand, for societies with high sustained fertility rates, wages fall.  The power and prestige of landowners and rentiers is maximized, and workers become disposable commodities with no intrinsic value.  In this case practical work is denigrated, and only those workers who can parasitize the administrative and cultural systems of the society have a hope of prospering.

Let’s consider a society with a low fertility rate.  Labor becomes the limiting factor.  As such, labor does not just get high wages – labor gets power.  As Benjamin Franklin wrote in his Observations concerning the increase in mankind, peopling of countries etc., when land is abundant and people few, farmers don’t need to work for a landowner.  They can just set up shop themselves and be their own master. 

Now suppose that you wanted to start an enterprise to, for example, build furniture in such a culture.  You would HAVE to hire carpenters.  In this you would have no choice.  You might also need accountants and administrators, but these would be limited to the minimum required to actually balance the books and set the schedules, because labor is in short supply and there isn’t that much left for overhead after you’ve hired the carpenters.  In this case the administrators are doing the necessary, practical work of organization, and they are not parasitical court followers or administrative empire builders.

Now consider a society with sustained high fertility rates.  Workers who do useful things get paid very low wages, they are disposable commodities. You still need them, it's just that you can take them for granted.  Meanwhile landowners and rentiers in general become an aristocracy.  Supply and demand, people, supply and demand.  Now while common laborers are ground into the dirt, more skilled laborers do a little better – because their wages have to cover their training costs, one way or the other, and because of ‘efficiency wages’ (it is easier to fire a janitor when they are halfway through cleaning a room, than to fire an engineer when he is halfway through designing a bridge).  Still, wages for all practical workers are overall very low – typically engineers in high-fertility societies get paid less than janitors in low-fertility societies.

However, people don’t like to starve to death in the mud.  So if the market means that doing productive labor is like living in a slave labor camp, people will scrap for an alternative.  In other words, for a job that does not depend on the market – like tax collector.  In imperial China peasants who worked the land were paid barely enough to survive, because there were so many starving landless peasants competing for work.  However, the tax collector didn’t have to compete for his job.  Once awarded to him, he simply collected his salary (the “Iron Rice Bowl”).  Period. 

Thus the overwhelming pressure in such societies is for jobs that are removed from market discipline – court favorite, scribe, priest, bureaucrat, mistress, anything.  And under these conditions people will scrap and fight with desperate intensity to get and keep these jobs, as if their lives depend on it – as they do.  They will also push for their relatives to join the imperial bureaucracy, and so on and so forth.  Also, because the productive workers get paid so little, there is plenty of surplus to pay the unproductive ones.

Now in a low-fertility society, losing a job is not a death sentence.  Jobs that pay high wages are plentiful, as are opportunities for self-employment.  If a worker is doing something that is not vital, they can be released with little effort because the worker knows that they can easily find something else.  But in a high-fertility society, losing a job is a death sentence.  People will hang on to their useless jobs for dear life, and they will resist with all their might any attempt at making the system more efficient. 

Bureaucracies will always tend to increase, and administrators will always favor hiring more administrators, to increase their status.  That’s almost a law of nature, like the second law of thermodynamics.  But in a low-fertility society market forces are a powerful countervailing force – labor is simply too valuable to waste like this, and people are not that resistant to losing a job that turns out to be redundant.  In a high-fertility society, however, people have a desperate motivation to create and expand the bureaucracy, and once someone gets an unproductive job they cling to it like a leech.  Plus, because not much need be paid for the necessary productive labor, there is plenty of surplus to grow the bureaucracy. 

Sociologists often comment on how the overgrowth of a priestly and administrative caste can lead to the downfall of a society.  But what if they are looking at the symptoms, and not the cause?  I propose that an overgrowth of the priestly and administrative caste does not come out of thin air, but is often a consequence of too-rapid population growth. 

Karl Marx may have gotten many things wrong, but he got one thing right.  The history of civilization is a history of class war.  Once organized agriculture started, people belonged to one of two groups – workers and landowners.  The former have a stake in expensive labor, and the latter in cheap labor.  These diametrically opposed incentives are the engine of so much of the nonsense that human beings have done in the last few millennia. 

But there is another player in this game: the priestly/administrative caste.  They don’t suffer from the same market forces as regular labor.  They are, in a sense, also in direct competition with the rentiers and landowners.  Now much of the administrative caste does serve the rich, no doubt – they collect taxes, propagandize the divine nature of the rule of the rich, entertain the rich, etc.  But a lot of the costs of the priestly caste come out of the profits of the rich.  The rich can deal with uppity landless peasants quite easily.  Fire them and replace them with others.  Priests are not quite so easily dislodged.  They will cling to their power, they will expand it, and reach their tentacles into the society and find all manner of non-market-based stratagems to entrench their privileges.  Administrators will make the simple complex to justify their existence.  But this comes at the expense of the army and the building of weapons and so on, and will weaken the society overall…

It’s not just about the standard of living of the average worker.  In low-fertility societies you have a yeoman culture, where people of energy and talent have the freedom and resources or build and invest (because a society not pushing at subsistence is necessary to have an investable surplus).  These societies tend to be dynamic and advance (think England in the post-Medieval period). 

On the other hand, in high-fertility societies you have a sort of mandarin culture, where productive work is looked down on, talented people have no outlet but to compete for priestly or administrative jobs in the imperial court, corruption and nepotism runs riot, and the society overall is impoverished and capital starved and stagnant.  Think imperial China.  Or, as the vile gospel of Neoliberalism continues to spread its rot, very soon, the entire world.

I am already seeing this in science in the United States.  No that long ago to be a scientist in a university was considered prestigious, and to be an administrator, less so.  They used to refer to people who went from science to administration as 'failed scientists'.  Now, not so much.  The flooding of the market with foreign nationals has driven down the job prospects of American scientists, they have trouble getting funded no matter how hard they work, they are fired with nothing to fall back on, and more and more are working part time as low-paid teaching temps.  Meanwhile administrators are gaining in salary and prestige, and growing the bureaucracy.  University presidents are getting paid like business CEOs.  More and more moving to administration is seen as the goal, not doing science.  I mean, today being a scientist means fighting a non-stop zero-sum game against the smartest people across the entire world.  Being an administrator means you step out of the competitive circle, you get paid a high salary no matter what and you tell scientists what to do.  Because power follows the market.  If talented scientists are a dime a dozen, they matter little, you can take them for granted.  On the other hand, the administrator that allocates scarce funds is someone to pay attention to... 

Here's another aspect to this.  In a low-fertility society, because labor is scarce, people with odd personality traits can still prosper.  The brilliant loner, the person who failed the standardized tests but had a unique insight... the need to fill a slot gives these people a chance.  Forget about the current racist fetish about a diversity of skin color being the most important aspect of human beings, it is a diversity of talent and temperament and viewpoint that are critical.  In high-fertility societies there are 100 desperate people competing for every job, even the high-skill ones.  Under these conditions workers with poor people skills and who don't do well on standardized tests are filtered out.  There may be a diversity of skin color, but a homogeneity of the spirit and intellect.

Do we have a society where the engineers are dominant, and practical and intelligent effort is the standard?  Or do we have a society run by the high priests of Set, an inward-looking pack of bureaucrats that absorb resources and create self-fulfilling complexity without giving anything back?  

The American Elites Fail at Every Enterprise and Call it Expertise

Perhaps the greatest problem with the United States today is that the elites no longer care about the nation as a whole, and certainly not about the working classes.  That is, of course, to be expected from the Neoliberalism, which can be summed up as follows:

The dogma of Neoliberalism: All human relationships should be reduced to market transactions, and the market should be rigged.  The rich and powerful should have total economic and social control of a society.  The rich should even control how many children people have, as if they were cattle – because the people cannot be trusted to make that sort of decision.  Say that you believe in free markets and competition, but fix the game so that you always win and if you do still manage to lose bail yourself out with public funds.  Claim that your policies will guarantee prosperity, and when they produce results worse than the old Soviet Union, play bait-and-switch and say that nothing is to be done.  Slander your opponents in every way possible, never feel any shame, buy and censor the press, and above all, say anything at all to provide cover, even if what you say has no bearing on reality or contradicts what you said before.

However, there is a secondary problem here: the Neoliberal elites have been so isolated from the negative consequences of their mistakes that they have lost the ability to think critically.  Indeed, they have lost the ability to even realize that thinking critically is important!  If you were to ask one of them: ‘if a policy fails should we change course?’ I imagine that at first they would simply stare at you in puzzlement.  What?  What are you talking about?  Then they would have you hauled off by the police for disturbing the peace and if you were a journalist or academic your career would be over.  (Pour encouragez les autres).  But if pressed I’m sure they could blather on about need to face challenges and collect data and blah blah but these words would no more reflect their thinking than happens inside a parrot's mind when it speaks English.

Let’s consider the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.  These have proven to be stunningly colossal failures, abject wastes of blood and treasure and opportunity.  After all this time and effort, ‘Islamic militants’ are as powerful as ever and nothing has been achieved but to line the pockets of politically-connected defense contractors, and spread chaos across much of the middle east.  And yet the people who have planned and continue to press these stupid wars continue to be respected as elder statesman, their advice breathlessly received by a sycophantic corporate press corps.  They do not apologize, they do not explain, but only treat any criticism as ‘not serious’.  The are given teaching appointments at the most prestigious universities, their bloviations command front-page access on the New York Times, they are on the boards of the largest corporations – all for failing in the most gaudy and total manner possible.

An early pioneer in this endeavor was Henry Kissinger, the first (but not the last!) American secretary of state to have lost a war (and this despite overwhelming material and technical advantages).  He parlayed his then-unprecedented failure into a prestigious teaching position at Harvard university, lucrative consulting agreements (where among other things he appears to have sold his insider knowledge to the Chinese communist government), and continued to be considered a diplomatic savant for decades to come.  However, compared to the current crop of American 'leaders', Kissinger is Talleyrand and Bismarck and Polk combined.  I wonder if Kissinger is at all jealous, seeing how much greater the failures of George W. Bush and Hilary Clinton and Dick Cheney and Barack Obama were than his own, and how much more money they ended up making as a result.  Nah, I doubt it.  Irony is a not a strong suite of Neoliberals.

Now even the smartest people, when they start something new, often make mistakes.  That’s part of life.  The thing here is not that these wars were started foolishly, but they have continued to be prosecuted for all this time without any change of policy!  Without any once wondering, is it wise to spend trillions on defense contractors that never deliver?  Should we be blowing up wedding parties because someone who might maybe sort of not like the United States could be there?  Should we even be doing this at all?  What the heck is our objective there?  That’s the main thing.  That there was no adjustment, no feedback, no altering the course in the face of failure.

It’s like the British generals in World War I.  Perhaps the first time or two they might have been forgiven for thinking that massed infantry charges could defeat dug-in machine guns and artillery.  After all, the situation had never arisen before.  But to do this for four years, over and over again?  That was the crime, not the initial mistake, but stubbornly repeating it without thought (another 100,000 dead?  Oh bother.  Well nothing for it but to try again next month.  Pass the champagne, will you my good man?).

Let us consider Hilary Clinton.  During her tenure as secretory of state, the highest praise that you could give her is that her policies did not actually result in the outright destruction of western civilization as we know it (so far).  And yet, Saint Hilary is widely touted as a ‘serious person’, she is currently the top-seed for next president of the United States, she gets million dollars fees for spreading her wisdom at speaking events.  Where sane people would see only a record of repeated failure, a Neoliberal sees a long resume of important positions and serious jobs (and she’s a woman!). 

How does this happen?  Others pointed out the flaws in her policies before they failed, others do not have such a track record of failure – ah, but they don’t have powerful friends.  So they are not allowed anywhere near the levers of power.  They are not given coverage in the mass media, they are not appointed to prestigious universities… Ultimately Hilary Clinton is lauded as a senior statesman because the game is rigged (and did I mention that she's a WOMAN?), because the elites in the United States are now a self-congratulating pack of cronies.  So it doesn’t matter how badly they fail – all the institutions and mechanisms for identifying and demoting failures are under their own control.  There is no feedback, there is no correction, the Neoliberals live in a golden bubble where everything they do is wonderful, regardless….

The Neoliberals play with real armies the way a spoiled rich kid plays with toy soldiers.  If a few break, why, no worries, daddy will buy me more!  Hilary Clinton could probably have ordered an entire US army corps to destruction and it would only prove all that more just how serious and capable of making the tough decisions she is...

Sanity requires feedback.  Nobody – but nobody – is always right.  As a child we learn that turning the bicycle handlebars the wrong way causes us to fall.  We learn that putting a raw egg in a microwave is a bad idea.  And that leaving the window open during a rainstorm can ruin your carpet.  And that not studying for an exam can cause you to fail a course.  And so on and so forth.  Without this feedback, painful as it often is, we would never grow or progress.  Without this constant feedback, we would not even be sane.

Now the Neoliberal elite still do get some lessons taught – like walking in the rain without an umbrella gets you wet, or insulting someone that you want to do you a favor rarely works out.  They maintain their skills at back-dealing and political infighting and self-promotion.  But in matters of public policy, they are immune to feedback.  For them, their critics are like the sound of crickets chirping – nothing to pay attention to, none of them have any real power.  And so, the United States has a leadership class that, increasingly, can only be called insane. 

Michelle Obama’s school lunch fiasco is one minor example of this.  Perhaps school lunches should be better balanced – in Japan the school lunches are healthy but delicious, you’d pay money to get them in a good restaurant in this country.  Instead the government creates unworkable standards and produces nearly inedible lunches at twice the price (money to be made!  A bonus!) – but Michelle’s kids eat catered gourmet food at private schools, liberals treat any criticism of her plan as racist, she is still treated with respect, and so she shows no interest in fixing the system.  Why should she?  So I expect that this horrible school lunch program will continue indefinitely, kids will eat crappy meals and complain about it and the right people will make money and so it will go, on and on forever…

Now building cutting-edge military and aerospace systems is never cheap and always takes longer than expected.  That’s just how the world works (you think building a fifth-generation fighter jet is easy?  Then build one yourself!).  Inefficiencies and false starts are part of the game when you are doing something that is novel and technically complex.  However, as the nation sinks ever deeper into the morass of Neoliberalism, this may be changing.  The elites may be so wedded to their culture of failure that the nation may, finally, be starting to lose the ability to do anything. 

Take the F35 fighter jet.  As usual, it’s over budget and behind schedule and might not be able to do everything as promised.  What else is new?  In the old days the program would be either made to work, or, if that was not possible, it would be cancelled and a new program started.  But not, I think, today.  The program's costs are so astonishing it’s not clear that the nation can actually afford more than a few dozen of these planes, they have short ranges, carry limited armaments, are not very maneuverable, and possibly not all that stealthy.  But like the Afghanistan war and Michelle Obama’s lunch program, it just continues on and on and on…

Everything costs money, and nothing involving human beings will ever be 100% efficient.  We should always strive to improve, but never forget that the perfect is the enemy of good enough.  But there is some level of inefficiency and corruption where it starts to become impossible to actually do anything.  The United States may be getting to that level.

Why is it that the American space program relies on Russian-made rockets?  America can’t even launch it’s own rockets into space any more.  Now there are calls for American industry to go back to building its own engines.  So if the government gives these brave capitalists a bazillion dollars for free to re-learn what they deliberately decided to forget, our brave capitalists just might be able to make their own engines by 2020.  Or 2030.  Or something.  Or just buy the engines from the Chinese and slap a 100% profit charge and an American flag decal on them.  Who cares, I mean, the average taxpayer is footing the bill, not Hilary Clinton (I did mention that she's a woman, didn't I?).  And if eventually no American rocket engines are made, well, the pundits can continue to wring their hands and the contractors can get their subsidies and Hilary Clinton can make another million dollars giving a serious speech expressing her serious views on the topic and nothing need change…

There is an old saying: "There is a lot of ruin in a nation."  This means that most nations have deep roots, and it will take more than one or two mistakes to bring them down.  Rome wasn't built in a day, and it took centuries of corruption and mismanagement to destroy it.  By 1970 the United States had acquired so much wealth and power that the entirety of the Roman Empire at its peak would hardly count as a minor city.  It is a tribute to those American leaders that went before, that what they have built has survived the almost transcendent mismanagement of the current elite.  But not even the United States has infinite wealth, and the effects of Neoliberal corruption are growing exponentially.  The United States, at least in its current form, may fall faster than Rome did.

FDR was once asked by an aid about some policy: ‘but what if it doesn’t work?’ – and FDR replied to the effect, then we shall have to try something else.  That sounds obvious, but our current elites don’t think that way.  Because why should they?  If the whole nation finally collapses under their mismanagement they can just take their money and move overseas – like the cruise ship captain who abandoned his post when it began to sink.  And when they do they shall shake their heads in sadness that the American people were not worthy of their brilliant leadership.

Nationalism is the Opposite of Racism

It is commonly asserted that nationalism is the same thing as racism.  This is incorrect.  Nationalism is the opposite of racism.  Destroying nationalism will not usher in a new era of open minds where everyone loves one another.  Rather it will turn people back to identifying with their race, their tribe, and their family.  And most of us won’t enjoy that.

The rich of the United States want to import massive numbers of foreign nationals in order to drive wages down to third-world levels, and drive up profits for the mega-rich.  Period.

But that doesn’t sound very good.

So the rich have used their power to hammer home the idea that opposition to importing large numbers of foreign nationals is equivalent to being opposed to immigrants in general.  Of course this is a lie – many US citizens and permanent residents are immigrants.  But it sounds good, so they bleat their slander over and over again, 24/7 from every media outlet.  ‘Opposing a high rate of immigration is the same as hating immigrants.’  Even though this is clearly false, the oligarchy has no shame and this propaganda helps to stifle the opposition.

The next time you read a mainstream article talking about ‘immigrants’, replace the word with ‘foreign nationals’.  Doesn’t read the same, does it?  Imagine headlines like these: ‘Hispanic racist lobby demands that Mexican nationals have the right to send their children to U.S. Schools’, ‘Children of foreign nationals overburden local school’, ‘Protestors demand welfare benefits for foreign nationals’, etc. 

Now for Americans to want to restrict the ability of foreign nationals to move to the United States is certainly nationalistic – and by a dictionary definition, one could argue that it is even patriotic.  Possibly xenophobic. But it is not a priori racist. 

Suppose that the government of a nation is unable or unwilling to protect the interests of its people.  The result is not utopia.  The result is that people rely on connections to others of their race, or tribe, or extended family connections.  This always happens.  And in that case you have people living in the same nation, working side by side, who feel themselves as rivals and consider life to be a zero-sum game, where race A can only get ahead by taking from race B.  And that’s not a pretty picture.

As with anything good, nationalism can become pathological.  I would argue that the family is a good thing, but there are criminal gangs based on families that steal from others and only have loyalty to themselves, and few would argue that that’s a good thing.  So too nationalism can become toxic, where people don’t just favor their own nationals, but go to the extreme where they consider that only their own nationals deserve any consideration and they can invade and plunder other lands at will.

Nevertheless, although it can be taken too far, nationalism is the only structure that can take all of the people living in one place and make them feel like they are part of the same team.  It is the only structure than can make people be willing to sacrifice for the greater good of all.  It is the only structure that can avoid the tragedy of the commons, and allow people to focus their efforts productively and make long-term investments for the general prosperity.

Consider this: under nationalism, people feel that all the other people that they actually live with and work with are their brothers, and they feel less connection with people living on the other side of the ocean.  Under racism, people feel that all the people of their race are their brothers, even if they live on the other side of the world, and they care nothing for people of other races even if they work side-by-side or live in the same communities.   Now what system is most likely to result in social harmony?  And no, you don’t get to pick ‘everyone loves everyone else’, because that’s impossible.

Imagine a man who is married to a woman and has two children.  He routinely sees other women, because why shouldn’t he if he can find others that are temporarily prettier than his current wife?    He helps fix someone else’s house even though his own roof leaks, because why should he favor his own family when others are in need? - and these other people gave him money, which he does not share with his own family.  He refuses to pay for the education or health care of his own children, because why should an accident of birth cause them to be favored? - but of course, he doesn't pay to help other people's children either, he keeps it all for himself.  In short, he shows no loyalty whatsoever to his own family – the family exists in name only.  He shows no loyalty to anyone or anything other than his own selfish short-term interests.  And then why should his wife take care of him if he gets sick and disabled?  Why should any member of this family sacrifice anything for any other member?  

When people say that they refuse to favor their own family members or fellow citizens because they ‘love everyone’, what they are really saying is that they love no-one.  And such people typically don’t help everyone – they use their claim of loving everyone, to help no-one, and keep everything for themselves.

Family ties should not be absolute - people should be mindful of the well-being of the community and nation beyond.  But neither should the family be dissolved.  The family is a useful and natural means of focusing effort and compassion.  There is a reason that foster children and children raised in state wards don't do as well as those raised in families - no mere employee would work or sacrifice for a child as a father and mother will for their children.  This fact of human nature is not changed by mindlessly chanting that we should love all children equally.

Now imagine a nation that does not discriminate between its own citizens and foreign nationals.  ‘Why shouldn’t we import foreign workers if the rich can make more money now?’, ‘Why should we train our own citizens and favor them for jobs when we can get smarter people who will work for less from overseas?’  ‘Why should we show any preference in any way to our own citizens, or restrict the ability of the citizens of other countries to come here and compete for jobs and benefits and resources in any way?’

That would not be a nation.  That would be a piece of dirt that people might come to in order to make some money or grab some resources, but nobody would show it any loyalty.  Nobody would sacrifice for it.  Nobody would die for it.  Nobody would give up a short-term profit to make long-term investments.  This would simply be a global commons, and people would grab everything of value from it while it lasts, and then abandon it when it is sucked dry.

“The tragedy of the commons” has sometimes been misused by Neoliberal economists in order to justify the acquisition of vast fortunes by corrupt rentiers (but then what hasn’t been misused by Neoliberal economists to this end?), but it is still true.  If there is common grazing land in a village, the incentive is to graze as many of your cattle on it as possible before it is turned into dirt.  If someone limits their grazing, they will lose out to others that do not.  If someone invests in improving the land, the fruits of this investment will go to others.  A commons inevitably is destroyed from overuse and underinvestment.

And so with a nation.  Imagine that a people invest in building new schools, and foreigners come in such numbers that school crowding is not reduced.  Why did the people invest all that money, when they acquired no benefit?  It’s pointless.  Suppose that people try to fight poverty amongst their fellows, but it is all swallowed up by people coming over from other countries, so poverty is in no ways reduced.  Suppose that people limit their numbers, and conserve resources, in order to improve their quality of life and their environment – and it is all wiped out by other people moving in.  Without borders there is no point to sacrificing for the greater good.  Without borders any effort at improving life will be so diluted by the size of the entire world that nobody will see any positive effect – and even the generous of spirit may balk at paying for programs that have no visible positive effect. 

After Mao’s disastrous program of maximizing population growth, the Chinese embarked on a program of limiting population growth.  It hasn’t always been pretty, and China is far from a utopia, but the average Chinese has made significant progress.  Not so in India, where continued rapid population growth has produced a mass of poverty of almost unimaginable scale.  A Chinese economist recently said words to the effect that, we decided to eat, and the Indians decided to have children.

Suppose that we allowed Indian nationals to move to China in search of jobs without limit.  The progress that the Chinese people have with made with such difficulty would be wiped out (and the standard of living in India would not improve, because the Indians leaving would simply free up room for more Indians to be born and survive to adulthood).  Why is that moral?  Surely if the Chinese people have managed to eke out some gains, they are entitled to keep them?  Instead of demanding that India be allowed to drag China down, should we not be asking why India cannot raise itself up?  And if a people sacrifice and work to raise their standard of living, and it is all wiped out by other people, then why bother?  Why limit your numbers, when all that will happen is that other people will move in and leave you no better off?  Why invest in more infrastructure, when others will take it leaving you with no benefit? 

A world without borders will be a global commons.  It will suffer form overuse and underinvestment as all such commons do.  A world without borders will not equilibrate to the mean GDP of the world, it will be driven down to the level of poverty of Pakistan and Bangladesh, because societies with sustained high fertility rates can and do consume all resources available to them.  A world without borders would be like an electrical system with no fuses or circuit breakers, where a problem in one place can take the entire system down.

A final note to those that claim that a nation is just an arbitrary line on a map, and that because one's membership in a nation is an accident of birth it is meaningless. People can be asked - no, they can be REQUIRED - to DIE for their nation.  Nothing that people can be required to die for should be considered trivial.  A nation is a family writ large, and of nearly as much importance to a person.

Good fences make good neighbors, and moderate nationalism makes good societies.  A global commons, does not.