Flutterby™! : gay economics 2006-11-16 23:11:13.51016+00

gay economics

2006-11-16 23:11:13.51016+00 by Dan Lyke 30 comments

Percy's Big Gay Economic Development Plan:

Fact: 25% of billionaires are gay* (in whole or part).

Fact: 27% of hedge fund managers are gay (in whole or part).

Fact: 54% of adult gays are college grads (compared with 28% of the general population).

Fact: The average income of adult gays is $53,500 (compared with $32,000 for the general population).

With that kind of brain power and economic clout, shouldn't we be recruiting more gays to move here? Yes, we should!

Greensboro, NC could be the next big boom spot.

#Comment Re: Illegal Gay Immigration made: 2006-11-17 05:26:03.030593+00 by: jeff

Dan--this might be an improper segue to the topic of illegal immigration (I don't know how to create a separate post), but are there statistics on how many illegal immigrants are gay? (Note: I've lived in the Bay area, and I am not biased for/against gay folks in any way)

The continual and accelerating trend of outsourcing manufacturing and high-tech jobs to China, India and other countries has many middle-class people concerned. That's a separate topic for discussion by itself. More recently, however, the focus has been on "illegal immigration," which has both societal (cultural) and economic impacts. Here is how your Congress and your representatives have considered and framed the issue:

I'm all for legal immigration, but building "the fence" is a pure facade--by both political parties. Consider this simple (but I believe accurate) analogy and comparison. We all have to deal with ants. They flock to any foodstuff they can find. We try to poison them, and yet they return. We caulk our walls and entry points, yet they find new paths into our homes. "Unremarkably," simply removing the foodstuffs from their access is nearly always successful in "keeping them out."

Clearly, the only policy that "has a chance" of working is to address the foodstuffs (i.e. the jobs) which are attracting the illegal immigrants and taking away jobs from legal American citizens. Anything less is a facade and is completely illogical. To date, the federal government has only "very selectively" politically chosen to enforce this solution path:

The burden instead has fallen on the States and local communities, which are at the front lines of the problem, and which directly bear the implicit and explicit costs of illegal immigration. Keep your eyes and ears focused on Hazelton (PA). Many illegal immigration legal precedents will likely be set from within that jurisdiction. While no one truly owns the province of absolute record-keeping on the numbers of illegal immigrants, there is one site that attempts to deal with the staggering implications of the numbers better than any I have seen to date. You may want to bookmark it:

Solutions? Simple. Educate America and businesses what the term "illegal" means. First offense? Fine employers for hiring illegals and fine landlords for housing them. Second offense? Larger fines and jail time. Third offfense? Still larger fines and a long prison term. I suspect we wouldn't see many third offenders. I also think we'd see far less people trying to cross "the fence."

We live in a changed world. Just because someone is born in this country shouldn't qualify them for automatic citizenship. A foreigner who happens to give birth to a child while vacationing here is no different from someone sneaking across the border to give birth to multiple offspring. Laundering money doesn't make it legal tender. The same applies to the offspring of illegal immigrants; their offspring are no more legal then they. The rules need to change to reflect the reality of the day, and our elected politicians need to start "getting it." Or maybe we just need to redefine or eliminate the word "illegal." Regardless of how you frame it, immigration is a huge problem for US. Now.

The fleecing of America and the assault on the middle-class by "big business" and our government continues unabated. Democracy in Iraq? In our lifetime, not a workable chance in all the sands of the Middle-East. It's far better to take a closer look at problems at home. We're in a "class and culture war," here, within our own borders. Illegal immigration is tacitly being supported by big business, in its endless drive for cheaper (not necessarily better) labor. This may not affect you directly now, but it WILL affect you later, and will most certainly impact your children.

I'm all for "legal immigration." Please pass this opinion along to any American who you think truly cares about these issues.

If we were to drop all movement restrictions into the United States, then all of the currently illegal immigrants would then be legal immigrants. Would you support dropping movement restrictions into the U.S.?

I was born outside the United States. My parents are United States citizens, so there's never been any question about my citizenship, but during high school and such this lead to the usual constitutional questions about what "natural born" meant, and the resulting threads of thought that have trailed off from that may have me thinking about immigration slightly differently.

I believe we have an overpopulation problem here in the U.S., and on that front I'm against immigration. On the other hand, I go back to my experiences on arriving in California. Taking our moving truck to be turned in at the rental place, I got off the highway and, on the exit ramp there stood, although that may be an exaggeration, maybe propped up against a sign post was, a white guy with a "will work for food" sign. A turn later and there are a bunch of hispanic looking gentlemen trying to wave down the truck because they actually will work, they're not looking for a handout, they're looking for an exchange of value.

So to some extent I view immigration restricts in the same light that I view unions: Someone's telling me that by some chance of circumstance they're more entitled to an economic situation than the guy who didn't have that luck across the street.

And I see strong applications of those principles in much the same way that I see what union attitudes have done to cities like Detroit and Flint: Given the occupants such a sense of entitlement that, once the economic realities finally did catch up with the residents, the eventual collapse meant that nobody knows what it means to strive and thrive any more.

"Legal" and "illegal" will always be primarily economic barriers, and little more. The law has little to do with "right" and "wrong", and makes no such pretensions. That's why we use "guilty" rather than "did it", it's a legal state that's not necessarily correlated with culpability. So by making things more or less illegal we can alter the cost associated with them, but we have to look at what that'll cost us.

So while there may be costs associated with illegal immigrants and things like police services and such, there are also huge benefits, and I think voters are peripherally aware of them. Out here in California, the anti-illegal immigration wave this summer meant crops rotting in the fields and higher food prices. On some level I'm sure that Californians realize that they've actually got a pretty sweet deal by tacitly allowing illegal immigration: It creates a state of second class workers who are artificially cheap, and it'll be really hard to wean our economy from that.

Long-term, the only real solution is to allow the dollar to fall to the levels that are economically, and not just militarily, supportable. That way our manufacturing becomes competitive with the world again. We're not going to get anyone to vote for that.

According to this presentation immigration is the cause of growing population in the US.

Make no mistake, I'm pro-immigration and I don't see an over-population problem in the U.S. When most of the U.S. has less than 200 people per square mile, I have to conclude that you and I must be talking about two different things.

Hmmm... Maybe I'll have the time over Xmas to look into the geography, but intuitively, areas with the most Hispanic illegal immigration are also areas of lower population density. Here, I'm thinking of the California Central Valley, Arizona, Texas, Dalton Georgia, etc.

BTW, has anyone else noticed that animosity towards African Americans has dropped significantly since both 9/11 and the issue of illegal immigrants?

The current targets of our ill-will as a nation are now Terrorists (frequently read as Muslims) and Illegal Immigrants (frequently read as Mexicans).

At one time, the ill-will was directed towards the Irish and before that the Dutch. Heck, look at the plight of the Native American... Maybe that's where this fear really comes from - that we'll end up getting the same treatment we gave the savages...

Mark: overpopulation has nothing to do with land area and everything to do with resource availability. Of course we have enough *room* - the question is, do we have enough *water*?

Yes, there are places that have much higher population densities than the U.S., but I believe that population densities have to be evaluated in terms of the full landmass necessary to support a population. And when you look at resources available in some of the land we've got, we're looking at, for instance, watersheds that are several states away from population centers being used for supporting those centers.

And, yes, immigration is indeed the reason the U.S. has a growing population. I don't believe we can stop immigration by legislation aimed at immigration, I believe we can slow it by foreign policies that lead to cultural changes in "third world" nations that lets those populations bring themselves up to contemporary developed nation living standards.

If your concern is environmental degradation, have considered the positive impacts that immigration may have on the environment? For example, if you can't leave your country of origin, then you may be forced to depend on environmentally unsound jobs (slash 'n burn farming, mining, poaching, etc.) If you can leave, you can take advantage of jobs in wealthier countries, which depend more on innovation, rather than resource extraction.

Also, concern for the environment seems to be correlated with increases in wealth and education. With increased immigration, poor populations have better access to education and capital markets.

I think one point is being overlooked here. Are we a country, or a corporation? (True, corporations have cultures, too.) Looking at the problems of illegal immigration solely in economic terms narrows the scope, but hardly addresses the cultural issues.

My problem with the cultural argument is that I find enough that's reprehensible about modern American culture that if people want to come to my community and actively work, I'm all for that. Moderate Catholics who understand that they're coming to my culture because of its benefits over theirs beat the hell out of radical fundamentalist Christians who aren't aware of the culture around them except that they think it should be subsumed by theirs.

I'd rather that, like the Indian IT workers we get, their host country had paid to educate them first, then we really win the economics, but I'll take what I can get.

(Oh, and just for clarification on the main topic: I believe that Percy Walker is a fictional character and that none of the statistics in that quote can actually be substantiated...)

#Comment Re: made: 2006-11-18 14:55:18.496979+00 by: Mark A. Hershberger

Moderate Catholics who understand that they're coming to my culture because of its benefits over theirs beat the hell out of radical fundamentalist Christians who aren't aware of the culture around them except that they think it should be subsumed by theirs.

Since I'm married to an immigrant (a moderate Catholic) and I come from a fundamentalist background, I've spent some time thinking about "why" people immigrate to the U.S.

It takes a lot of guts to leave the familiar, take a risk, and immigrate to another country. If you aren't a person of means, you're going to have to work hard to make a living and you're going to have to adapt to the culture. Any cultural assumptions you have will be quickly challenged. All this to say: an immigrants primary motive appears (from what I've observed) to be purly economic.

(I'm reminded of a Carlos Mencia bit where he comments on a survey taken in border towns in Mexico. 90% of people in the border towns said they wanted to live in the U.S. "There it is... Do you think you can make it?" The risk averse don't try to immigrate, legally or otherwise.)

Mars: Resource scarcity (particularly water) seems to be a California issue. No wonder housing prices are so high there! Its a hint.

Yeah, I think immigrants in general are cool, and I've said (only half-jokingly) that keeping immigration heavily restricted means that the people willing to cross the border illegally are the ones who are willing to take risks to be here, and on that basis I'm against opening up immigration.

Resource scarcity: Mars is in Washington state, but although it's more pronouced out here, it's not just a west coast issue. I don't know where in PA you are, but I remember every time we drove into New York City from upstate crossing the big reservoirs which were the staging area for the water supply, quite a ways north of the city. West coast towns may pull water from a thousand miles or more, but Atlanta has been contemplating drawing water from the Tennessee river up near Chattanooga, and parts of New York City's water system stem hundreds of miles north and west.

#Comment Re: made: 2006-11-20 19:10:18.114592+00 by: Mark A. Hershberger

It seems like the overpopulation problem is the same as the immigration problem. People go where there is opportunity and the influx of people causes problems with resources and what I can only describe as culture conflict.

I actually come up to NYC quite often (I'm looking over Central Park ATM), but it is always on Amtrak. The only water I see is in New Jersey swamps. But I have been wondering where the city gets all its water from. Upstate, as I recall, but I'm not sure where.

But New York is surrounded by water. Just as New Orleans manages to purify and use the muddy Mississippi, I wonder why NYC can't use water supplies closer to home. I suspect the scale of use plays a part, but how much does the city need and how much could the surrounding water supply?

A map of the New York City water supply. I actually thought it extended further out; when I was a kid we'd drive to one set of grandparents down from the middle of Columbia County to just in to Nassau County (during which trip we crossed one or more of the reservoirs), and I remember it taking about three and a half hours.

I'll bet that by the time it gets that far down the Hudson is too polluted to use for drinking water. There are several industrial cities upstream, and there have been some long fought litigations against various large companies in those cities that still aren't resolved (EPA's page on GE and the Hudson River PCBs).

Is that an issue with population density? You could definitely make an argument that at a dramatically lower density one can get away with a whole lot more that nature will, in human scales, clean up, or that won't impact your neighbors. One of my fallings away from Objectivism, and even radical libertarianism, has been that with what we think of as normal resource use we're pushing the replenishing abilities of the world way harder than simplistic ethics allow for. At current population densities, it is an act of violence when you heat your house with a wood stove.

You could also make the argument that it's an issue with resource use. NYC could pack in twice the number of people if they could double water efficiency, something that those of us who've spent time in the desert can suggest ways to do tenfold, if not more. And if we went to direct derivatives of corn rather than processing it into meats via cattle feed lots and high density chicken processing we could double the efficiency of Iowa.

But as we do those things we, of necessity, create a more stratified society. Luxury items (organic produce, grass fed beef, food derived from processes that we thought of as normal when we were kids and the population of the U.S. was half of what it is now) become more expensive, and at some point I believe the health differences will create a feedback loop.

#Comment Re: made: 2006-11-21 06:08:12.909698+00 by: Mark A. Hershberger

Thanks for the watershed maps. NOLA's water source is indeed the Mississippi and there are chemical plants upstream. More than once these plants have released arsenic and PCBs into the water supply. Still, they manage to get 47 billion gallons of water per year.

(But NYC residents are more active than NOLA residents. And more environmentally aware.)

Population densities like those in NYC are actually more environmentally friendly than in more sparsely populated areas. In fact, some people would argue that NYC is the greenest city in America.

I'm just not convinced that the U.S. has a population problem. The evidence simply isn't there that, as a nation, we are over-populated. Housing prices are high because we're on the tail end of a bubble, not because housing is intrinsically scarce. Developed land that is underused will be sold to developers who can make better use of the land. See the Amish. Many are getting out of farming because they can sell their land for a handsome profit. And the track housing being built on the land isn't even that efficient.

Should we be concerned about our impact on our natural resources? Absolutely! We should scale back our use of resources because we want those resources to last indefinitely. But saying the U.S. is overpopulated just doesn't fit the evidence.

I wonder if the difference between the Mississippi and the Hudson is heavy metals? Some things are easier to filter out than others.

And I've seen the arguments towards densities like NYC (in fact, I stole that link from you), and I agree with them (pack people together and you have to use resources more efficiently), but I believe that you can't measure the population density of NYC without including the watershed and the areas necessary to supply food.

Overpopulation is a function of how efficiently people can live in an area. I think it comes down to us having different views of what that needs to be, what our collective safety margins are, and what our social desires are. I see that every additional person has an impact on all of those factors.

And, if people are coming from countries with natively growing birth rates, that immigration helps slow the trend only in that resources get sent back more efficiently when they're sent through family members or for retirement than when they're granted to governments or sent through NGOs.

So, here's the counter: What are the conditions under which you'd say that a country is overpopulated? Because I think that availability of quality of life is where we differ.

#Comment Re: made: 2006-11-21 15:56:48.344415+00 by: Mark A. Hershberger

I'm not sure what you mean by "availability of quality of life". Also, you talked about the percentage of land that is developed, but where did you get that figure?

(fwiw, I skimmed through the video link I gave above. The presenter makes a point about immigration and immigrant's children being the cause of over population. He starts the clock in 1960 and says that immigrants who came after that are causing the problem. And I've begun to wonder... why that point?)

I have no idea what that is as a percentage of developable land, although I don't think Iowa's surface area is 10% lakes, rivers and wetlands, it could be. But Central Park is about 5% of Manhattan, and if we count that as undeveloped (a stretch, but what the heck), then Manhattan is <95% developed to Iowa's >90%.

It's just a reminder that although we think of places like Manhattan as developed, the land in places like Iowa is often used even more efficiently in order to support population densities like Manhattan.

"availability of quality of life"? I've heard a lot of discussion about the environmental impacts of the suburbs. That's exactly what I mean.

I too wonder "why that point", which is why I asked where your point is. Mine's about 1 person per square mile. And I also note his straight lines with regards to immigration, there are a bunch of simplifications he makes for shock value.

#Comment Re: made: 2006-11-21 20:43:17.571102+00 by: Mark A. Hershberger

I was comfortable living in New Orleans, which, according to Wikipedia was around 1000/sqmi (though, my neighborhood may have been around 500-750/sqmi).

But beyond comfort level, there is sustainability. I recall reading about experimental farms being set up that could support (at least) one person's needs in about an acre of land. That was in the SF area, IIRC. I'll have to find the article.

Do we want to get to that point? Most likely not. But now that I understand you're looking at 1person/sqmi, it helps me see why you think we're overpopulated.

I think Thoreau, back before lots of artificial fertilizers, came up with a .6acre/person number for growing food for a year. Assuming fairly fertile workable land, although Massachusetts has a shorter growing season, the crops you can work out of 5 or 6 months of no rain, and heavy rain in the winter, are probably less than you can with regular summer rains.

Obviously those numbers mean squat in Nevada, Utah, various regions of California, etc.

I'm a fan of living in moderately densely populated areas, I like the idea of a concentrated enough population to support walkable shopping and public transit between population centers. And I'll also freely concede that 1 person/square mile might not be dense enough nationally to support, for instance, the economy we have now: Intel needs a certain number of customers or some economies of scale just don't work.

But I also believe that the numbers necessary to support that, and to do so in a way that doesn't keep us having to so actively manage natural resources and constantly need technological innovation and not pay an economic penalty for excess population, is quite a bit lower than we've got now.

Don't the largest numbers of immigrants also have the highest birth rates? How do you reconcile controlling overall population densities without first paying attention to the groups (i.e. Mexico) which will have the greatest effect on population growth in the future?

I believe (and I admit that I haven't gone back and tried to find numbers to support this) that if the culture here is ready to assimilate them, those who immigrate will have their birth rate down to our culture's in a generation. The larger question is what happens in the countries they leave, and there we get back into discussions of foreign policies that encourage less corruption (eg: I'm not sure what we're doing with Mexico right now, but I'm damned sure it isn't the right thing), and how we encourage immigrants investment, both economic and cultural, in their country of origin.

I also haven't looked into it as deeply as I should, but I'm fairly sure that if you normalize for economic situation, then immigrants, legal or otherwise, really aren't any more prone to crime than the general U.S. population (for instance).

Whatever the legal aspects of the matter, money spent on enforcement is simply an economic barrier. As we've seen with illegal drugs and even high taxes on cigarettes (here in sleepy Lagunitas, someone broke into the general store last night to steal cigarettes), if the demand is there the only thing that putting resources into enforcement does is raise the price and increase the crime associated with the flow of that product. There is, indeed, a price above which illegal immigrants will no longer be viable in the labor market, but having just filled out an I-9 form, I don't like the price already, and the potential for abuse if that bar is raised higher starts to become pretty serious.

We can either do this with the carrot or the stick, and if we do this with the stick then eventually we're going to end up with travel controls and ID checkpoints on legal citizens, and have to carry papers everywhere and justify our trips and be subject to regular search and identity verification.

I'm not willing to do that. I grew up knowing way too many who emmigrated from the former Soviet or various Southeast Asian Communist states to want to go any further down that road; we're already far enough in that direction.

I am, however, totally willing to encourage regime change and free and fair elections in Mexico and Central America, more free trade (and not artificially subsidized trade where domestic producers and taxpayers get screwed over by special grants given to the best lobbyists) and on a more personal level more cultural sharing with immigrants, because in the long-term that's how we solve both the immigration issue and the population issue.

#Comment Re: made: 2006-11-22 12:57:19.289767+00 by: jeff [edit history]

I agree totally that those isolated cases mentioned in your last post are a real cultural problem, but statistically they would bear little influence on the overall population distribution and growth. This may seem racist and a bit of a generalization from Renew America, but on RECENT immigrant culture assimilation:

"What does this have to do with illegal aliens? It has everything to do with whether we can absorb large numbers of them or not. It is no accident that the Hispanic marchers in Los Angeles brandished anti-American and pro-Mexican signs. In their heart of hearts, they were Mexican and not American."

"Since 1980, the number of Hispanics in the U.S. has grown five times faster than the rest of the population, making the United States the third largest Spanish-speaking country in the world."

"Higher fertility has been a major source of population growth among minority groups. Hispanics have the highest fertility rate of any U.S. minority, with the average Hispanic woman giving birth to three children in her lifetime."

"Analysis of data collected by Census Bureau in 2002 shows that women from the top-10 immigrant- sending countries living in the United States collectively tend to have higher fertility than women in their home countries. As a group, immigrants from these countries have 23 percent more children than women in their home countries, adding to world population growth. Among the findings:

Among Mexican immigrants in the United States, for example, fertility averages 3.5 children per woman compared to 2.4 children per women in Mexico."

"In Utah, births to immigrant mothers spiked from 3.7 percent in 1970 to 14.7 percent in 2002. Of those births, an estimated 47 percent are to mothers who are illegal immigrants, according to the study released this week by the Center for Immigration Studies. The children born to immigrants are arguably the most important long-term legacy of immigration."

From my own subjective experience earlier this year, talking to a bus driver in Zion National Park, who lives in a small town near the park: "They are taking over." Habla usted español?

#Comment Re: made: 2006-11-22 21:22:18.659455+00 by: Mark A. Hershberger

If I fear learning a language, then I fear my children are more likely to need to learn Chinese than I am going to have to learn Spanish.

#Comment Re: made: 2006-11-23 08:23:57.479545+00 by: TheSHAD0W [edit history]

In related news, this link just on Fark.com:
http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink=2431655
"Dallas tourism officials attempting to lure gay and lesbian visitors, saying the city is a great place for them to spend their time, money and last few terrified moments of their lives among rednecks who disagree with their lifestyle"