People are mean. Not everyone, and not all the time, but reliably enough to give me a high degree of confidence in making that general statement. My late father-in-law simply used to say, “People are no damn good.” I wouldn’t take it quite that far, but society fails too many of us too much of the time, and those human resource failures are intimately connected to policies of natural and industrial resource utilization. We claim to value human life in the nominal or absolute sense of the word, but our social, political, and economic commitments to a high shared quality of life are mired in contradictions and hypocrisies. Remember, after all, that our contract with society is supposed to be about subordinating a certain amount of individual freedom in exchange for mutual security and prosperity. (Rousseau had some pretty radical notions of what the state should be allowed to enforce, but the underlying concept of a social contract nevertheless remains valid and important.) How is that going for us?
People are expensive. Westernized people are very, very expensive. In fact, there is probably not much more any one of us could do for the cause of sustainability than having one less child. I know, right? Say that casually at your next office party and wait for the embarrassed looks. But wait. Next, throw in a reference to ecological economist Herman Daly’s observation that governments often encourage high birth rates among the poorer social classes to guarantee a steady source of cheap labor for the rich. (Is it getting hot in here?) The idea is that poor people burdened with many mouths to feed can neither afford to educate their children nor save to make future investments: they are doomed ever to sell their labor to the owners of capital. Daly conducted a detailed study of this phenomenon in eastern Brazil during the 1970s. It has long been understood that one of the best ways to escape from this kind of poverty trap is to empower girls and young women through education. Educated women not only tend to have fewer children, but they (like educated men!) tend to have more innovative ideas, greater civic participation, and higher economic output; all good things that require no particular technological breakthroughs or difficult trade-offs.
Back to “people are mean.” If you are a business owner, what is one of the first things you do to reduce your expenses? Cut labor costs. But you need people to do the work. If you can’t replace people with machines (more on this in a moment), then you need to keep their wages low. Nobody likes low wages (or working on Christmas, or those stupid team-building exercises where everyone plays some idiotic game on Zoom…). If the labor supply is tight enough, workers can negotiate. If not, they can unionize. Unless they can’t. Because the law makes it difficult. Or because the workers don’t have legal rights to begin with. The American business community desperately needs immigrant labor, particularly in sectors such as agriculture, meatpacking, construction, landscaping, and child/eldercare, but also in sectors like software development, medicine, and engineering. The common denominator across all these sectors is pretty simple: Americans don’t want either to pick tomatoes or study math.
Source: Openverse
If the people who do can be hired as livestock, either without legal documentation or else under restrictive visa programs that bind them to a single employer, then they can be worked like rented mules under pain of deportation or even worse. Sound familiar? We will never seal the U.S. border because, if we did, God-fearing middle-class people would have to pay real, American wages for everything from groceries to golf clubs. Instead, we perpetuate a schizophrenic policy of luring workers from abroad to work cheaply while at the same time terrorizing them and denying them the chance to legally bargain for better treatment. This is morally indefensible. It also diverts large amounts of energy and materials to defending a system that would work better if we simply acknowledged our need for assistance and allowed people to work in peace. That does not mean making every laborer a U.S. citizen, but it does mean an end to the sordid, brutal theatrics of our Department of Homeland Security and its apologists.
And haven’t we now addressed both problems? In a world of 8.1 billion people, is there any reason at all to be concerned about a low birth rate in any specific area? Can we not learn to get along well enough with each other to allow people to move where they are most needed? They may not ever become voters, but their children probably will, and why should anyone not be a citizen of the place where he/she was born and raised? Where should that person go? To a land where he/she does not speak the language, understand the customs, or have social connections? What kind of people are we to even suggest this? The path to a sustainable future is the path to a shared future: shared resources, shared burdens, and shared opportunities. The world will ultimately need to settle at a much smaller human population if we are ever to live within our ecological means. We can build walls and try to wait out and starve out our fellow travelers, or we can make the transition together. Our neighbors may not all look or think exactly like we do, but that’s the genius of the melting pot. A stew with only one ingredient is not very appealing, and neither is today’s nativism.
I promised you another word about the machines. Automation often serves just as well as a cruel immigration policy to undermine the success of the average worker. I am a mechanical engineer. I do not hate technology. I do, however, object to using technology to replace people rather than to assist people. There is usually a way to design a product with either of those two goals in mind, and we should, as a matter of policy, strongly incentivize the latter. The economist might argue, “But that does not maximize allocative efficiency!”, to which I would reply, “So what?” Anyone who has been to business school in the U.S. will have heard the phrase “Pareto efficient.” A Pareto efficient allocation of resources is one in which no one can be made better off without making someone else worse off. It may sound eminently sensible when you first hear it, but if I can make a million ordinary Americans better off by making one billionaire worse off, I am not going to lose any sleep over it. Not one wink. Rising populations combined with replacement automation is a perfect storm of civil unrest. If the rich offer us universal basic income (UBI) as a solution, then go to your nearest animal shelter and take a good, hard look at the cats at feeding time. That’s UBI.