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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (118016)

4/11/2016 5:19:22 PM

From: koan

Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 220075

The most reliable information is personal observation of reality. >>

How well did that work for hominids a 100,000 years ago?

How come we lived as nomadic animals with nothing but crude stone tools, spears and throwing sticks for tens, 100'000's of thousands of years, until the invention agriculture 15,000 years ago and of the alphabet 5,000 years ago and the writing of books, if the most reliable information is personal observation of reality?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (118016)	4/11/2016 5:47:55 PM
From: bart13	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 220075

Did you also notice that he mentioned no books from Asia. Typical hidebound blindered know-it-all Western pretender who thinks he's educated. -ng-

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (118016)	4/21/2016 1:13:51 AM
From: elmatador	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 220075

You might say that citizens of rich countries receive a citizenship premium, while citizens of poor countries suffer a citizenship penalty. Migration is the attempt by the global poor to enjoy that premium, or at least a part of it, for themselves. There is a trade-off between citizenship and migration Immigration threatens to diminish the premiums enjoyed in rich countries, writes Branko Milanovic Branko Milanovic APRIL 19, 2016 Today, the rich world believes it has reached the limits of acceptable migration. Almost daily, countries in the developed world are placing new barriers in the way of would-be migrants. For the past decade or so, I have maintained a chart showing the border fences and walls separating contiguous countries with the largest income gaps (Mexico and the US, for example, or Spain and Morocco). Over the past couple of years, the number of such barriers around the world has soared. Now, we know that migration does more to reduce global poverty and inequality than any other factor. Calculations done by Alan Winters of the University of Sussex show that even a small increase in migration would be far more beneficial to the world’s poor than any other policy, including foreign aid. So is there a way to make greater migration acceptable to the native populations of the rich countries? We should consider first how we got to where we are today. The gaps between mean incomes in western Europe, North America and Japan, on the one hand, and what used to be called the Third World, on the other, reached a peak in the late 1970s and early 1980s. They have since begun to be eroded, in part by rapid economic growth in China, India and the rest of Asia. The income disparities between countries remain large, however. And they mean that most of a person’s lifetime income is determined by where he or she lives or were born (less than 4 per cent of the world’s population live in countries they were not born in). The incomes of two individuals identical in all respects except that one was born in a rich country and the other in a poor one might differ by a factor of 10 or 20, or even more. You might say that citizens of rich countries receive a citizenship premium, while citizens of poor countries suffer a citizenship penalty. Migration is the attempt by the global poor to enjoy that premium, or at least a part of it, for themselves. The arrival of migrants threatens to diminish or dilute the premium enjoyed by citizens of rich countries, which includes not only financial aspects, but also good health and education services, and public goods like the preservation of national culture and language. Can that threat be defused? I believe it can, so long as we redefine citizenship in such a way that migrants are not allowed to lay claim to the entire premium falling to citizens straight away, if at all. Restricting the citizenship rights of migrants in this way would assuage the concerns of the native population, while still ensuring the migrants are better off than they would be had they stayed in their own countries. As happens currently in the Gulf states, migrants could be allowed to work for a limited number of years, or to work only for a given employer, or else be obliged to return to their country of origin every four or five years. They could also be made to pay higher taxes since they are the largest net beneficiaries of migration. Despite such discriminatory treatment, the welfare of migrants and their families would increase, while native populations would not be made to share their entire premium with incomers. This would require significant adjustments to traditional ways of thinking about migration and citizenship. We should stop thinking of migration as a voyage of reinvention in which an African, say, “becomes” a European, and start viewing it simply as a way of finding a better job in a foreign country. Moving from a Nigerian village to work in London should not be seen as any different from working in Lagos while one’s family stays in the countryside. Nor should this lead to the expectation of any special citizenship benefits. There is no reason why one may not work in country A and be a citizen of country B. It is not clear that the old conception of nation-state citizenship as a binary category that in principle confers all the benefits of citizenship to anyone who happens to be physically present within a country’s borders is adequate in a globalised world. In effect, there is a trade-off between such a view of citizenship and the flow of migration. The more we insist on full rights for all residents, the less longstanding residents will be willing to accept more migrants. If graduated categories of citizenship were created — ranging from those that grant almost no benefits other than the right to temporary work, to those that are close to full citizenship, like the US green card system — we would be able to reconcile the objective of reducing world poverty with reducing migration to acceptable levels. If we do not do something, we will be stuck in a position in which everyone who makes it to the rich world is given full rights of citizenship, but we do everything in our power to make sure that nobody gets here. The writer is author of ‘Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization’