To be honest I think thats not a nearly throughout economic analysis.
To begin with, as noted in the article by having to pay more people, it removed some from unemployment. That as noted in the article basically halved the cost of the extra cost.
But hold on. Someone removed from unemployment doesn't just sit and look pretty. Unemployment benefits are usually nothing to write home about compared to an actual wage and where previously one could just subsist they newly employed individual could now Consume much more strongly. Consume in this case means buying tomatoes, buying starbucks, buying cinemas tickets, buying dresses and whatever. All this stuff moves the economy.
The question is then, has the economic impact of all this economy moving been taken into account?
Huh. That's actually fairly interesting! Myself I have noticed the following. I am someone who meddles around with both "artistic" stuff (3d modelling etc) and programming as a hobby/projects.
I have noticed that when I do the 3d stuff, I can usually tolerate music with lyrics, or for that matter even listening to documentaries, TED talks etc just fine. Everything slows down but progress is actually being made.
On the other hand when I do something programmy or for that matter even simple text based stuff such as "writing descriptions" I have noticed that I find music with lyrics utterly distracting.
Although the left/right brain thing is a bit of a myth, frankly it has been extremely clear to me that language neurons get to be dual-purpose components when it comes to logic stuff of a particular kind.
Great Work with the list! I can see it becoming a thing in the future!
I would add Douglas Adams & Terry Pratchett to your fiction category, although it is hard to quantify why. They are an amazing interplay of imagination, creativity & playfulness and by going through them, some of it rubs off to their readers.
In the case of Terry Pratchett in particular, some of the books are actually quite indirectly educational and as good as philosophical critiques on society and aspects of. Including: Authoritarianism, Government, Racism, Superstition, Charlatanism, Economics, Mortality etc etc.
Non-EU Norway is a 5 million nation sitting on a ton of oil. Which in turn takes that oil profits and puts them in a social fund, which reduces the main stressor of all socialistic systems (pensions). If you think that you will convince BP to do the same, good luck. Especially considering that there is nothing stopping you from doing the same already.
Switzerland, 8 million, is also landlocked in between some of the best EU nations, all of which trade with it in an EU-like agreement, including free movement, and its manufacturing economy abides pretty much to Every EU regulation. What this means, is that again nothing prevents the UK to have been Switzerland, other than, super politely put, the population's innate inability to be as productive, or imaginative in thinking useful products like the Swiss do.
Greece, which ironically is my original home country so I know Very well, is a corrupt mafiocrasy. (rather Russian like in fact) It would have failed IN or OUT of the EU anyway. This however is not the EU's fault, as evident by the fact that plenty of EU countries started worse than Greece, and are now better (better as in gdp/capita), including Estonia, Lithuania & Slovakia.
If anything, this disparity is able proof that EU nations actually have more than enough sovereignty to fuck or unfuck themselves as much as they want. Its just that every time something good happens politicians say "we did it" but every time something bad happens they say "totes the EU fault, holding us down!"
To sum up. You want to be Norway. Make a referendum to throw BP's profits in a fund. (Not that you have the oil reserve anyway) You want to be Switzerland, think of more useful chemicals rather than watching x-factor (I am not even kidding. Chemicals are one of the best Swiss exports apparently). You don't want to be Greece, don't just take EU development money and use it just for politician's villas, bouzouki and civil servants appointment for votes. Simples.
To get to the bottom of tax avoidance, people have to see and feel the benefit of paying tax. In Greece they simply don't, and it hasn't gotten any better in recent years.
The average German can easily list the benefits they receive from their government.
Because its all fun and games until the "majority" suddenly realize they can just say "oh, and also, how about we vote to take all the money of that 10% here".
There is such a thing as tyranny by the minority, and tyranny by the majority. The second is in fact much easier to do, since the first requires a modicum of power & ability for someone to keep himself in that position.
The minaret thing is irrelevant, as a minaret thing, but relevant as a right to construct the things you damn like thing upon your private property.
I'm also of the conviction that everybody should do whatever they want if they don't hurt/bother anybody else. However, a consequence of this is that people will have to waive certain freedoms if the majority is bothered by them, like building whatever they'd like on their private property.
Sure, let's say not being allowed to build minarets because people don't like that is bullshit.
But let's also imagine I buy some land in front of the kindergarden your children go to and build a giant wall showing hardcore porn movies all day. Now probably you and the majority of people living there wouldn't like me to do that, but it's my damn right so gtfo.
It's a slippery slope both ways (minarets, gay people can't kiss in public, porn walls) and I have no idea how to draw the line between what the majority wants and the invasion of personal freedom. More importantly, neither the majority nor any elected officials should be allowed to draw that line (almost by definition), so it seems it's a catch 22 situation.
There is no right to construct the things you damn like upon your private property in most of Europe. There are a lot of zoning laws, safety laws, standards, etc. Generally, even if fairly loose places like the UK, each locality gets to veto the construction of something if they don't like it.
Also, the idea of private property, here or anywhere else, is highly tenuous. Have you looked into how much you actually own that property? Try not paying your property taxes for a few years and see who really owns your so-called private property.
"Real" in "Real estate" doesn't stand for reality, it stands for royalty. Your private property is granted by royal decree, and can be withdrawn by the same mechanism.
> "Real" in "Real estate" doesn't stand for reality, it stands for royalty. Your private property is granted by royal decree, and can be withdrawn by the same mechanism.
That etymology doesn't sound very "real"?
"Real estate, the exact term, is first recorded 1660s, but in Middle English real was used in law in reference to immovable property, paired with, and distinguished from, personal."
Democratic countries should live or die on the decisions they make. I think that is the ultimate freedom.
On the whole, most developed countries have broad consensus on core issues. I don't believe gap between left and right is large enough to destroy a country, there is a lot of common ground.
Your rights, any right, ends when the rights of others start.
You want to build things you damn like? Better those things not to create noise that enters my private property, and my private ears.
My right not to be disturbed is more important than your right to build whatever you want.
All predators, humans included, have this thing called "territory". When someone comes from outside the country and starts filling the ambient noise with her sounds, they are actually claiming ownership of everything.
Maybe if they had money to spend, then they wouldn't be "unwashed" and in fact thus be part of an ever increasing economy. Unfortunately that would require an understanding of how an economy works, rather than a zero-sum mindset and collectivist hate of seeing "other" people have money who "don't deserve it" because their "birth coordinates were wrong", even if you were to receive exactly the same. Talk about self-destructive behaviour.
There is something to be said for having been born (and as a result, raised) in a post-Enlightenment society.
Migrants from pre-Englightenment societies almost always raise the general crime levels, take value that they didn't earn, and become the new underclass.
Look at Irish and Italian immigrants in the US in the 1800s. We came from countries that did not have the same level of education, without the history of liberal philosophy, and as a result we caused a lot of damage to the US -- between organized crime, debauchery, civil unrest, general violence, but also, politically/socially. We didn't understand the American political space, we voted for statist governments, and then began taking over the police forces and unions and mobilizing them against our rivals (blacks, Polish and Jews).
Eventually, we were assimilated, but that was much easier -- we were already Christians (albeit Catholic), and a lot of us could pass for a more desirable nationality. So far, Middle Eastern immigrants have shown little interest in assimilating at all.
> So far, Middle Eastern immigrants have shown little interest in assimilating at all.
Do you realize that there are indigenous christians of all denominations in the ME or there's some kind of dominance hierarchy among denominations and churches of the world that I am not aware of?
Of course. It's something like 3% of Syrian refuges, for example. No population is uniform.
But if we were talking casually about, say, Hong Kong, and I said the Hong Kong-ese speak Cantonese, would you complain because some percentage do not?
Or if I said Spanish people speak Spanish?
It's not a useful distinction to draw unless you provide it in the context of some larger argument.
I've not made any arguments that we are pre-disposed, as a race, to these traits. I made no mention of the heritability of these traits. Describing my comment as racism is a complete nonsequitor.
My comment was on the state of the predominant Irish culture at the time of the diaspora.
By 1800 Ireland had been victim to hundreds of years of British misrule, shortly followed a major famine.
Our culture was devastated, our institutions were devastated, our life expectancy was in the mid 30's. We had little experience in self-governance, little experience of Democracy, Catholics were banned from most universities, couldn't fully own land until 1778.
It was even illegal for Catholics to teach elementary school, so childhood education was in an unimaginably desperate state.
Worst of all, Irish immigrants (unlike the H1Bs of today) mostly came from the lowest rungs of society in this already destitute nation and culture.
When my Irish great great grandmother came here she was 16, sent to America by her stepfather (along with her younger brother) because he no longer wanted to care for another man's children. She was fortunate enough to have come from a family of domestics for a wealthy estate, so she spoke well, and could cook and clean. She was comparatively lucky. Even so, it took multiple generations before my family pulled out of poverty, in NYC, and became a normal middle-class family.
Trying to assimilate a population like that into a nation with limited government and social institutions, as the US was in the 19th century, is a recipe for disaster. And it was, for a long time, a disaster.
That is a very one sided view of things. Lots of assumptions that have been proven false over and over again. If you actually look into the economic research on this questions you will quickly see that its very hard to make a case against immigration. Anti-immigration economists have to make arguments such as "over a period of 30 years immigration reduced the real wage of people without a high-school degree 5-8%". And that's of course a terrible argument that does not hold up in comparison with the positive effects.
Essentially xenophobia is the only reason why people are against immigration.
Letters maybe, but its not standard to represents genomes as dots. Thats just an "artistic" representation.