Recent reading
Jan. 8th, 2020 06:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
luzulaOch några, antar jag, är ok! by Sandro Scocco (2019)
The title is an allusion to Trump's speech where he said that Mexicans were drug smugglers, criminals and rapists, but that a few of them were maybe okay (sorry, don't have the exact phrasing). The book is not about the US, though, but about Sweden. I read it in order to have better political discussions with my parents. The author is a left-leaning but otherwise mainstream economist who examines the economic impact of immigration. The main thesis is that immigrants generally end up on the bottom of the labor market, but not actually to the detriment of people who lived there before, because many of them get pushed up into higher-waged jobs--given that the possibilities of social mobility in society are sufficiently large. If they are not, it might indeed happen that there is downward pressure of wages in the bottom of the labor market. So successful integration depends not on doing specific things for immigrants, but on ensuring the possibilities for social mobility for the population in general.
He also describes research on how the ethnification of the lowest class of society can lead to these people coming to be seen as being poor because they are personally lacking and undeserving of social redistribution of wealth via taxes (i e welfare from the state). This then weakens the votes for redistribution of wealth in general, which of course is bad for everyone but rich people and also lessens social mobility which will then lead to the self-fulfilling prophecy of downward pressure of wages. The last line of the book is: "If the citizens wrongly believe that immigrants are ruining the welfare systems of the state, then [right-wing] politicians will soon wreck those welfare systems for them."
The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman (2019, listened to as audiobook by Michael Sheen)
The audiobook reading is lovely, which is what kept me listening as long as I did. But I didn't finish this. The upcoming romance is...ugh. Ugh. He took care of her as a baby and then he was her teacher in her teens. I mean, there are aspects of the book that I like, but as a whole it just wasn't something I wanted to finish or indeed have the energy to write much about. Read more inrachelmanija, dolorosa_12 and naraht's recent posts if you want...
The title is an allusion to Trump's speech where he said that Mexicans were drug smugglers, criminals and rapists, but that a few of them were maybe okay (sorry, don't have the exact phrasing). The book is not about the US, though, but about Sweden. I read it in order to have better political discussions with my parents. The author is a left-leaning but otherwise mainstream economist who examines the economic impact of immigration. The main thesis is that immigrants generally end up on the bottom of the labor market, but not actually to the detriment of people who lived there before, because many of them get pushed up into higher-waged jobs--given that the possibilities of social mobility in society are sufficiently large. If they are not, it might indeed happen that there is downward pressure of wages in the bottom of the labor market. So successful integration depends not on doing specific things for immigrants, but on ensuring the possibilities for social mobility for the population in general.
He also describes research on how the ethnification of the lowest class of society can lead to these people coming to be seen as being poor because they are personally lacking and undeserving of social redistribution of wealth via taxes (i e welfare from the state). This then weakens the votes for redistribution of wealth in general, which of course is bad for everyone but rich people and also lessens social mobility which will then lead to the self-fulfilling prophecy of downward pressure of wages. The last line of the book is: "If the citizens wrongly believe that immigrants are ruining the welfare systems of the state, then [right-wing] politicians will soon wreck those welfare systems for them."
The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman (2019, listened to as audiobook by Michael Sheen)
The audiobook reading is lovely, which is what kept me listening as long as I did. But I didn't finish this. The upcoming romance is...ugh. Ugh. He took care of her as a baby and then he was her teacher in her teens. I mean, there are aspects of the book that I like, but as a whole it just wasn't something I wanted to finish or indeed have the energy to write much about. Read more in
rachelmanija, dolorosa_12 and naraht's recent posts if you want...
Damn right, Scocco
Date: 2020-01-10 09:20 pm (UTC)In the USA, advocates from across the political spectrum (wretchedly narrow, in general) successfully tied social welfare to Black people. Racism is so foundational in the US that this coupling guaranteed the ruination of all social welfare programs, with protests only from outside the mainstream political parties.
Re: Damn right, Scocco
Date: 2020-01-11 09:08 am (UTC)