Who Should Debate Me?
Yarvin vs. Weyl: Extremist Supporter of Qatari Monarchy Allowed to Debate
It was big deal when Curtis “Mencius Moldbug” Yarvin debated a lady professor at Harvard recently without being beaten up by Antifa. Now he’s going to debate liberaltarian economist Glen Weyl of Microsoft and various Ivy League colleges in September, but so far there has been little “How Dare He?” anger.
When it comes to monarchism, my view is that I’m an American, and if a king wasn’t good enough for Thomas Jefferson, then a king isn’t good enough for me.
Personally, I don’t expect to live long to worry about radical change in government structures.
Of course, there are monarchies today, such as in the Persian Gulf.
Interestingly, Dr. Weyl is a notorious Open Borders extremist who is an outspoken advocate of monarchism if it facilitates Open Borders.
From The New Republic in 2014:
A Radical Solution to Global Income Inequality: Make the U.S. More Like Qatar
By Eric A. Posner and Glen Weyl
INEQUALITY NOVEMBER 6, 2014
Last month, in a speech in Boston, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen provoked some grumbling from conservatives when she said, “The extent and continuing increase in inequality in the United States greatly concern me…. I think it is appropriate to ask whether this trend is compatible with values rooted in our nation’s history, among them the high value Americans have traditionally placed on equality of opportunity.” But she is hardly alone in her concerns. Since at least Occupy Wall Street, income inequality has been one of the most intensely debated issues in American politics. Commentators fret that rising inequality hurts the poor, gives the rich the upper hand in politics, and will create a caste system in the United States. Proposed solutions range from the practical but weak, like raising the minimum wage, to the fanciful, like Thomas Piketty’s global wealth tax.
But the most powerful force to reduce inequality worldwide has gone largely unrecognized by the West, even though their value has been proven in the Gulf nations: open migration laws that are coupled, paradoxically, with caste systems.
The first thing to understand is that inequality is a much more severe problem across borders than within countries. In the United States, the median household makes around $50,000 per year and those in the top one percent make on average $300,000-$400,000. But even the poor in the United States are well-off compared to the poor in most other countries. The poorest five percent of Americans make about $3,000-$4,000 per year. This amount exceeds the per-person earnings of 60 percent of the global population. Around the world, more than a billion people live on a dollar a day.
So if you care about inequality, you should care about global inequality. Is there anything that can be done about it?
I pointed out 11 years ago: Well, there used to be starving children in China and now there aren’t. Why not? Because the Chinese did things about it.
Good for the Chinese.
As I wrote in 2014, maybe other countries could take steps to solve their own problems, too. For example, the people of Mexico could overthrow the parasitical chokehold of Carlos Slim on their economy so that he is no longer a contender for World’s Richest Man.
… The largest contribution to human well-being in the last few decades has come not from the U.S. or Europe but from China, whose authoritarian government has engineered massive economic growth for its poor populace, and from authoritarian countries in the Persian Gulf.
Sheikh Hamad, Emir of Qatar and World’s Greatest Guy
The countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)—Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE)—are not known for their humanitarianism. They are authoritarian Islamic states that sit on huge pools of oil, and they’re also among the most unequal in the world. About 85 percent of the population of the UAE, for example, consists of migrant workers living on roughly $5,000 per year. Fifteen percent of the population are Emirati nationals, who live on roughly three hundred thousand dollars a year, implying greater economic inequality than existed even in Apartheid South Africa or the antebellum South.
But these foreign migrant workers earn vastly more in the GCC nations than they would at home in Bangladesh or India, where they would make around $1,000 per year. By welcoming migrant workers, the UAE and its neighbor Qatar do more than any other rich country to reduce global inequality. …
This is not to say that migrant workers in GCC have it easy—not by any stretch. Those in monarchical Qatar, for instance, do not enjoy even the limited rights of Qatari nationals. But reducing inequality will require uncomfortable tradeoffs. Qatar would not welcome so many migrant workers if it had to give them generous political and civil rights; in fact, Gulf states explicitly seek non-Arab, dark-skinned migrants so as to minimize the risk that nationals will sympathize, fraternize, or intermarry with migrants (who would then demand permanent residence, if not citizenship). Indeed, almost all of the massive historical migrations from poor to rich countries have occurred on such economically and politically unequal terms.
… If the OECD countries copied the migration policies of the GCC countries, they would reduce global inequality by much more than their welfare systems do within their borders. For example, if OECD countries welcomed migrants in proportion to their GDP at the same rate and from the same poor nations as Qatar does, this would reduce global inequality by about twice the amount that eliminating all internal inequality in the OECD countries would—and by twice the rate that taxes and transfers in these countries reduce global inequality. If they adopted the same per-citizen rate at which the UAE takes migrants, they could accomplish much more. By taking in the 60 percent of the global population who make less than the bottom five percent in the United States and paying them $5,000 per year, the U.S. and Europe would reduce global inequality by roughly a third.
60 percent of the world population of 8.2 billion people is five billion.
Five billion immigrants is a big number.
We citizens of OECD countries take pride in our political and civil rights, and our generous welfare systems. Yet we maintain our high standard of living by giving no rights and trivial money to people who live outside our arbitrary borders.
Yeah, pretty much. Not letting in five billion unskilled Third Worlders is more or less essential to American prosperity.
But the many unappealing aspects of the [Gulf Arab] system—the migrants’ limited economic, political, and social rights, their segregation from the citizenry, and an authoritarian enforcement regime—seem necessary to maintain political support for the migration policies that help to reduce global inequality. (There are, of course, many other unsavory aspects to these regimes, like the oppression of women and LGBT people, that no nation should imitate. But those issues bear no relationship to the open immigration policies we’re proposing.)
Massive indentured servitude with no civil rights — Great Idea!
Full rights for the Transgendered to use the locker room of their choice — A nonnegotiable precondition!
Intellectuals and leaders in OECD countries need to think carefully, and in a politically realistic way, about how to reconcile their commitments to rights and the agenda of reducing inequality. The GCC model of accepting migrants on economically and politically subordinate terms, though not humanitarian on its face, has proven so in practice. If this model were adopted in rich countries, then inequality—both political and economic—would dramatically increase within our own societies. This could undermine some of the liberal character we all prize, and it would certainly make all of us even more uncomfortable about inequality than we already are.
If Curtis gets to debate a nutcase like Professor Weyl, whom should I get to debate?
An interesting question …
A cognitive peer like Matthew Yglesias would be well aware that I’d point out that he and I were largely in agreement, so he’d never agree to debate me.
So, whom should/could I debate?
Weyl's opinions may be nutty, but the fact that he is now an esteemed and well compensated public figure for promoting them suggests there are many people who at least tacitly share them.
Superficially clever but profoundly destructive opinions usually rest on an error, and in Weyl's case they rest on several. First, he confounds the national polity, for which national policy makers actually have responsibility, with the inchoate global multitudes, for whom national policymakers not only don't have responsibility but their responsibility is in fact to repel them from the national polity. If Weyl were actually concerned with global inequality, he should address himself to the United Nations or to those nations who are most economically primitive. But he does not. Most likely this is because his actual objective is overturning the First World, not helping the Third World.
Second, Weyl imagines that because it is nominally cheaper to make the equalism "line go up" using random warm bodies from alien lands, that it should done, irrespective of other considerations. This arrogantly assumes the preeminence of equalism, and naively assumes the effectuality "line go up" chartism.
Third, he erroneously assumes that "we maintain our high standard of living by giving no rights and trivial money to people who live outside our arbitrary borders" as if there were a fixed quantity of rights or even money, and as if we were arbitrarily withholding that those from outside our jurisdiction. (This is compounded by his false assumption that our borders are "arbitrary".)
Altogether, this is the footprint of a deeply naive and wildly overeducated man, and possibly one who harbors a hidden animus against civilization.
How about Nick Fuentes? The contrasting styles and persona would be fun to watch. You could debate Jewish accomplishments/assimilation, Holocaust revisionism. May be too 3rd rail but would entertain and get huge numbers.