Posts by jh
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Diversity: "Are we Getting There":
First, Goodhart demolishes what he calls the “immigrationist myth”. This is the proposition, spun by the political elite for the last quarter century, that Britain is a mongrel nation that has always been open to outside arrivals. As he painstakingly demonstrates, this is almost completely untrue: “From 1066 until 1950 immigration was almost non-existent – about 50,000 Huguenots in the 16th and 17th century, about 150,000 Jews in two waves, and perhaps one million or more Irish over 200 years, during which time they were internal migrants within one state.” More immigrants now arrive on British shores in a single year than they did in the entire period from 1066 to 1950, excluding wartime flows and the Irish.
Second, Goodhart challenges the proposition that immigration is by definition good for the economy. The evidence is mixed: “Immigration has made Britain livelier and more dynamic than it would otherwise have been, but it has not clearly made it richer or more content. Indeed, large-scale immigration has exacerbated many of the undesirable aspects of British economic life: poverty, inequality, low productivity, lack of training and employer short-termism. The country would still have functioned perfectly well with half the levels of poor-country immigration we have experienced – it would have been more monochrome, a bit more equal and a lot more Irish”.
Third, Goodhart shows how British voters have never been asked about immigration. Indeed they have frequently been misled or lied to by the authorities on a subject that has completely changed the nature of their communities. This helps to explain why so many people regard political parties as useless.
Finally, Goodhart is utterly devastating on the enormity of the demographic transformation of Britain achieved by Tony Blair and New Labour after 1997. The total number of non-European immigrants during the half century after 1948 was approximately two million. From 1997 to 2012 net immigration has been approximately four million. To put this another way: twice the number of immigrants have come to Britain in the 15 years since 1997 than in the previous 50.
Net immigration to Britain, just 48,000 in 1997, rose to 148,000 in 1998, and advanced even more sharply thereafter. As Goodhart shows this was no accident. It was down to deliberate government policy. The primary purpose rule, introduced by Margaret Thatcher to slow down immigration in the Eighties, was abolished in a payback to Labour’s South Asian voters.
Most important of all was the decision to open the labour market to Eastern European and Baltic states seven years before we were legally required to. Labour ministers made a series of profoundly misleading statements about the consequences of this decision, saying that no more than 13,000 new workers would arrive. The true figure was 1.5million.
Goodhart argues that “in 30 years’ time New Labour’s immigration policy will almost certainly be seen as its primary legacy”. And yet there was no serious discussion in cabinet, and scarcely any mention of immigration in Labour’s 1997 or 2001 election manifestos. In a cruel paradox, the losers from this policy were Labour voters who suddenly found themselves priced out of jobs and confronted with competition for housing and key public services such as education and health.
For the economic elite (a category that includes Guardian columnists and BBC grandees) immigration brought many advantages. Their lavish salaries allow them to buy their way out of public education and the NHS while immigration means an abundance of labour, higher corporate profits and cheaper domestic help.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/9986465/The-British-Dream-by-David-Goodhart-and-The-Diversity-Illusion-by-Ed-West-review.html
It looks as though U.K is getting there (in a waking up sense) faster than Aotearoa. -
Hard News: Diverse Auckland: are we…, in reply to TracyMac,
I'm thinking the Robert Putman study included cities.
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Hard News: Diverse Auckland: are we…, in reply to BenWilson,
It’s pretty much “Not living in cities”. Which makes proving that cities erode the communal sense easy, but doesn’t make a convincing argument in itself that diverse cities are bad places. Indeed, the hostility of tight knit communities to outsiders, in the sense you are describing, may be one of the main reasons that cities grow so large by comparison. They have to take all the “rejects”. Which ends up being most people on the planet.
I see what you are getting at and I often wonder why if life in the country is so good why do masses leave to go to cities? It seems to be for economic reasons.
There may also be another reason relating to our evolutionary past excitement(I remember moving to the city as a kid and hearing my first ambulance at night and then visiting L.A and listening to the buzz about freeway traffic, police chases in process etc ).
But cities are also about communities. A healthy community isn't an optional extra or second best to diversity. -
Hard News: Diverse Auckland: are we…, in reply to Sacha,
But, of course, this is the result of computer simulations of reality, not reality itself. Our identities, social relationships and actual neighborhoods are far more complex than simulations can get at.
That doesn't support the argument one way or the other, it is like saying "these are only computer simulations of what happens to climate as C02 increases, not reality itself".
This large (30,000 people) empirical study appears to support it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/world/americas/05iht-diversity.1.6986248.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0Frank Salter calls it The War Against Human Nature
http://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2012/11/the-war-against-human-nature-iii/ -
IT HAS BECOME increasingly popular to speak of racial and ethnic diversity as a civic strength. From multicultural festivals to pronouncements from political leaders, the message is the same: our differences make us stronger.
But a massive new study, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has concluded just the opposite. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam -- famous for "Bowling Alone," his 2000 book on declining civic engagement -- has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.
"The extent of the effect is shocking," says Scott Page, a University of Michigan political scientist.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/world/americas/05iht-diversity.1.6986248.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Indirect evidence that the ghost of Franz Boas still haunts the antipodean ivory tower comes from leading scholars of ethnicity and nationalism who I contacted. They could not name one Australian scholar who professes biosocial theory. This is in line with the survey reported in the first essay in this series in the June issue.[2] No political science or sociology department reported a scholar basing his or her research or teaching on behavioural biology. The skew towards Marxist and other environmental theories means that scholars of nationality do not know what to do with the wealth of findings drawn from evolutionary psychology, ethology, and sociobiology—except ignore them.
http://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2012/11/the-war-against-human-nature-iii/
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Hard News: Diverse Auckland: are we…, in reply to BenWilson,
Is community (in the sense you’re referring to) good in itself, though? You’re almost defining it as something that self-inoculates against diversity. So again the question: Good for whom, or for what?
I'm not sure how to define community (in this sense) , but I think it means living where there is a common bond with those around you.
I think this old article from Time Magazine explains it.
http://www.oocities.org/athens/stage/8922/ -
Diversity isn't good for community
Urbanists and planners like to imagine and design for a world of diversity. Diversity, we like to think, is both a social good and, as I’ve argued, a spur to innovation and economic growth.
But to what degree is this goal of diverse, cohesive community attainable, even in theory?
That’s the key question behind an intriguing new study, “The (In)compatibility of Diversity and Sense of Community,” published in the November edition of the American Journal of Community Psychology. The study, by sociologist Zachary Neal and psychologist Jennifer Watling Neal, both of Michigan State University (full disclosure: I was an external member of the former’s dissertation committee), develops a nifty agent-based computer model to test this question.
Their simulations of more than 20 million virtual “neighborhoods” demonstrate a troubling paradox: that community and diversity may be fundamentally incompatible goals. As the authors explain, integration “provides opportunities for intergroup contact that are necessary to promote respect for diversity, but may prevent the formation of dense interpersonal networks that are necessary to promote sense of community.”http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2013/11/paradox-diverse-communities/7614/
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Hard News: Diverse Auckland: are we…, in reply to Sacha,
mass migration has fuelled a nasty real estate market
No, it’s a tiny factor. Our skewed financial system and investment culture are mostly to blame.
I don't think it is a tiny factor.
This is what the Savings Working Group said:Although "the favourable tax treatment of property investment" accounted for about 50% of house price increases between 2001 and 2007, the working group said, there was also strong evidence that rapid swings in immigration brought about price-rise "shocks".
There was a sharp spike in immigration in 2001, 2002 and 2003 and, said working group committee member Dr Andrew Coleman, it appeared that property prices did not fall anywhere near as greatly when immigration fell again.
The report added that there was little evidence that immigration boosted local incomes. In fact, the need to build roads and schools meant that net migration contributed to the national deficit.
"Migration is another issue that the government should investigate further," the working group said. "There are indications that high immigration rates have pushed up government spending, house prices and business borrowing, and prevented necessary adjustments to the economy."http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/money/4622459/Government-policies-blamed-for-house-prices
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Hard News: Diverse Auckland: are we…, in reply to BenWilson,
Why wouldn’t infill be related to population growth?
Because the immigrant population might be less interested in infill than the non-immigrant?
I'm not blaming immigrants directly, I''m blaming population growth ( a policy choice) and an industry that feeds off it.
As immigration has grown the construction sector has grown as has their lobbying power.
Immigration creates it's own demand for skilled immigrants (housing is a significant driver of manufacturing).
New arrivals require infrastructure. Infrastructure is costly and comes out of the taxes of our low paid workforce (urban limits are one of the responses to the cost of infrastructure).
Wealthy immigrants pick the eyes out of the real estate. Treasury say that 70% of our houses are in a poor state of repair.
Whatever the government says about immigration rules the public perception is different (equivalent to an Open Day with a For Sale sign).
Globalisation is good for those at the top but not the bottom of the pyramid in developed countries like NZ.
It is hard to see why we need more and more people when our main industries don't benefit from economies of scale, and manufacturing is becoming more automated.
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Hard News: Diverse Auckland: are we…, in reply to alobar,
“The need of human beings to belong to and unite behind a common culture, institutions and values is part of human nature. This need is hard-wired because of its survival value during evolutionary history. It cannot be overcome by government policies and coercion aimed at its elimination.”
Sounds like one mans opinion to me
but what if it is true?