Noah Smith – Why Paul Ehrlich – Population Bomb – Was Wrong

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Noah Smith (see his Substack Noah Opinion & subscribe) an accomplished wordsmith, journalist, data analyst and thinker revisits Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, limits to growth and degrowth; still apparent in faux environmental narratives in mainstream media, but are coming from the fossil fuel nativist right.

Missed a few details including ZPG Zero Population Growth, Rockefeller Bros., Rockefeller Foundation, long standing donors like the Scaifes etc., whiff of anti-immigrant, antisemitic, anti-Catholic and Asiaphobe sentiments that were channelled via deceased white nationalist John ‘passive eugenics’ Tanton and his Social Contract Press; colleague of Ehrlich at ZPG.

Not to forget the roots of this movement including Malthus, Galton, Madison Grant, Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes and post World War II the Rockefeller Commission, UN Population Division, green revolution, Club of Rome and tracking symptoms of previous high fertility i.e. ‘population growth’ but ignoring decline in fertility globally, to this day. 

Data Analysis – Why Paul Ehrlich got everything wrong

And why we should still listen to warnings about environmental catastrophes

Biologist Paul Ehrlich is one of the most discredited popular intellectuals in America. He’s so discredited that his Wikipedia page starts the second paragraph with “Ehrlich became well known for the discredited 1968 book The Population Bomb”. In that book he predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the decade to come; when no such thing happened (in the 70s or ever so far), Ehrlich’s name became sort of a household joke among the news-reading set.

And yet despite all this, in the year 2022, 60 Minutes still had Ehrlich on to offer his thoughts on wildlife loss:

When the news program was roundly ridiculed for giving Ehrlich air time, the 90-year-old scholar defended himself on Twitter by citing his academic credentials, and the fact that The Population Bomb had been peer-reviewed:

As many acidly pointed out, the fact that Ehrlich has impeccable credentials and was peer-reviewed is a reason to take a more skeptical eye toward academic credentials and peer review in general. Maybe we’ve gotten better at these things since the 60s, and maybe not. But being spectacularly wrong with the approval of a community of experts is much worse than being spectacularly wrong as a lone kook, because it means that the whole field of people we’ve entrusted to serve as experts on a topic somehow allowed itself to embrace total nonsense.

Anyway, it’s useful to review why Ehrlich got things so wrong, and why the people who make similar claims today — i.e., the “degrowth” movement — are also wrong. But it’s also important to realize that just because Ehrlich was wrong about overpopulation and some other stuff doesn’t mean that he, or the degrowth people, are wrong about the threat of habitat destruction and wildlife loss.

Why Ehrlich was so wrong in 1968

Ehrlich’s basic prediction in The Population Bomb was that overpopulation would soon cause massive famines. Matt Yglesias has a good Twitter thread with some screenshots:

Ehrlich also predicted that 65 million Americans would starve to death in the 1980s, that England would cease to exist by the year 2000, etc. etc.

Obviously, nothing like this ever happened. But why? In fact, there are a number of reasons. But the most important principle here is just that extreme projections of recent trends tend not to come true. The scientific “models” that Ehrlich and the other enviro-catastrophists of the 60s and 70s relied on were very basic things — they were really just drawing exponential curves and then saying “See, line go up!” That sort of simple projection ignores all the various countermeasures that people will take against emerging problems, and all the ways they’ll adapt to new conditions. Countermeasures and adaptations act as a dampening force, slowing down the trend lines before catastrophe hits — sometimes, though not always, slowing it enough to avoid catastrophe entirely.

In the case of overpopulation and food supply, two big things happened to make Ehrlich wrong. The first is that a bunch of new agricultural technologies — collectively referred to as the Green Revolution — emerged that boosted crop production dramatically. For example, corn production has more than quadrupled since Ehrlich’s book came out:

The other thing that changed was the number of mouths that had to be fed. Population growth has not remained exponential; it has slowed all around the world, thanks to lower fertility rates. Ehrlich wrote right around the peak; since then, population growth has been more than cut in half.

These two factors, in combination, mean that human beings consume substantially more calories today, on average, than when Ehrlich made his sensational predictions

Nor is this just because a few rich-world people are hogging all the food. Global deaths from hunger and malnutrition have fallen steeply, to about 212,000 in 2019

So whether or not Ehrlich got his math right, the fact is that his assumptions were wrong. But why were they wrong? A bit of it was due to what I might call “quasi-natural” processes — economic growth led to urbanization, which drives down fertility rates. Increasing education, which also tends to accompany growth, reduced birth rates as well. But most of Ehrlich’s mistakes come from his failure to anticipate that human beings would act intentionally to avert most of the trends he was warning about.

Scientists of the 1960s, like Norman Borlaug, knew that feeding the world would be a problem as global population rose; they didn’t need Paul Ehrlich to tell them that. That’s why they dedicated their lives to working on improving crop varieties and fertilizers and irrigation. The inventors of birth control knew that for many families, having one more accidental child just meant one more mouth to feed, and they invented new forms of contraception specifically so that people could choose the family size they wanted. Human ingenuity — what Julian Simon, who famously beat Ehrlich in a bet about commodity prices, called “the ultimate resource” — was one of the stabilizing mechanisms that acted to damp out the runaway trends Ehrlich was predicting. (In fact, human ingenuity was also the reason Simon won the bet about commodities; people worked hard to develop new sources of supply and new ways of using resources more efficiently.)

Another stabilizing mechanism was government action. Concern about overpopulation was what prompted many countries to make new birth control technologies more available to their people, even when it violated their conservative values — for example, worry about food supply prompted Iran’s religious leaders to implement one of the world’s most effective (and totally voluntary) family planning programs in the 1990s.

What about coercive programs? Brutal, repressive policies like India’s mass sterilization program or China’s one-child policy were motivated in part by the overpopulation panic that originated in the West (though in China’s case the key book was The Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth). Of course, China and India hardly needed some American intellectuals to tell them that they were poor countries who struggled to feed their gigantic populations. But these were definitely the kind of brutal totalitarian measures that Ehrlich was recommending.

And yet it’s not at all clear how much of an effect these repressive policies actually had. China’s fertility rate had already declined precipitously by the time they enacted the one-child policy, and further declines didn’t happen until a decade later.

Meanwhile, India’s mass sterilization campaign in 1975 produced no discernible change in the slow, steady downward fertility trend in that country.

In other words, the stabilization mechanisms that made Ehrlich so laughably wrong were generally not the massive coercive top-down government actions that he hoped for. Instead, stabilization of global food supply was achieved via technological innovations by concerned scientists, which were then adopted by concerned governments.

There is a lesson here for the modern day.

Ehrlich’s modern-day heirs

In general, my advice to people who want to understand the late 2010s and 2020s is to read about the late 1960s and 1970s. The parallels aren’t perfect, of course, but the broad-based social and political unrest that emerged in the late 60s has an obvious parallel with the unrest of the late 2010s. My general thesis is that unrest is a “macro variable” that trickles down and basically infects everything in a society, including what scientists think about and write about.

For many, I think, unrest creates a sense of catastrophic runaway change, which results in a desire to “stop the bus” and slow change down. If you’re a biologist, then perhaps that fear of change manifests in catastrophic predictions about population and natural resources. Ehrlich has caught an especially large amount of flak, but he was hardly unique for his day; Mark Perry has a good roundup of apocalyptic predictions that environmentalists made around the same time, some of which are even more extreme than Ehrlich’s!

Nowadays, as in the 70s, many intellectuals on the left have become afraid of economic growth and resource limitations. This is why Ehrlich is back on TV — wildlife loss is one of the things people are scared of. But the biggest thing people worry about is climate change. And though some environmentalists have embraced the idea of green growth as the solution to climate change (which it is), there’s also a degrowth movement that’s especially popular in the UK and North Europe, and has gained a foothold in some intellectual circles in the U.S.

So far, degrowth’s popularity in the U.S. has been limited due to vigorous pushback from liberals and many leftists, who realize that its proposed solution of massive coordinated global anti-growth planning is A) unworkable, B) would stall the transition to renewable energy, and C) would require developing countries to make untenable sacrifices. But the idea still gets regular exposure in the American press, and sensible folks are forced to be constantly vigilant against the steady drumbeat of degrowtherism from across the Atlantic.

It worth mentioning, though, that degrowthers aren’t just calling for unworkable solutions; they’re also incredibly sloppy in their predictions. For example, degrowthers regularly base their assessments of unsustainable resource use on aggregate measures of material usage. 

The British intellectual Jason Hickel also uses aggregate measures of resource use by gross tonnage to support his own jeremiads against growth.

This is a terrible metric, for several reasons. First, it includes materials that are recycled or sustainable (e.g. commercial forests, or farming itself). If resources shift to a more sustainable form — for example, the massive switch from fishing to fish farming — that won’t be recorded in these numbers.

Second, it ignores one of the most important sources of sustainability: resource substitution. When humans figure out how to substitute a commonly available resource for a scarce one, sustainability increases even if the gross tonnage used also increases. For example, if we use widely available magnesium instead of scarce lithium for our batteries, that increases sustainability even if tonnage doesn’t change. Humans are always looking for ways to substitute plentiful resources for scarce ones, and we often find them.

But no matter what metric they use, degrowthers always make the same fundamental mistake, and it’s the same one Paul Ehrlich made: trend extrapolation. The tweet above is just classic “line go up” thinking. And degrowthers treat the past correlation of economic growth and resource use as if it’s a law of the Universe, when there’s no reason to believe that correlation will continue. For example, many countries have managed to decouple their carbon emissions from their GDP growth:

When confronted with this blunt fact, the degrowthers, who have long claimed that this sort of absolute decoupling is impossible, will respond that all that matters is global emissions (which is true), and that although global GDP has grown much faster than emissions since 1990, the fact that global emissions are still up slightly since that time means these have not yet decoupled in an absolute sense.

This is, of course, nonsense. Absolute decoupling in countries like Mexico, Singapore, Germany and the U.S. shows that absolute decoupling is possible in every country; most countries consume just about as much carbon as they produce, which is why outsourcing of emissions basically doesn’t happen. There’s no reason that China, India, and the rest of the world can’t decouple as well, and with them, the world. Of course, it will take several years — perhaps a decade — to demonstrate global absolute decoupling, by which time our age of unrest will likely be behind us and degrowth will have faded just as surely as the population panic of the 70s.

In the meantime, however, degrowth might push some countries’ policies in a decidedly foolish direction; I’m particularly worried about the UK. Just as India and China pursued self-destructive policies in response to the population panic, the UK may be tempted to make its grinding post-2008 stagnation even worse in the name of degrowth.

But enviro-catastrophists are not always wrong

Witnessing the follies of environmental catastrophists, from the 1970s to today, it’s tempting to conclude that people who make dire environmental predictions are simply kooks whom we should just never listen to. Indeed, many people do draw exactly that conclusion, especially on the political right. This is a bad response, for a number of reasons.

First, environmental catastrophes are a very real possibility. Climate change is the main example; if we don’t do something to limit emissions (and, probably, pull some carbon out of the air), we really do face a whole lot of extremely negative consequences. Sober scientists who believe strongly in the power of human ingenuity, technical solutions, and economic growth nevertheless recognize both the necessity and the magnitude of the task.

It would be very, very bad to ignore the people warning about climate change. If we do avert catastrophe, technology will be how we do it. But just as with Norman Borlaug, scientists have to be sufficiently worried about the problem in order to be motivated to devote their lives to this project. It’s easy to mock climate alarmism, but without some sort of alarm, people wouldn’t have spent the last 40 years figuring out how to make solar power and batteries cheap. Ingenuity is one of the great stabilizing forces of human society, but it doesn’t just happen automatically.

(So how do we tell the difference between the sober, realistic warnings and the overblown panics? There’s probably not a good general mechanism for doing this; we just have to use our intelligence to evaluate the claims various people are making. But one good rule of thumb is probably to be suspicious of people who package their warnings with pre-prepared solutions. In general, expertise in identifying a problem isn’t the same as expertise in solving it, so people who insist that mass sterilization is the only solution to overpopulation, or that degrowth is the only solution to climate change, often have a political axe to grind, or are just overconfident people to begin with.)

But there’s one other situation where prophets of enviro-doom might come in handy even when their warnings are overblown. Humans, who set all the policies and invent all the technologies, simply don’t care enough about nonhuman life. We may stop climate change and overpopulation and resource scarcity and air and water pollution out of self-interest, but it’s unlikely that pure self-interest will be enough to stop habitat destruction.

And we are destroying the animals — or at least, many of them. Wild mammals, for instance, have declined by 85% (in terms of biomass) since humans arrived on the scene. 

Statistics on biodiversity and habitat loss generally all point in the same direction.

I’ll write a lot more about why this is happening, and how bad it really is, and what we can do to prevent it, but for now I’d just like to note that it’s highly unlikely that human beings care as much as we should about the welfare of non-human living beings. Some people do care, a lot; but the fact that self-interest is rarely a major factor in our calculations about other animals means that we’ll always tend to care less about actions of ours that harm those voiceless, powerless creatures.

This lack of caring can often be utterly chilling. In an otherwise strong post criticizing Ehrlich’s recent 60 Minutes appearance, Cato senior fellow Marian L. Tupy ended with this disturbing assertion:

But let’s get real. The reason the planet matters is that we are here to perceive it and to enjoy it with our senses. (Animals don’t care about biodiversity per se. What they do care about is finding an organism to kill and eat or mate with.) Moreover, the planet is not a fragile damsel in distress…Rather, it is a ruthless killing zone in need of taming.

This depiction of animals as savage beings who care only about killing and sex is strongly at odds with the experience of anyone who has actually been around animals and seen them demonstrate love, playfulness, and kindness. It also happens to omit animals’ desire to live, to avoid starvation and pain — wildlife exists not just for humans’ benefit, but for its own. And the idea that the savage necessities of life in the wild provide moral justification for human destruction of wild habitats needs some stern reexamining.

Seeing the prevalence of attitudes like this, I wonder if alarmism like Ehrlich’s isn’t a useful counterweight to human callousness. In economics jargon, perhaps overestimating the probability of a sixth mass extinction is a way to better match the private utility functions of the humans who make global economic policy with the social welfare function that includes all living, feeling beings. At the very least, alarmism might help to keep habitat destruction in the public consciousness.

So I’m not ready to throw the degrowth people and the doomers under the proverbial bus quite yet. I just want them to focus their efforts on wildlife, biodiversity, and habitat destruction, and leave climate change to more sober-minded folk.’

For more blogs and articles on Demography, Environment, Eugenics, Limits to Growth, Political Strategy, Statistical Analysis, Tanton Network and White Nationalism click through:

Malthus on Population Growth, Economy, Environment, White Nationalism and Eugenics

Posted on February 16, 2021

Malthus on Population Growth, Economy, Environment, White Nationalism and Eugenics

In recent years we have observed the reemergence of the British nineteenth century preacher Malthus and his ideas on population, via groups like Population Matters in the United Kingdom, with a focus upon negatives round the supposed direct relationship between increasing population (growth), economic growth or impairment, and environmental degradation.

However, Malthusian population principles have less relevance in the 21st century, especially when presented via scientifically untested ideas or philosophy versus the now available grounded science research and data analysis. Further, there is very limited and sub-optimal data to support Malthusian claims which have returned to become a weapon or political tactic. This leveraging of Malthus includes white nationalism, fossil fuels and environmental degradation, apportioning blame for related issue on undefined population growth, as opposed to the lack of good policy development, on actual causes i.e. fossil fuel pollution, global warming through emissions; used to deflect from inertia of governments and create antipathy towards existing and future ‘immigrants’ including babies, from the non European world.

Ghosts of Galton and Eugenics Return – Society, Population and Environment in the 21st Century

Posted on November 25, 2021

We have already looked at some other key players of the past related to eugenics, population via Malthus and liberal economics of Adam Smith, now we look at Galton, if not in detail, a broad sketch of his life and later impact on society, especially in the Anglosphere.

This has been exemplified by how eugenics theory never went away, even after the Nazis post WWII, but reemerged via the US using an environmental and climate prism, with a focus upon Malthusian population obsessions; supported by ZPG, UNPD data, Anglosphere media and think tanks to avoid regulation and business constraints, while encouraging xenophobia.

Madison Grant – Eugenics, Heredity, Class, Immigration, Great Replacement, Conservation and Nazis

Posted on May 3, 2022

In recent years we have observed the rise of white nationalism, alt &/or far right, nativism, eugenics, neo-Nazis etc. in the Anglosphere and Europe, often underpinned by divisive dog whistle politics through legacy media. For one to understand modern Anglo &/or European nativism, the past of eugenics and conservation in the US especially, the history of Madison Grant starting over a century ago, needs to be scrutinised. Following is a brief but incomplete overview from relevant literature, including Grant’s own writings.

John Tanton – Australia – The Social Contract Press

Posted on September 30, 2020

John Tanton – Australia – The Social Contract Press. Many people in the Anglo world and now Europe may ask where does the current transnational white nativist or white nationalist ideology, promoting eugenics and immigration restrictions, come from?

Trump’s White House Immigration Policies and White Nationalist John Tanton

Posted on April 10, 2020

The aggressive anti-immigration sentiment and policies that are promoted by governments in the US, UK and Australia are not new and have been in the making for generations, John Tanton described as the ‘most influential unknown man in America’ appears central in modern day manifestations.

Monbiot – Radical Right Libertarians – Fossil Fuel Think Tanks – Koch & Tanton Networks

Posted on January 14, 2024

Good overview via Argentina by George Monbiot in The Guardian ‘What links Rishi Sunak, Javier Milei and Donald Trump? The shadowy network behind their policies’ and concerning dynamics around national politics, media, think tanks and governance.

The ‘junk tanks’ he talks of, observed in Anglosphere and globally are Atlas – Koch Network and another that shares donors in the US, Tanton Network. The former does low tax, low regulation and small government while the latter is faux environmental via demographics, population and migration ‘research’.

Mainstreaming of the Far Right

Posted on January 2, 2024

The far right did not emerge from a vacuum, but ignorance of the history of eugenics, authority, slavery, colonialism, Nazi Germany and post WWII, white nativists, especially in the US, and nowadays ageing democracies and right wing media which adopt the same.

Both Malthus and Galton are central to narratives around population control, identity and eugenics, with strong undercurrent of socio-Darwinism. By post WWI eugenics became a major area of research, not just in Germany via Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, but the US too with slavery, Madison Grant and AES American Eugenics Society.

Global Population Decline and Rebalance

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The Anglosphere, especially right wing media and influencers, obsess about supposed immigrant-led population growth in the developed world, while claiming high fertility and exponential growth; not true it’s a reflection of better human health and increasing longevity.

However, these dynamics are still misrepresented or ignored in media, politics and public narratives based on the eugenics based ideology of Bob Malthus, Francis Galton, Madison Grant and John Tanton; the latter via ZPG Zero Population Growth supported by Rockefeller Bros. Fund.

Population Growth or Decline?

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Since the 1970s, and earlier with Malthus and eugenics movement, we have been presented with the threat of catastrophic population growth due to fertility rates in the less developed world, then due to ‘immigration‘ from the less developed world when in fact we are facing population decline from mid century; contrary to UN Population Division data which inflates future headline growth?

This ‘misunderstanding’ has been highlighted by science journalist Fred Pearce in ‘The Coming Population Crash: and Our Planet’s Surprising Future’; Hans Rosling in ‘Don’t panic the truth about population’; Prof. Wolfgang Lutz of Vienna’s IIASA and Sanjeev Sanyal demographer at Deutsche Bank.

Right Wing Anglosphere – White Nativist Demographic Talking Points – Population – Immigration – International Education

Disjointed analysis in Murdoch’s NewsCorp media across multiple (often seemingly unrelated) factors, bypassing data analysis principles according to Statistics 101 and ABS Australian Bureau of Statistics advice on using the NOM net overseas migration formula, that feeds into estimated resident population headline data; misdescribed as undefined ‘immigration’.

However… 2006, the NOM was inflated, follows the fossil fuel climate science denial techniques used to misrepresent and denigrate climate science research by misinterpreting data, claiming non existent correlations etc. and in the media shooting messengers or centrist government. 

Using a right wing ‘wedge’ and foil to the criticism directed at fossil fuels in Anglosphere, plus parts of Europe, informed by former ZPG Zero Population Growth white nativist Tanton Network. In the US it shares donors with Koch Network think tanks behind the GOP Republican Party and Trump, Bannon, Miller and FoxNews border obsessions including climate science denial; ditto the same networks in the U.K. Tories, UKIP/Reform, Farage, Anderson and GB News for Brexit.

Unvoiced or silent objective? Corrupt white nativist authoritarian autarky like 1930s Italy and Germany, or 19th century America of planters, master servant relationships and ‘segregation economics’, informed by the eugenics movement and the Mont Pelerin Society?

‘From NewsCom:

Simply too high’: Australia nearing crucial immigration ‘peak

Aussies have been warned that a current crisis plaguing the country could become “permanent”.

Leith van Onselen

‘ANALYSIS’

Last week, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released the official population statistics for the September quarter of 2023, which revealed that Australia’s population grew by an unprecedented 660,000 people over the year, driven by record net overseas migration (NOM) of 549,000.

In percentage terms, Australia’s population grew by 2.5 per cent, the nation’s fastest growth rate since 1952, during the post-war migration boom.

(No, this defies both direct ABS advice and Statistics 101, NOM definition changed in 2006, cannot compare before and after

Graph from MacroBusiness misrepresents data by ignoring the 2006 expansion and running NOM (red line) uninterrupted from 1900 through 2006 to focus on present and temporary ‘data noise’, described as ‘immigration’.

23 Estimates of NOM based on the previous methods and those based on the ‘12/16 month rule’ methodology are not comparable. The key change is the introduction of the ‘12/16 month rule’ for measuring a person’s residency in Australia, replacing the previous ‘12/12 month rule’.ABS Explanatory Notes.)

Meanwhile, Australia’s natural population increase was a historically low 111,000 in the year to September 2023, courtesy of a jump in deaths, most likely related to the Baby Boomers beginning to die off and the impacts of the pandemic.

As a result, NOM as a share of Australia’s population increase remained at a record high of 83 per cent in the September quarter of 2023.

Separate annual data released by the ABS for the 2022-23 financial year showed that Australia’s capital cities grew by an unprecedented 517,000 in the year to 30 June 2023.

Melbourne (167,500) led the nation’s population growth last year, followed by Sydney (146,700).

The ABS’ monthly permanent and long-term arrivals data provide a useful proxy for the official quarterly NOM.

Annual net permanent and long-term arrivals hit a record high in January, suggesting that Australia’s official NOM and population growth would have increased further in the December quarter of 2023.

In its December Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Update (MYEFO), the Albanese government forecast that Australia’s NOM would fall to 375,000 this financial year, which would represent the second-highest annual NOM in Australia’s history.

However, given the acceleration of NOM in the September quarter and the stronger-than-anticipated net permanent and long-term arrivals numbers to January, Australia should expect significantly higher NOM this financial year than the government’s forecast.

The good news is that visa data suggests that NOM is at or near its peak.

According to the ABS, there were 402,000 net visa arrivals (excluding visitors) in the year to February 2024, down from a recent peak of 503,000.

This decline in visa arrivals has been driven by foreign students, which fell to 221,000 in the year to February, down from a recent peak of 294,000.

Australian renters are being smashed (source or evidence?)

The migration surge’s impact on the nation’s rental market has been particularly severe since the population boom occurred alongside the collapse in dwelling construction to decade-lows.

According to the ABS, Australia added only 155,600 homes (net of demolitions) to the nation’s dwelling stock in the year to September 2023, against a population increase of 660,000.

Therefore, Australia added only one new home for every 4.24 new residents. This explains why the nation’s rental vacancy rate has collapsed to a record low of around one per cent.

(No evidence simply talking points while ignoring the more unique housing types and requirements of international students and diversity of supply versus first home buyer and families)

Reflecting this demand-supply imbalance, median asking rents across Australia have soared by 38 per cent since the beginning of the pandemic, according to PropTrack, with almost all of this growth occurring after the federal government opened the international border to migration in late 2021.

With Australia’s net overseas migration and population growth to remain historically high for the foreseeable future, and the rate of dwelling construction expected to continue falling, the housing situation will remain fraught.

As a result, Australian tenants should prepare for further tightening of the rental market and ongoing strong rental inflation.

Australia needs a smaller and better-targeted immigration system

Few people would disagree that Australia’s immigration numbers are too high.

While migrants undoubtedly fill important labour market gaps across the economy, the sheer volume of arrivals has placed chronic pressure on the housing market and the nation’s infrastructure.

(No evidence, infrastructure requires healthy budgets from taxes plus skilled personnel and especially skilled migrants; clear issue in regions with population ageing and decline)  

A report released this month by the Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) showed that “recent migrants earn significantly less than Australian-born workers” (because they are not ‘migrants’ but international student, on low income?) and that “migrants have become increasingly likely to work in lower productivity firms”, earning more than 10 per cent less than Australian-born workers on average.

The CEDA report also showed that the unemployment rates of recent skilled migrants are higher than Australian-born workers.

CEDA’s findings are supported by the latest Graduate Outcomes Survey, which shows that international graduate employment rates, participation rates, and median salaries are well below those of domestic graduates.

(What if the other way round, then there would be complaints that domestic graduates are being usurped by international students in graduate employment?)

Research released in November 2023 by independent economist Gerard Minack showed that Australia’s 8.2 million population increase this century has outpaced the provision of business investment, infrastructure and housing, resulting in what economists call “capital shallowing” and reduced productivity growth.

“Australia’s economic performance in the decade before the pandemic was, on many measures, the worst in 60 years”, Minack wrote in his November report.

“Per capita GDP growth was low, productivity growth tepid, real wages were stagnant, and housing increasingly unaffordable. There were many reasons for the mess, but the most important was a giant capital-to-labour switch: Australia relied on increasing labour supply, rather than increasing investment, to drive growth.

“Australia’s population-led growth model was a demonstrable failure in the 15 years prior to the pandemic. Remarkably, the country now seems to be doubling down on the same strategy. The result, unsurprisingly, is likely to be more of the same.”

(No, wrong as our population was inflated by the NOM expansion in 2006 sweeping up international students who study and work part time, i.e. low income, hence, averaging or per capita does not reflect this).

To add further insult to injury, data compiled by the Grattan Institute shows that a significantly smaller share of migrants work in the construction sector than their Australian-born counterparts.

“About 32 per cent of Australian workers were foreign born, but only about 24 per cent of workers in building and construction were born overseas”, the Grattan Institute wrote in January.

“And very few recent migrants work in construction. Migrants who arrived in Australia less than five years ago account for just 2.8 per cent of the construction workforce, but account for 4.4 per cent of all workers in Australia”.

Therefore, Australia’s immigration system is directly adding to Australia’s housing and productivity problems in two ways.

First, immigration volumes are simply too high, overwhelming the supply side of the economy. 

(No, there is no optimum number but demographic balance for a youngish population, while international students spike data via the NOM, but described as ‘immigrants’ vs. far larger ageing baby boomer bomb)

Second, the migration system is poorly targeted and does not provide the skills the economy needs.

(Evidence?)

The fact that the nation’s population has ballooned by 8.2 million people (44 per cent) this century alone, yet Australia’s skills shortages are worse than ever, is empirical evidence of these facts.

(No, it’s higher churn over as many of those originals were temporary, and are no longer resident in Australia; where is the evidence of skills shortages being worse due to immigrants?)

Australia, therefore, needs a migration system that is much smaller in size and better targeted towards the skills we need.

(Opinion or motherhood statement lacking specifics)

Australia’s migration system must be calibrated to a level below the nation’s ability to supply homes, infrastructure, and business investment while safeguarding the natural environment (including water supplies).

(Opinion or Motherhood statement lacking specifics) 

Otherwise, Australia’s housing shortage will become permanent, and productivity growth and living standards will flounder.

(No, if a shortage why have Sydney house values stagnated for past decade i.e. price only doubled?)’

Leith van Onselen is co-founder of MacroBusiness.com.au and Chief Economist at the MB Fund and MB Super. Leith has previously worked at the Australian Treasury, Victorian Treasury and Goldman Sachs.

For more blogs and articles on Australian Immigration News, Australian Politics, Demography, International Education, Media, Tanton Network and White Nationalism click through:

Australian Bureau of Statistics – UNPD NOM Net Overseas Migration Formula – Inflating Immigration and Population Growth

Posted on March 25, 2024

One has written previously on the wilful confusion around immigration and population data used for demographic analysis in the Anglosphere, also to dog whistle refugees, immigrants and population growth.

However, requires the misrepresenting of data and research using climate science denial techniques used by entities linked to both Tanton Network and Koch Network, deflecting from carbon or fossil fuels and promoting eugenics; in Australia and US using proxies to replicate previous race based immigration restrictions.

Anglosphere Antipathy To Refugees, Immigrants and Sovereign Nations – White Nativism, Autocracy and Eugenics

Posted on March 11, 2024

Late news is that the former Labour MP, then Conservative MP and now Reform, Lee Anderson, has quite xenophobic views on both foreigners and fellow citizens, the new normal that is being actively promoted?

Repost from ByLine Times of AC Grayling article on Anglo, western and other nations negative attitudes that lack empathy, shared experience or understanding of refugees, asylum seekers and immigration history.

Nowadays with above median age voter dominated by less educated, less diverse, low info and more often regional voter, they are targeted by right wing nativist or white nationalist talking points for suboptimal outcomes e.g. Brexit, Trump, The Voice and those demanding no support for Ukraine vs. Russia’s invasion or ‘special operation’.

Mainstreaming of the Far Right

Posted on January 2, 2024

The far right did not emerge from a vacuum, but ignorance of the history of eugenics, authority, slavery, colonialism, Nazi Germany and post WWII, white nativists, especially in the US, and nowadays ageing democracies and right wing media which adopt the same.

Both Malthus and Galton are central to narratives around population control, identity and eugenics, with strong undercurrent of socio-Darwinism. By post WWI eugenics became a major area of research, not just in Germany via Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, but the US too with slavery, Madison Grant and AES American Eugenics Society.

Due to the holocaust and Nazis treatment of Jews, Gypsies and minorities, including the ‘left’ i.e. being exterminated, eugenics had to be rebranded post WWII as a quasi ‘environmental’ movement, with strong support of same fossil fuel Rockefellers (Standard Oil & Exxon) and auto oligarchs (Fiat & VW) via Club of Rome and ZPG Zero Population Growth. 

Environment – Fossil Fuels – Climate Science Denial – Populationism – Anti-Immigration – Far Right – Tanton Network

Posted on November 30, 2023

Jeff Sparrow in Overland rebuts a counter critique of his book ‘Crimes Against Nature’ by a faux expert Edward Smith who appears to be au faire with faux environmental and anti-immigrant arguments promoted by the US Tanton Network linked NGO Sustainable Population Australia.

One would not bother using high level analysis to rebut low level faux science nativist agitprop inspired by former ZPG Zero Population Growth types, namely deceased white nationalist John ‘passive eugenics’ Tanton whose colleague was Paul ‘Population Bomb’ Ehrlich, with support from the Rockefeller Bros., ‘limits to growth’ PR constructs promoted by Club of Rome and drawing on Malthus, Galton and Madison Grant.

However, it does show some of the influence that proponents aspire to, whether in media, NGOs, think tanks or politics, constantly reinforce old nativist and white Australia policy tropes masquerading as environmental science, greenwashing both fossil fuels or carbon emissions and eugenics; targets old white Australia sentiments and younger mistaking the movement and proponents as experts.

Australian Migration Review 2023 – For Immigrants and Nation or a Nativist Trap?

Posted on May 10, 2023

The Australian Migration Review Report has been published, based on narratives and submissions, but little meaningful grass roots feedback or data to support any grounded analysis for good future reforms?

This post will focus on NOM Net Overseas Migration and major source or factor i.e. international education and students, but for now, not the other main factors including WHV Working Holiday Visas (2nd year) and temporary workers.

There are generic review report issues e.g. lack of direct support for many narratives and recommendations, does not explain budget issues of ageing i.e. more low or no tax payers in retirement as baby boomer bubble transitions vs. decline in working age cohort of PAYE taxpayers, to support more Australian retirees.

Immigration to Australia – More Opportunities for Temporary Residents?

Posted on March 7, 202

Interesting analysis from Grattan Institute in Melbourne on how to improve Australia’s migration system, especially for temporary entrants. 

However, although one agrees with the broad argument and sentiments, many assumptions and factors cited including the need to make more temporary residents permanent, would require raising, for now, the modest permanent cap, guaranteed to kick off a negative media campaign.

Further, one thinks it overestimates the desire for ‘temporary migrants’, caught under the ‘nebulous’ (Ian Dunt UK) NOM net overseas migration, to remain in Australia permanently after studies, travel, work etc.?

Tanton Network Migration Watch UK criticised for misleading UK immigration reports.

How Conservatives Admire Corrupt Dictators and Authoritarians – Trump and Putin

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Article from Michel in TNR The New Republic on the right’s obsession with, respect and desire for authoritarians and dictators, even if corrupt and nativist including Trump and Putin.

While ‘free market’ think tanks, especially US fossil fuel Atlas or Koch Network promote right wing policies for the 1%, and related white nativist Tanton Network entities promote eugenics and the great replacement.

Further, two other central elements include media and ageing citizens; hollowed out legacy media including ‘news deserts’ and now social media being colonised or flooded with far right nativist agitprop to increasing numbers of ageing and/or disadvantaged voters who are less urban, less diverse, less educated and less informed.

Right wing parties, nativists and populists are being used to support both eugenics and corporate friendly policies for the 1% versus 99%, even if against the latter’s interests; see Brexit, Trump and Putin.

From TNR The New Republic:

How the American Right Fell in Love With Dictators, Over and Over Again Trump and Putin are nothing new.

By Casey Michel

For years, an imperialistic, hard-right European dictator unleashing bloodshed across the Continent cultivated supporters across the U.S. This despot claimed he was leading a “unique, anti-Western culture,” and, in so doing, cultivated allies and fellow travelers among conservatives across America, all of whom were disgusted by “corrupt Western liberal values” and who “scorned Western liberalism as a bankrupt ideology.” Nor was this appeal just rhetorical; as investigators later discovered, this right-wing revanchist bankrolled both propaganda efforts and agents on the ground, successfully turning Americans, especially on the right, to his cause.

To modern readers, the story is a familiar one — not least as it pertains to Donald Trump’s affections for Vladimir Putin, to say nothing of how Russian forces have cultivated conservative Americans from Tucker Carlson to the National Rifle Association and beyond. But the aforementioned case has nothing to do with Putin or with Trump. Instead, it took place a century ago, when conservatives across the U.S. flocked to the cause of Germany’s militarist tyrant, Kaiser Wilhelm II.

In so doing, as Jacob Heilbrunn successfully argues in his new book, America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance With Foreign Dictators, they created a blueprint for how foreign dictators even decades later could cultivate conservative communities to their cause — and could, by the early 21st century, help propel one as far as the presidency. The story of the Americans who worshipped Wilhelm is just one of a range of pro-dictatorship efforts that Heilbrunn excavates, threading a century-long conservative infatuation with right-wing dictators. It’s not only a corrective to the voluminous (if also accurate) investigations on how communist tyrannies fostered leftist supporters in the U.S., but also an able — and wildly timely — effort to stitch together nominally disparate views, from different epochs and eras. 

It all adds up to a convincing conclusion: that Trump, in “lavishing praise on Putin and other dictators … wasn’t creating a new style of right-wing politics,” Heilbrunn, editor of The National Interest and author of a previously acclaimed book on the history of neoconservatives, writes. “Instead, he was building on a long-standing tradition.”

It’s a tradition that has seen surprisingly little scrutiny, allowing Trump’s treacly fealty to Putin to seem like an aberration. To be sure, there are elements unique to Trump’s personal predilections — not least his history as a luxury real-estate developer, an industry that profited arguably more than any other from the illicit, kleptocratic flows linked to foreign dictators, laundering untold millions of dollars (and potentially more) in the process. Never before could foreign despots so easily, and so effectively, patronize the company of a sitting American president.

But in other far more conspicuous ways, Trump is simply building on a legacy long predating his rise. There were, for instance, the early devotions to the Ur-Fascist himself, Benito Mussolini. Il Duce presented himself not only as a guarantor of order and stability — and a bastion against left-wing forces in Italy and beyond — but as someone who posed “as a defender of whites,” Heilbrunn notes, who prioritized “family values” and who, “in stark contrast to hedonistic America, cherished manliness.” (He also cherished Wall Street with JP Morgan organizing a loan for the Fascist government worth nearly $2 billion in modern currency.) Conservatives in America lapped it up, fêting not only Mussolini but salivating for a similar leader in the U.S. One conservative writer, Irving Babbitt, bleated that circumstances “may arrive when we may esteem ourselves fortunate if we get the American equivalent of a Mussolini; he may be needed to save us from the American equivalent of a Lenin.”

So, too, did plenty of conservative Americans view the rise of Mussolini’s younger brother, ideologically, in Berlin. While the organization of pro-Nazi sympathizers in America has seen more detailed treatments elsewhere, Heilbrunn ropes in other conservatives who freely platformed Adolf Hitler. Germany’s dictator was freely supported by conservatives such as William Randolph Hearst, who “not only admired the Fuhrer, but commissioned him and Mussolini to write for his newspapers for handsome fees.” Later investigations revealed that Hitler’s regime picked up on the kaiser’s previous model, not only covertly funding agents in the U.S. but even slipping pro-Nazi propaganda into official congressional mailings, recruiting some of the U.S.’s most conservative representatives of the time.

The postwar smothering of fascism didn’t seem to slow conservatives’ lust for right-wing strongmen. By the 1960s, the primary home for such reverence was found not necessarily in Washington but in the pages of National Review, where founder William F. Buckley and his claque of writers apparently never found a hard-right despot they couldn’t support. There was Spain’s Francisco Franco, whom Buckley dubbed an “authentic national hero,” Heilbrunn writes. There was Portugal’s Antonio Salazar, who wrote in the magazine that he was “fighting for Western civilization and Christian values.” There was Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, whom Buckley viewed as a “bona fide leader who knew how to exercise power.” (After Pinochet used a car bomb to assassinate a political opponent in Washington, D.C., Chilean officials turned directly to Buckley for advice on how to “sanitize Pinochet’s reputation,” for which Buckley happily obliged.)

Soon, though, such sentiments swelled back into the White House. By the Reagan era, American affections for right-wing despots during the late Cold War blossomed into official policy. The architect for such fondness was Reagan’s foreign-policy adviser, Jeane Kirkpatrick, who served as an “unabashed defender” of right-wing regimes throughout her tenure. Nor was she picky about the form. Militarists in Argentina, those running death squads in El Salvador, the authors of apartheid in South Africa: Kirkpatrick, with Reagan in tow, succored them all.

But then, in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, and a few years later, the Soviet Union shattered. America — and liberalism — stood triumphant. Supporting such regimes was suddenly gauche, out of step with this American moment. And the patterns and preferences that propped up American backing of right-wing dictators slunk back into the shadows.

But it never disappeared entirely. As with so much of the paleoconservative architecture of Trumpism — the nativism and the racism, the suspicion of the federal government and the amorality undergirding it all — Heilbrunn identified Pat Buchanan as the figure who kept the flames of such fawning for right-wing dictators alive. Not only did Buchanan refer to leaders like Hitler as “an individual of great courage,” but Buchanan whipped up opposition to American intervention in the Balkans, calling time and again to let Serbian tyrant Slobodan Milosevic have his way and commit genocide.

As Heilbrunn writes, Buchanan — who would later turn his affections toward figures like Putin, even before Trump entered the White House — “longed for a kind of internationalism rooted in those small towns and conservative values and in whiteness, whether in the U.S. or in Serbia or Russia or South Africa or elsewhere.” For years, Buchanan “seemed like a Cassandra,” but as Heilbrunn added, “One prospective candidate for the presidency who picked up on … Buchanan’s unusual history lessons was a loudmouthed Manhattan real estate mogul” — a figure who gave Buchanan’s views the biggest platform yet, carving an entire political movement out of a conservative tradition few Americans had any idea existed.

Thanks to Heilbrunn’s book, however, that confusion is no more. And while the book’s actual writing verges on the overwrought — words like oneiric and pursuivant belong in spelling bees, not mainstream political analysis — Heilbrunn correctly identifies the core of this conservative strain. Trumpists, and those who came before, “are advocating ethno-nationalism in the guise of a set of principles.” Just as the white supremacist Redeemers before them claimed they were simply advocating a restoration of democracy, so, too, do the Herrenvolk reactionaries of the MAGA world claim they’re simply restoring supposed American greatness — and that right-wing despots abroad should be allies in the fight.

If there’s a fault in Heilbrunn’s writing, it’s that there might be too much emphasis on such ideological affinity. After all, dictatorships’ abilities to inflame and inflate American conservative support can’t operate without a latticework of supporters. And as we’ve learned in recent years, those operatives — the lobbyists and the PR specialists, the law firms and the consultancies, the former congressional officials who leave office and immediately transform into mouthpieces for foreign regimes — don’t require any ideological overlap with their despotic clients. All they need is to get paid, and they’ll be happy to transform into foot-soldiers for tyranny.

Just look, for instance, at the network that serviced Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian thug who ruled Ukraine until Kyiv’s democratic revolution a decade ago. There was Paul Manafort, who later became Trump’s 2016 campaign manager. But there was also Tony Podesta, who until the mid-2010s oversaw arguably the leading Democratic lobbying shop in Washington. There was even Tad Devine, who helped Yanukovych grab power in 2010 — and who then steered Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign. It was an ideological potpourri, all working at the behest of an autocrat who tried to cement pro-Russian rule in Kyiv — and whose ouster lit a fuse that detonated stability in Europe and that now risks far more devastation.

But that’s all the subject for another book (mine, called Foreign Agents, will be hitting bookshelves in August). In the meantime, Heilbrunn’s analysis of this glorification of right-wing dictatorships is a warning — as if more were needed — of what a potential Trump second term could look like. Whether it’s Putin’s Russia or Orbán’s Hungary, or even the echoes of Wilhelmine Germany, the conclusion is clear: “Aggrieved … by what they perceived as their own society’s failings — its liberalism, its tolerance, its increasing secularism — conservatives have searched for a paradise abroad that can serve as a model of home.” The kaiser would be proud.

For more articles and blogs on Ageing Democracy, Conservative, Demography, Eugenics, Evangelical Christianity, Media, Political Strategy, Radical Right Libertarian, Russia and Younger Generations click through:

Collective Narcissism, Ageing Electorates, Pensioner Populism, White Nativism and Autocracy

Posted on November 5, 2021

Plato noted more than 2000 years ago, one of the greatest dangers for democracy is that ordinary people are all too easily swayed by the emotional and deceptive rhetoric of ambitious politicians. We have observed the Anglosphere including the U.K., Australia and U.S., becoming more nativist, conservative, libertarian, extreme and conspiracy minded.  This is not organic.

Narcissistic Political Leaders – NPD Narcissistic Personality Disorder – Collective Narcissism – Cognitive Dissonance – Conspiracy Theories – Populism

Posted on April 13, 2022

We have observed the rise of neo authoritarian conservative leaders using nativism and sociocultural issues with media PR support to inform the public, especially voters, suboptimally, including east and west.

However, there are pitfalls for democracy in manipulating access to information by the public or electorate, not just feeding the needs of narcissistic leaders (see article ‘Narcissistic Leaders: The Incredible Pros, the Inevitable Cons’), but developing societal collective narcissism for populism and electoral advantage aka Brexit, also observed in Hungary, Turkey and Russia.

Nationalist Conservative Political Parties in the Anglosphere – Radical Right Libertarian Ideology and Populism for Votes

Posted on May 31, 2021

Interesting article from CARR reflecting conservative parties across the world dealing with demographic change, and especially the Anglosphere of the UK, US and Australia where they have been beholden to corporate supporters from the old economy i.e. fossil fuels, agriculture and industry including assembly lines and construction.  Nowadays the new economy of Big Tech, innovation, services and government with more educated and empowered citizens is problematic for the Kochs, Murdochs, DeVos, Scaife et al.

Ageing Democracy, Nativism and Populism

Posted on January 18, 2019

Liberal democracies in western world need to make sure they do not become populist gerontocracies with changing demographics creating elderly ‘Gerrymandering’ where influence and numbers of older voters (with short term horizons) increasing proportionally over younger generations with longer term interests but less voice and influence.

AC Grayling on the Need for more Educated and Informed Citizens

Posted on September 1, 2023

When people question seemingly uninformed voter choices averting their gaze from politicians of the right, right wing media and related who are desperate to keep or put right wing parties in power, by attacking the centre and sensible legislation, why or how?

Across the Anglosphere and Europe many mostly ageing dominant voters, politicians, media and influencers, who are less educated and less diverse than younger generations, backed up by ‘collective narcissism’ and ‘pensioner populism’; see Brexit, Trump, Meloni, Orban et al.

British Young People Thrown Under a Bus for Votes in Ageing Demographics

Posted on September 21, 2023

Relevant article from John Curtice of the University of Strathclyde on how age determines divides in British politics, and not class in Conversation article ‘Age, not class, is now the biggest divide in British politics, new research confirms’.

CPAC Conservative Political Action Conference and the John Birch Society

CPAC US has been in the news for falling audiences and fallings out between different groups and players, while CPAC Hungary will be held 25-26th April in Budapest.  

Recently both The Atlantic and SPLC Southern Poverty Law Center have highlighted the links between CPAC and the anti-communist John Birch Society, founded by Robert Welch, with assistance from others including Fred Koch.

Fred Koch was the father of Charles Koch who in turn helped create the Atlas – Koch Network of global think tanks, along with Tanton Network nativism or eugenics from the old Rockefeller supported ZPG Zero Population Growth; underpins the threat of the ‘great replacement’ of the WASP 1% by lower orders and ‘other types’.

An interesting metaphor, allegory or comparison where the John Birch Society apparently saw itself in the same ecosystem as the KKK Ku Klux Klan competing for members, while nowadays Koch Network shares donors with the nativist or eugenics based Tanton Network, obsessing over borders and immigrants. 

From The Atlantic

The Return of the John Birch Society

The organization, once relegated to the outermost edges of the conservative movement, now fits neatly into its mainstream.

By Elaina Plott Calabro

Michael Smart chuckled as he thought back to their banishment.

Truthfully he couldn’t say for sure what the problem had been, why it was that in 2012, the John Birch Society—the far-right organization historically steeped in conspiracism and opposition to civil rights—had found itself blacklisted by the Conservative Political Action Conference. “Nobody knows the official reason, because they don’t tell you that,” Smart, a field coordinator for the group, told me.

He has theories, of course. Perhaps the Birchers’ unapologetic crusade against “globalism” had started to hit too close to home for the Republican Party of 12 years ago; perhaps their warnings about, of all people, Newt Gingrich—a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” whose onetime membership on the Council on Foreign Relations, as Smart saw it, revealed his “globalist” vision for conservatism—had rankled the Republican powers that be.

In any event, the ouster had made the news, coming as it had after a change in leadership at the American Conservative Union, the host of CPAC, the annual gathering of conservative politicians, commentators, and activists. “When they applied, I said, ‘I don’t want any segregationist groups at CPAC; it sends the wrong message,’” Al Cárdenas, the ACU chair from 2011 to 2014, told me recently. “And that was that.” For some optimistic observers, the decision had signified a small but symbolic effort to purge the movement of its most “highly offensive” elements, as one report put it…..’

From SPLC Southern Poverty Law Center

FOR CPAC ATTENDEES, ‘AMERICA IS UNDER ATTACK

March 08, 2024

Hannah Gais and Cassie Miller

National Harbor, Maryland – Activists at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) this past month presented their movement as locked in an irrevocable, existential conflict with their perceived political enemies.

In recent years, the far right has used the event to integrate themselves into the greater political establishment and influence a coherent identity for their movement. The conference focuses on elections as one of the key strategies for advancing their agenda further to the right.

Between Feb. 21-24, right-wing activists gathered in National Harbor, Maryland, where one speaker called for overthrowing democracy and others presented former President Donald Trump as the sole politician capable of rescuing America from crisis. One sponsor, an antigovernment organization called Moms for America, whose self-proclaimed goal is “to raise patriots and promote liberty,” ran an advertisement between speeches that described America as “under attack.”

CPAC featured an array of speakers and prominent attendees from international far-right organizations in El Salvador, Germany, Hungary, Argentina, Spain, Japan and the United Kingdom, in addition to Trump and other figures from the American far right. In a sparsely occupied exhibition hall in the Gaylord Convention Center, the venue that hosts CPAC, Hatewatch observed organizers from the far-right, conspiratorial John Birch Society handing out publications and membership applications.

Another vendor permitted attendees to play a pinball machine promoting various conspiracy theories about the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and attack on the U.S. Capitol. Multiple anti-abortion activists promoted their work. At different booth, one man attempted to sell Hatewatch reporters colloidal silver toothpaste, a fraudulent health product pushed by conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones.

“Welcome to the overthrow of democracy,” Jack Posobiec, a political operative and Turning Point USA (TPUSA) affiliate who has collaborated with a range of white nationalists, neo-Nazis and other extremists throughout his political career, told a crowd on Wednesday, Feb. 21.

“We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get there all the way on Jan. 6. But we will endeavor to get rid of it, and replace it with this right here,” he said, before holding up what appeared to be a cross.

Amid a slew of sexual assault allegations against Matt Schlapp, who heads the American Conservative Union that oversees and organizes CPAC, the conference has struggled to maintain relevance and attract attendees. On Thursday and Friday, a Hatewatch reporter observed dozens of rows of empty seats throughout the conference hall. Even during Trump’s speech on Saturday, a small, standing-room-only overflow area in the main hall appeared only partially full.

‘IT WILL BE THEIR JUDGMENT DAY’

Throughout the conference, speakers described the United States as a “captive nation” that is under siege from a myriad of perceived threats, including from the political left.

“For hardworking Americans, Nov. 5 will be our new liberation day. But for the liars and cheaters and fraudsters and censors and imposters who have commandeered our government, it will be their judgment day,” Trump said during his speech on the afternoon of Feb. 24, which began one hour after its scheduled start time.

In the end, he said, “Our country is being destroyed and the only thing standing between you and its obliteration is me.”….

FEAR MONGERING ABOUT THE BORDER, IMMIGRANTS

Multiple speakers at CPAC focused heavily on immigration and anti-immigrant rhetoric, presenting immigrants from non-white countries as a destructive force.

“All of a sudden we’re starting to like our prisoners and our horrible violent criminals because they’re nicer than the people that are flowing in,” Trump said on Feb. 24, warning that immigrants from Asia, the Middle East and Africa were “destroying the country.”

Stephen Miller, once a senior adviser to Trump whose affinity for white nationalist literature Hatewatch revealed in 2019, emphasized that a second Trump administration would build on the anti-immigrant policies that he enacted during his previous time in office. Miller reiterated a plan to deputize the National Guard to act as immigration enforcement. The administration, he said, would establish large-scale staging grounds where immigrants would be brought before being flown out of the country by federal law enforcement.

FLOUNDERING ATTENDANCE AND EXTREMISTS

The continued presence of once-fringe conspiracy-minded groups such as the John Birch Society, which was also listed as a sponsor for this year’s CPAC, is a “symbolic ratification of where CPAC has been the past decade,” Matthew Dallek, the author of Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right, told Hatewatch in a phone call.

Arguably, so too is the presence of several known white nationalists and neo-Nazis who attended CPAC or mingled around the outskirts of the official event.

Hatewatch observed Jared Taylor, wearing an official CPAC badge, at multiple events over the course of the Feb. 22-24 conference. Taylor runs the white nationalist outlet American Renaissance, which portrays Black people as inferior and biologically prone to criminality. Multiple conferencegoers posted photos with Taylor on “X,” formerly Twitter, with him over the course of the event….

…..Greg Conte, the former director of operations for the now-defunct white nationalist think tank the National Policy Institute, as well as a former chairman for the now-defunct pro-Hitler political party the National Justice Party, appeared at multiple venues near the conference with other white nationalists. The Nation, NBC News and The New York Times reported seeing Conte on Friday night at a bar near the venue. On Saturday afternoon, a Hatewatch reporter also witnessed Conte and a handful of friends, who were not wearing CPAC badges and confirmed they were not there as conference attendees, drinking at a bar in the Gaylord lobby.

On Feb. 25, Schlapp responded to the NBC News report regarding Conte, Sanchez and others’ presence at the event on “X,” formerly Twitter, falsely accusing supporters of a ceasefire in the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict in Gaza of being neo-Nazis.’

For more blogs and articles related to Conservatives, Eugenics, Koch Network, Libertarian Economics, Radical Right Libertarians and Tanton Network click through:

Adam Smith – Classical Liberal Economics or Conservative Calvinist Christianity or White Christian Nationalism?

Posted on June 21, 2021

We observe many governments, especially Anglosphere and conservative, following the ideology of Adam Smith, promoted through Koch linked think tanks, assiduously. The outcomes include less Keynesian influence on government policy and more Smith, or Hayek, Friedman and Buchanan.

The latter cite ‘freedom and liberty’ for society, and economic policies based round ‘public choice theory’, monetarism and small government. Related there is also much emphasis or attention paid to elections, taxes, government budgets and many sociocultural issues including impairment of workers and unions rights, interfering on university campuses, demanding immigration restrictions, ‘freedom of speech’ and using Christianity as a divisive issue to create an ageing conservative voter coalition, especially in the USA.

Anglosphere Nativist Libertarian Social Economic Policies or Return of Eugenics?

Posted on October 28, 2022

In the past decade we have witnessed a political shift to the nativist and libertarian right in the Anglosphere, but described as ‘conservative’, appealing to the important above median age voter, less educated, more socially conservative, obedient and monocultural, but e.g. in UK leading to austerity measures?

Most of these ideas come from the classical or liberal economists of the past including Calvin, Smith, Ricardo et al. and also includes old eugenics based ideas of dour Christian men like Malthus on population, Galton on social Darwinism or eugenics, and worse, Madison Grant in the US who influenced Hitler.

James Buchanan – Economist – Koch Influencer – Radical Right Libertarian – Anglo Conservatives

Posted on October 10, 2022

5

We hear much about the influence of right wing or conservative economic ideology in political policies whether GOP Republicans, UK Tories, Australian Liberal conservatives etc., think tanks and related media calling for lower taxes or cuts, smaller government, fewer services, immigration restrictions, white nativism, climate science denial, less red tape and moving the Overton window to the far right. 

However, as witnessed recently in the UK, with ‘Trussonomics’, these policies are presumed to be native and grounded through good policy development, but are they? 

No, they represent the work of one ‘the most influential but unknown men in America’, segregation economist James Buchanan allied with Hayek, von Mises, Friedman and Rand, while being supportive of Pinochet’s coup in Chile; ‘radical right libertarian policies’ presented as economic but appear to be more social engineering, with eugenics (of class and race) in the background? 

Anglosphere Oligarchs – Koch Atlas Network Think Tanks

Posted on March 27, 2023

We have heard much of supposed ‘libertarian’ think tanks or PR outfits in the Anglosphere influencing policy, especially of the right, via media and lobbying, euphemistically known as ‘Koch Network’ or the ‘Kochtopus’ with a fondness for fossil fuels and climate science denial.

New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer investigated several years ago for her book ‘Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right’ (2017) which included insight into oligarch donors Mellon-Scaife, Olin, Bradley, DeVos and Coors.

Conservative CPAC Event – Hungary – Who Pays for Influence?

Posted on June 2, 2022

Recently the infamous US GOP Conservative CPAC event was held in Budapest, Hungary, with a conference and meeting of minds whether related to the far right, Fox News, ‘the great replacement’, anti-semitism, anti-immigration, Christian nationalism and rights etc.

Putin’s Russian Led Corruption of Anglosphere and European Radical Right, Conservatives and Christians

Posted on March 4, 2024

Some years ago Putin and Russia attracted much attention and sympathy from Anglo and European ultra conservative Christians, radical right and free market libertarians for Russia’s corrupt nativist authoritarianism with antipathy towards liberal democracy, the EU and open society.

These phenomena can be observed through visitors and liaisons, but more so by shared talking points and values.  These include family values, pro-life, Christianity, patriarchy, misogyny, white supremacy, traditionalism, dominionism, Evangelicals, anti-LGBT, anti-woke,  anti-elite, anti-gay marriage, traditional wives etc. and corruption, promoted by right wing parties, media, ultra conservative influencers, think tanks and NGOs.

Degrowth Economics – Greenwashing Fossil Fuels and Nativism for Authoritarian Autarky?

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Is ‘degrowth’ genuine economics theory or astroturfing for greenwashing the status quo i.e. by demanding degrowth that leaves already wealthy or <1% with existing economic and social mobility or status, but precludes upward mobility for 99%> of future generations?

Why? Creates confusion and delay for the economic, industrial and fossil fuel status quo of over a century to transition away from carbon to renewable sources.

Although not cited by either The Conversation or Grist below, the degrowth, steady state and autarkist constructs are not new, see 1930s Italy and Germany, then fast forward to the Club of Rome which promoted the construct ‘limits to growth’; good things like technology grow linearly vs. bad things like emissions and people grow exponentially. 

Aided both the fossil fuel ‘free market’ Atlas or Koch Network and nativist faux environmental movement related to Tanton Network demanding closed borders, immigration restrictions, withdrawal from trading blocs e.g. EU & multilateral agreements in favour of bilateral agreements, that favour more powerful nations and entities over the less powerful; suggests eugenics?

From The Conversation:

If you follow the degrowth agenda, it leads to an economy that looks a lot like the sickly UK

The degrowth movement has become very popular in recent years, particularly among younger people who appreciate its critique of the endless pursuit of economic expansion. The problem with growth, advocates argue, is that it implies the use of more and more resources and energy, as well as ever larger quantities of waste.

Well, the good news for the movement is that one of the world’s leading economies has offered itself up as a case study. If you look past the debate about whether the UK’s recent technical recession is going to deepen or peter out, the economic situation is pretty dire.

One main reason for the UK stagnation is a lack of investment in productivity, which advocates of degrowth would argue is an essential part of moving away from a resource-hungry economy. So what can we learn from the UK’s experiences so far?

The degrowth perspective

Degrowth has become the latest element in a long line of critiques of economic growth. One leading proponent, the Spanish ecological economist Giorgos Kallis, defines it as the “socially sustainable reduction of society’s throughput”, which is “incompatible with further economic growth, and will entail in all likelihood economic (GDP) degrowth”.

Pursuing GDP growth is criticised, both because of its increased use of resources and for “unrealistic expectations” that technological improvement and productivity growth would allow us to stay within so-called “planetary boundaries” (meaning the limits beyond which humanity will be unable to continue to flourish).

Kallis argues that degrowth implies reduced spending on goods and new technology, while distinguishing “good” and “bad” investments:

We will have to do with less high-speed transport infrastructures, space missions for tourists, new airports or factories producing unnecessary gadgets, faster cars or better televisions.

We may still need more renewable energy infrastructures, better social (education, and health) services, more public squares or theatres, and localised organic food production and retailing centres.

Yet this fails to appreciate that a reduction in GDP implies lower investment in technologies across the board, including those underpinning renewable energy. It also misunderstands that modern economic growth is not driven by accumulating and using more resources, but by innovation through investment. Witness what has happened in the UK…

….Degrowth advocates will not welcome this kind of approach, but technological improvement is ultimately likely to be a better way of achieving their goals than impoverishing people.

From Grist:

How to ‘decouple’ emissions from economic growth? These economists say you can’t.

For nearly 200 years, two transformative global forces have grown in tandem: economic activity and carbon emissions. The two have long been paired together, or, in economist-speak, “coupled.” When the economy has gotten bigger, so has our climate footprint.

This pairing has been disastrous for the planet. Economic growth has helped bring atmospheric CO2 concentrations all the way up to 420 parts per million. The last time they were this high was during the Pliocene epoch 3 million years ago, when global temperatures were 5 degrees Fahrenheit hotter and sea levels were 65 feet higher.

Most mainstream economists would say there’s an obvious antidote: decoupling. This refers to a situation where the economy keeps growing, but without the concomitant rise in greenhouse gas emissions. Many economists and international organizations like the World Bank, the United Nations, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development celebrate evidence that decoupling is already occurring in many countries. 

“Let me be clear, economic growth coupled with decarbonization is not only realistic, it has already been happening,” said Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, or IEA, in a commentary published in 2020.

It’s an alluring prospect — that we can reach our climate goals without fundamentally changing the structure of the global economy, just by swapping clean energy in for fossil fuels. But a band of rogue economists has begun poking holes in the prevailing narrative around decoupling. They’re publishing papers showing that the decoupling that’s been observed so far in most cases has been short term, or it’s happened at a pace that’s nowhere near quick enough to reach international climate targets. These heterodox economists call decoupling a “neoliberal fantasy.”

The stakes of this academic debate are high: If decoupling is a mirage, then addressing the climate crisis may require letting go of the pursuit of economic growth altogether and instead embracing a radically different vision of a thriving society. That would involve figuring out “how to design future livelihoods that provide people with a good quality of life,” said Helmut Haberl, a social ecologist at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna, Austria. Rather than fixating on growth, he argued, “We should engage more in the question of, ‘What future do we want to build?’” 

The basic idea behind decoupling has been ingrained in mainstream environmental thought for decades. The 1987 Brundtland Report — a landmark publication of the United Nations designed to simultaneously address social and environmental problems — helped establish it through the framework of sustainable development. It argued for “producing more with less,” using technological advances to continue economic growth while decreasing the release of pollutants and the use of raw materials.

Decoupling continues to underlie most global climate policies today. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, for example, has spent nearly two decades promoting it under its “green growth” agenda, urging world leaders to “achieve economic growth and development while at the same time combating climate change and preventing costly environmental degradation.” Decoupling is also baked into the IEA’s influential Net Zero Emissions by 2050 policy roadmap, which assumes that full decarbonization can take place alongside a doubling of the global economy by 2050. 

That economic growth should continue is simply assumed by virtually every international institution and government. Policymakers connect growth with more jobs and better living standards, and use it as the primary measure of societal well-being. They also point to growth as a way to keep pace with the rising energy demands and economic needs of a growing global population…. 

….Degrowth advocates say that deprioritizing growth could allow countries to redirect their attention to policies that actually boost people’s quality of life: shorter working hours, for example, as well as minimum income requirements, guaranteed affordable housing and health care, free internet and electricity, and more widespread public transit. 

“Degrowth is as much oriented toward human well-being and social justice as it is toward preventing ecological crises,” Vogel said.

Crucially, degrowth advocates mainly promote the concept in high-income countries, which are historically responsible for the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions. They acknowledge that many developing countries still need to grow their economies in order to raise populations out of poverty. Those existing inequities, they argue, put even more onus on developed countries to shrink polluting industries and cut their consumption, in order to balance out other countries’ necessary growth.

Several experts told Grist it was a “distraction” to ask whether decoupling greenhouse gas emissions from economic growth is possible, as this question elides many areas of agreement between green growth and degrowth advocates. Both sides agree that moving off fossil fuels will require a massive buildout of renewable energy infrastructure, and that countries need to urgently improve living standards and reduce inequality.

“The goal is to get to zero emissions and climate stabilization” while improving people’s well-being, said Pollin, the University of Massachusetts Amherst professor. “Those are the metrics I care about.”

They also broadly agree that it’s time to move past GDP as a primary indicator of societal progress. But that’s easier said than done. We are “structurally dependent” on GDP growth, as Raworth put it. Publicly traded companies, for example, prioritize growth because they’re legally obligated to act in the best interest of shareholders. Commercial banks fuel growth by issuing interest-bearing loans, and national governments face pressure to grow the economy in order to reduce the burden of public and private debt.

Making any meaningful shift away from focusing on GDP would require dismantling these structural dependencies. “It’s massively challenging, there’s no doubt about that,” Vogel told Grist. “But I think they’re necessary changes … if we want to avert a real risk of catastrophic environmental changes and tackle long-standing social issues.”

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Limits to Growth – Jorgen Randers – Club of Rome

Posted on April 5, 2022

Reposting a 2012 article from Renew Economy Australia from Giles Parkinson on Jorgen Randers of Norway in ‘Randers: What does the world look like in 2052?’

Randers had been a proponent of the Club of Rome ideas including the promotion of the ‘limits to growth’ (debunked by University of Sussex research team in ‘Models of Doom’), resource depletion, climate and population.

Greenwashing – Club of Rome – Limits to Growth – Astroturfing Fossil Fuels – The Guardian

Posted on July 27, 2021

The Guardian in article following, is a victim of astroturfing again on the environment, presenting the Club of Rome and MIT’s ‘Limits to Growth’ model as science, and resurrected by media as contemporary, along with obsessions about Malthusian ‘population growth’ (and ‘immigration’) by non-scientists i.e. ZPG and other related ‘theories’ such as Lovelock’s ‘Gaia’.

Following is an article written by presumably a non science journalist Edward Helmore highlighting KPMG’s Gaya Herrington (econometrics and sustainability studies, again not science) who is a researcher and advisor for the Club of Rome predicting catastrophe.

Tactics Against Bipartisan Climate Change Policy in Australia – Limits to Growth?

Posted on November 30, 2019

A recent ABC article ‘The day that plunged Australia’s climate change policy into 10 years of inertia’, endeavoured to describe how climate change consensus was broken by former Liberal MP Andrew Robb who claimed he had followed the ‘Limits to Growth’ (LTG) theory via the Club of Rome but changed his mind, hence withdrew support on bipartisan support on carbon emission measures.

Degrowth and Steady State Economy or Eugenics for the Environment Debunked

Posted on June 30, 2022

In recent years with pressure on fossil fuels and the need to transition to renewable sources, now compounded by Russian invasion of Ukraine, has seen renewed promotion of ZPG Zero Population Growth with Herman Daly and Club of Rome inspired ‘steady-state economy’ and ‘degrowth’ as scientific theories; part of a crossover between nativist Tanton Network and libertarian Koch Network.

Anglosphere Triangle – Immigration – Environment – Population Growth – Radical Right Libertarians

Posted on August 4, 2021

While the fossil fuel supported ZPG Zero Population Growth, with Malthusian and eugenics based arguments round the environment, population growth and immigration being mainstreamed, especially by the time of Trump, who were the prime movers of the past?

The following article and excerpts of Berger, looking through Focauldian prism, follows some of the history of this movement including now deceased John Tanton (‘the most influential unknown man in America’), Paul Ehrlich (The Population Bomb) et al. and organisations that emerged from ZPG including FAIR, CIS, US English, then IRLI and SLLI with their links to the Koch Network ‘bill mill’ ALEC, leading up to the Trump White House.