From my new column in Taki's Magazine:
Is Texas about the best fate that a heavily Hispanicized America can hope for? In a future United States that won’t be able to generate all that much per-capita wealth, is Texas‘s system of cheap labor, cheap land, cheap taxes, and cheap government the only plausible future for the economy?
These are questions I’ve kicked around for much of the 21st century. My long-time readers will note that several of my old ideas on affordable family formation and the differences between red states and blue states comprise the backbone of Tyler Cowen’s cover story in the current issue of TIME, “Why Texas Is Our Future.” The parts of Cowen’s article that aren't derived from me are not all that well thought out, but his long feature is interesting as an example of the weird, almost Straussian influence I seem to have on what’s considered cutting-edge thought in the mainstream media.
Read the whole thing there.
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24 comments:
A congrats are in order I guess for this guy having plagiarized off you.
I've been reading your blog/website for 12-13 years now, so there's no question those are your ideas.
The parts of Cowen’s article that aren't derived from me are not all that well thought out, but his long feature is interesting as an example of the weird, almost Straussian influence I seem to have on what’s considered cutting-edge thought in the mainstream media.
You're being way too charitable. It's clear that a lot of these guys like Cowen rip off your stuff, both because they don't want to admit reading and being influenced by you and because they want to pass off your stuff as their own novel insights. Cowen himself has absolutely nothing to say. Most of his blogs are links to other people and where he does write more than a few sentences, they're mostly elaborate exercises in saying nothing of substance.
So basically Cowen's only original points are that 90% of Americans are going to be living in trailer parks and eating canned beans for the rest of their lives.
"Tyler is a lot smarter than Malcolm, so why shouldn’t he be the New Gladwell."
One minor thing, perhaps a word change, instead of the word "is a lot smarter than Malcolm" perhaps the word should read "is a lot savvier than Malcolm" since savvy tends to relate to your overall theme regarding happy talk frequent flier filler books. Those types of tomes are all in the marketing and packaging and if Malcolm Gladwell is on the downward spiral, on the way out so to speak, as a relevant pop lite intellectual, then a lot of this has to do with how one is marketed and packaged as the next best thing and that depends to a large extent on SAVVY marketing.
Otherwise, a lot of heavy meat packed with nutrients to chew on. Thanks for the brain food once again.
Some of the signs from Texas are ominous, but California is in worse shape than Texas.
The irony of ironies is that even though Steve clearly thinks this is a dystopian future, and that he essentially admits that Republican party's capitalist program is responsible for it, he'll still write articles explaining how they can win elections. Pity he and all the other Steves are reduced to such a hopeless cause.
For what it's worth. They are wrong. If I am correct, what steve-ites want to do is to maintain America as a first world country as opposed to the third world country she is becoming, (not that we Europeans have anything to shout about). The best way to do that is with the Democrats not the Republicans. The Democrats stand for environmentalism, social liberalism, more support for manufacturing(operative word being more), higher education, and at least a passive agressiveness toward capitalism. The Republicans on the other hand stand for smoke stack chasing and natural resource exploitation and "small government". In other words, the policy prescriptions of a third world country.
you did not talk about oil or natural gas. in 2014 texas will be producing more oil than mexico, and already produces more natural gas.
mexico oil production is 2.9 MMbbl/d and falling, texas oil production is 2.7 MMbbl/d and rising. taxes collected from PEMEX are often cited as accounting for perhaps half of the budget of the mexican government. so the entire country is running off a few 40 year old oil fields - oil fields which will be producing LESS oil than texas next year.
mexico natural gas production is 4.8 Bcf/d. mexico natural gas consumption is 6.5 Bcf/d. so it is already an importer of natural gas, and needs to buy 1.7 Bcf/d from somewhere - mainly the US. texas produces 22.5 Bcf/d, almost 5 times as much as mexico, and is happy to supply them with the bulk of that order. at prices of $3.8 Tcf, that means mexico is paying 6.5 million per day, 195 million per month, or 2.3 billion per year, to import natural gas (mostly from texas).
and of course texas goes on to sell the rest of their excess natural gas production to other buyers as well. mexico's demand, which is growing, barely puts a dent in their supply. texas natural gas output is worth about 85 million a day at current prices. prices which will only slowly go up now that the US exports natural gas via international shipping.
math for the benefits of texas oil activity was hashed out in a previous post a few weeks ago. it generates about 270 million per day or 100 billion per year at WTI $100.
in that sense, texas is a major outlier in the US, with north dakota the ONLY state having a similar outlook or future - sitting on a giant reservoir of free money and energy and vast expanses of undeveloped land. the US would be extremely fortunate if it's future was texas.
of course i agree that in general, the long term future of texas is terrible. the oil and natural gas can sustain the mexican hordes for a while. once the flow of free energy and free money begins to ebb however, look out. and of course locals only get to indirectly partake in the energy bonanza. unless they are directly employed by the energy sector in some capacity, people living in texas don't automatically move into the middle class by osmosis. the mexican hordes do get to be net tax consumer leeches for a few more decades though because texas can afford that.
footnote: mexico is, for some reason i cannot understand, said to be economically booming, according to allan wall and a couple other people in the vdare sphere. it's not, by my reckoning. i think mexico is actually growing about 1% or 2% per year. hardly booming.
oil production is falling, natural gas production is falling, and mexico is now a net natural gas importer, and looking down the barrel of becoming an oil importer. remittances from illegal aliens in the US probably cancel out that natural gas import bill though - for now. that bill will grow, and look out below if PEMEX does not reverse the oil flow.
but if mexico's economy is booming, and 50% of mexico's economy is driven by oil and natural gas, then what must the texas economy be doing? for every 1 person in texas taking a piece of that economic pie, there are 5 people in mexico dividing up that same slice.
irishman said: The Democrats stand for environmentalism, social liberalism, more support for manufacturing(operative word being more), higher education, and at least a passive agressiveness toward capitalism.
Hunsdon said: This world you live on, it sounds interesting. It doesn't sound like our world, and those don't sound like our Democrats----but it sounds interesting.
Cowen said, "At the top will be 10% to 15% of high achievers, the “Tiger Mother” kids if you like, whose self-motivation and mastery of technology will allow them to roar away into the future.".
This idea that technology is driving inequality is both wrong and dangerous.
I am an engineering PhD and I work in a big, famous lab. If you believe standardized testing, my verbal and quant ability is far up in the 99th percentile. Yet with 20 years' experience I make only about 3x the median for all occupations. That ratio was probably about the same in 1960 and is in no way a recipe for social upheaval.
Also, if you look at the very rich, few got their money by inventing or building things. They got it through connections and politics. Connections and politics are the mother's milk of the FIRE sector.
If we believed Cowen, in order to stop inequality, we would stop technological progress but do nothing to address the political system. That is so stupidly, obviously wrong that the median wage-earner ought to be able to grasp it right away.
"Tyler Cowen: "Why Mexico Is Our Future""
There, fixed it for you, Tyler.That´s what you really meant anyway. Enjoy the cheap chalupas and the flavoured beans.
Anonymous said . . .
Cowen himself has absolutely nothing to say.
This. What is the evidence that Cowen is smarter than Gladwell?
Tyler Cowen was perfectly and succinctly described in this blog's comments years ago by Steve Burton:
Tyler Cowen is, quite simply, a *poseur*.
He constantly posts lists of what he's supposedly reading, or viewing, or listening to, at the moment - but he hardly ever has anything even slightly interesting to say about any of it.
And on the rare occasions when he does say something interesting, it turns out to be thoroughly incompetent.
Burton's middle para is the key. How is it possible for a supposedly smart person to read all the stuff Cowen supposedly reads and never, ever make a novel, insightful connection between any of it? How? The smart people I know can't read a box of Count Chocula without seeing some connection to other, more interesting things.
At best, Cowen is a very industrious grind who has stumbled into a prime seat on the gravy train. That's assuming he writes his own stuff.
Anonymous said . . .
I am an engineering PhD and I work in a big, famous lab. If you believe standardized testing, my verbal and quant ability is far up in the 99th percentile. Yet with 20 years' experience I make only about 3x the median for all occupations. That ratio was probably about the same in 1960 and is in no way a recipe for social upheaval.
Also, if you look at the very rich, few got their money by inventing or building things. They got it through connections and politics. Connections and politics are the mother's milk of the FIRE sector.
More brilliance from Anonymous.
Think about the standard story of technical change leading to inequality. The mechanism is supposed to be that high ability in abstract reasoning is both rare and necessary in order to fully exploit the power of computers, which exploitation is hugely and increasingly valuable.
So linux kernel hackers and enthusiastic participants on programming forums are rich, right? These guys are wicked smart and are insanely into fully exploiting the power of computers.
Certainly it can't be the case that people with law degrees from Harvard or people who are really good at selling worthless financial products are the ones getting rich, can it?
Oops.
I wonder when we might start to see white out-migration from Texas, akin to California.
So far it's been a destination, not a place to leave.
But I'd wager a guess that some limited out-migration has been going on for a while, if you look closely enough. Maybe not enough to balance out the California influx among other things.
But I'd bet it's there.
I just wonder when it becomes noticeable.
If you think about it, eventually (and not so long) all the frackable sites are going to be fracked and produced? There is some kind of blind faith, particularly with Republican people, that this resource is essentially unlimited. If you want to disbelieve me fine, but fracked gas starts to decline in flow rates almost from the day it's put into service. You just keep going to another site and frack again.
But eventually you run out of good sites. Also this trick would not have worked if the US didn't have such a good (relatively speaking), extensive gas pipeline network.
But when the fracking starts to die down, what happens to the Texas economy then?
My personal guess is that most of the really good fracking sites will be exhausted in 10 years or so.
irishman said: The Democrats stand for environmentalism, social liberalism, more support for manufacturing(operative word being more), higher education, and at least a passive agressiveness toward capitalism.
Hunsdon said: This world you live on, it sounds interesting. It doesn't sound like our world, and those don't sound like our Democrats----but it sounds interesting.
That "world" is called White Europe. Like White America -- Vermont, Minnesota, etc. What kind of America are YOU interested in?
Burton's middle para is the key. How is it possible for a supposedly smart person to read all the stuff Cowen supposedly reads and never, ever make a novel, insightful connection between any of it? How? The smart people I know can't read a box of Count Chocula without seeing some connection to other, more interesting things.
He said that he rarely finishes what he starts reading and that he often just skims or reads just a few pages and moves on to another book. That's fine, but he also pontificates on stuff he hasn't read completely or thoroughly.
I first "met" Tyler Cowan many years back, when Google was relatively new. I thought I'd look myself up in this new-fangled search engine thingamajig and see what I could find.
Lo and behold, at the top of the search list I found something called a "blog" by a GMU "economist" named "Tyler Cowen." He was ridiculing a letter I had written to the Baltimore Sun (!)about immigration driving down US wages.
Perhaps, he wondered, "Mr. Mendez" also wanted to replace bulldozers with shovels or -- better yet -- teaspoons, to keep US wages up.
Since he obviously didn't understand the difference between wages and productivity, and since he was bothering to refute a letter-to-the-editor by a nobody like me, I assumed he was a nobody, too. Probably a T/A or something.
The Democrats stand for environmentalism, social liberalism, more support for manufacturing(operative word being more), higher education, and at least a passive agressiveness toward capitalism.
Environmentalism = abolition of private property.
Social liberalism = abolition of Western civilization.
More support for manufacturing = corporate fascism.
Higher education = thought control.
Passive aggressiveness toward capitalism = more corporate fascism
The Democrats stand for environmentalism, social liberalism, more support for manufacturing(operative word being more),
Environmentalism AND more support for manufacturing????
One of Cowen's students would be expelled for plagiarism if he pulled an intellectual property theft of this magnitude... it's the Great Train Robbery in prose.
But you can eat beans. With cumin! That's his contribution, and he deserves credit for it.
For what it's worth. They are wrong. If I am correct, what steve-ites want to do is to maintain America as a first world country as opposed to the third world country she is becoming, (not that we Europeans have anything to shout about). The best way to do that is with the Democrats not the Republicans. The Democrats stand for environmentalism, social liberalism, more support for manufacturing(operative word being more), higher education, and at least a passive agressiveness toward capitalism. The Republicans on the other hand stand for smoke stack chasing and natural resource exploitation and "small government". In other words, the policy prescriptions of a third world country
You have some good points, but the Democratic Party in the US is pro-minority. Also for manufacturing Germany has even went from 40 percent to 19 percent of their population employed in it. Also, people are employed more part time in Germany in store jobs than in the past. I read and heard this. Germany has car manufacturing in the US and also uses a lot of automation and robots to cut down in manufacturing employment. So, the strong tariff approach doesn't work since the factory jobs still outsource or automation and robots take them.
I see this time Sailer restrained himself to only 4-5 paragraphs of smug self-exaltation -- "David Brooks reads me"; "the Pope is influenced by me"; etc. -- also humbly offering the opinion that he's more of a mensch than Leo Strauss was. It reminds me of the old Phil Hendrie Show character who's an astronomer in Colorado and wont to make passing apropos-of-nothing remarks about his "long-running feud" with Stephen Hawking.
Paul Mendez: If Tyler really wrote what you say (bulldozers/spoons) then he was plagiarizing Milton Friedman too. That was from an old column about visiting post-war Hong Kong.
Of course now he has moved on to plagiarizing "the dark matter of the Internet"
Anonymous said...
Some of the signs from Texas are ominous, but California is in worse shape than Texas.
10/23/13, 10:24 PM
Steve basically homers for Calif. despite the equally bad problems there (visit Fresno's scenic unpaved downtown for a taste) because it has no Republicans in power to whine about. Maybe his cognitive dissonance will finally rupture after the next big earthquake, along with several grandfathered concrete structures in Koreatown/Rampart.
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