Daesh

The War on Terror has been a total failure.

pnrj current events, ethics, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , ,

Sep 11 JDN 2459834

Since today happens to be September 11, I thought I’d spend this week’s post reflecting on the last 21 years (!) of the War on Terror.

At this point, I can safely say that the War on Terror has been a complete, total, utter failure. It has cost over $8 trillion and nearly a million lives, and not only didn’t reduce terrorism, it actually appears to have substantially increased it.

Take a look at this graph from Our World in Data:

Up until the the 1980s, terrorism worldwide was a slow smoldering, killing rarely more than a few hundred people each year. Obviously it’s terrible if you or one of your loved ones happen to be among those few hundred, but in terms of its overall chance of killing you or your children, terrorism used to be less dangerous than kiddie pools.

Then terrorism began to rise, until it was killing several thousand people a year. I was surprised to learn that most of these were not in the Middle East, but in fact spread all over the world, with the highest concentrations actually being in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Notably, almost none of these deaths were in First World countries, and as a result most First World governments largely ignored them. Terrorism was something that happened “over there”, to other people.

Then of course came 2001, and 9/11/2001, in which nearly 3,000 Americans were killed in a single day. And suddenly the First World took notice, and decided to respond with overwhelming force.

We have been at war basically ever since. All this war has accomplished… approximately nothing.

The deadliest year of terrorism in the 21st century was not 2001; it was 2014, after the US had invaded both Afghanistan and Iraq, and in fact withdrawn from Iraq (but not yet Afghanistan). This was largely the result of the rise of Daesh (which is what you should call them by the way), which seems to be the most fanatical and violent Islamist terrorist organization the world has seen in decades if not centuries.

Even First World terrorism is no better today than it was in the 1990s—though also no worse. It’s back to a slow smolder, and once again First World societies can feel that terrorism is something that happens to someone else. But terrorism in the Middle East is the worst it has been in decades.

Would Daesh not have appeared if the US had never invaded Afghanistan and Iraq? It’s difficult to say. Maybe their rise was inevitable. Or maybe having a strong, relatively secular government in the region under Saddam Hussein would have prevented them from becoming so powerful. We can at least say this: Since the US withdrew from Afghanistan and the Taliban retook control, the Taliban and Daesh have been fighting each other quite heavily. Presumably that would have been happening all along if the US had not intervened to suppress the Taliban.

Don’t get me wrong: The Taliban were, and are, a terrible regime, and Saddam Hussein was a terrible dictator. But Daesh is clearly worse than either, and sometimes in geopolitics you have to accept the lesser evil.

If we’d actually had a way to take over Afghanistan and Iraq and rebuild them as secular liberal democracies as the US government intended, that would have been a good thing, and might even have been worth all that blood and treasure. But that project utterly failed, and we should have expected it to fail, as never in history has anyone successfully imposed liberal democracy by outside force like that.

When democracy spreads, it usually does so slowly, through the cultural influence of trade and media. Sometimes it springs up in violent revolution—as we hoped it would in the Arab Spring but were sadly disappointed. But there are really no clear examples of a democratic country invading an undemocratic country and rapidly turning it democratic.

British colonialism was spread by the sword (and especially the machine gun), and did sometimes ultimately lead to democratic outcomes, as in the US, Australia, and Canada, and more recently in India, South Africa, and Botswana. But that process was never fast, never smooth, and rarely without bloodshed—and only succeeded when the local population was willing to fight for it. Britain didn’t simply take over countries and convert them to liberal democracies in a generation. No one has ever done that, and trying to was always wishful thinking.

I don’t know, maybe in the very long run, we’ll look back on all this as the first, bloody step toward something better for the Middle East. Maybe the generation of women who got a taste of freedom and education in Afghanistan under US occupation will decide to rise up and refuse to relinquish those rights under the new Taliban. Daesh will surely die sooner or later; fanaticism can rarely sustain organizations in the long term.

But it’s been 20 years now, and things look no better than they did at the start. Maybe it’s time to cut our losses?

The challenges of a global basic income

pnrj critique of neoclassical economics, development economics, public policy, Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457404

In the previous post I gave you the good news. Now for the bad news.

So we are hoping to implement a basic income of $3,000 per person per year worldwide, eliminating poverty once and for all.

There is no global government to implement this system. There is no global income tax to be collected or refunded. The United Nations and the World Bank, for all the good work that they do, are nowhere near powerful enough (or well-funded enough) to accomplish this feat.

Worse, the people we need to help the most, not coincidentally, live in the countries that are worst-managed. They are surrounded not only by squalor, but also by corruption, war, ethnic tension. Most of the people are underfed, uneducated, and dying from diseases such as malaria and schistomoniasis that we could treat in a day for pocket change. Their infrastructure is either crumbling or nonexistent. Their water is unsafe to drink. And worst of all, many of their governments don’t care. Tyrants like Robert Mugabe, Kim Jong-un, King Salman (of our lovely ally Saudi Arabia), and Isayas Afewerki care nothing for the interests of the people they rule, and are interested only in maximizing their own wealth and power. If we arranged to provide grants to these countries in an amount sufficient to provide the basic income, there’s no reason to think they’d actually provide it; they’d simply deposit the check in their own personal bank accounts, and use it to buy ever more extravagant mansions or build ever greater monuments to themselves. They really do seem to follow a utility function based entirely upon their own consumption; witness your neoclassical rational agent and despair.

There are ways for international institutions and non-governmental organizations to intervene to help people in these countries, and indeed many have done so to considerable effect. As bad as things are, they are much better than they used to be, and they promise to be even better tomorrow. But there is only so much they can do without the force of law at their backs, without the power to tax incomes and print currency.

We will therefore need a new kind of institutional framework, if not a true world government then something very much like it. Establishing this new government will not be easy, and worst of all I see no way to do it other than military force. Tyrants will not give up their power willingly; it will need to be taken from them. We will need to capture and imprison tyrants like Robert Mugabe and Kim Jong Un in the same way that we once did to mob bosses like John Dillinger and Al Capone, for ultimately a tyrant is nothing but a mob boss with an army.Unless we can find some way to target them precisely and smoothly replace their regimes with democracies, this will mean nothing less than war, and it could kill thousands, even millions of people—but millions of people are already dying, and will continue to die as long as we leave these men in power. Sanctions might help (though sanctions kill people too), and perhaps a few can be persuaded to step down, but the rest must be overthrown, by some combination of local revolutions and international military coalitions. The best model I’ve seen for how this might be pulled off is Libya, where Qaddafi was at last removed by an international military force supporting a local revolution—but even Libya is not exactly sunshine and rainbows right now. One of the first things we need to do is seriously plan a strategy for removing repressive dictators with a minimum of collateral damage.

To many, I suspect this sounds like imperialism, colonialism redux. Didn’t so many imperialistic powers say that they were doing it to help the local population? Yes, they did; and one of the facts that we must face up to is that it was occasionally true. Or if helping the local population was not their primary motivation, it was nonetheless a consequence. Countries colonized by the British Empire in particular are now the most prosperous, free nations in the world: The United States, Canada, Australia. South Africa and India might seem like exceptions (GDP PPP per capita of $12,400 and $5,500 respectively) but they really aren’t, compared to what they were before—or even compared to what is next to them today: Angola has a per capita GDP PPP of $7,546 while Bangladesh has only $2,991. Zimbabwe is arguably an exception (per capita GDP PPP of $1,773), but their total economic collapse occurred after the British left. To include Zimbabwe in this basic income program would literally triple the income of most of their population. But to do that, we must first get through Robert Mugabe.

Furthermore, I believe that we can avoid many of the mistakes of the past. We don’t have to do exactly the same thing that countries used to do when they invaded each other and toppled governments. Of course we should not enslave, subjugate, or murder the local population—one would hope that would go without saying, but history shows it doesn’t. We also shouldn’t annex the territory and claim it as our own, nor should we set up puppet governments that are only democratic as long as it serves our interests. (And make no mistake, we have done this, all too recently.) The goal must really be to help the people of countries like Zimbabwe and Eritrea establish their own liberal democracy, including the right to make policies we don’t like—or even policies we think are terrible ideas. If we can do so without war, of course we should. But right now what is usually called “pacifism” leaves millions of people to starve while we do nothing.

The argument that we have previously supported (or even continue to support, ahem, Saudi Arabia) many of these tyrants is sort of beside the point. Yes, that is clearly true; and yes, that is clearly terrible. But do you think that if we simply leave the situation alone they’ll go away? We should never have propped up Saddam Hussein or supported the mujihadeen who became the Taliban; and yes, I do think we could have known that at the time. But once they are there, what do you propose to do now? Wait for them to die? Hope they collapse on their own? Give our #thoughtsandprayers to revolutionaries? When asked what you think we should do, “We shouldn’t have done X” is not a valid response.

Imagine there is a mob boss who had kidnapped several families and is holding them in a warehouse. Suppose that at some point the police supported the mob boss in some way; in a deal to undermine a worse rival mafia family, they looked the other way on some things he did, or even gave him money that he used to strengthen his mob. (With actual police, the former is questionable, but actually done all the time; the latter would be definitely illegal. In the international analogy, both are ubiquitous.) Even suppose that the families who were kidnapped were previously from a part of town that the police would regularly shake down for petty crimes and incessant stop-and-frisks. The police definitely have a lot to answer for in all this; their crimes should not be forgotten. But how does it follow in any way that the police should not intervene to rescue the families from the warehouse? Suppose we even know that the warehouse is heavily guarded, and the resulting firefight may kill some of the hostages we are hoping to save. This gives us reason to negotiate, or to find the swiftest, most precise means to deploy the SWAT teams; but does it give us reason to do nothing?

Once again I think Al Capone is the proper analogy; when the FBI captured Al Capone, they didn’t bomb Chicago to the ground, nor did they attempt to enslave the population of Illinois. They thought of themselves as targeting one man and his lieutenants and re-establishing order and civil government to a free people; that is what we must do in Eritrea and Zimbabwe. (In response to all this, no doubt someone will say: “You just want the US to be the world’s police.” Well, no, I want an international coalition; but yes, given our military and economic hegemony, the US will take a very important role. Above all, yes, I want the world to have police. Why don’t you?)

For everything we did wrong in the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I think we actually did this part right: Afghanistan’s GDP PPP per capita has risen over 70% since 2002, and Iraq’s is now 17% higher than its pre-war peak. It’s a bit early to say whether we have really established stable liberal democracies there, and the Iraq War surely contributed to the rise of Daesh; but when the previous condition was the Taliban and Saddam Hussein it’s hard not to feel that things are at least somewhat improving. In a generation or two maybe we really will say “Iraq” in the same breath as “Korea” as one of the success stories of prosperous democracies set up after US wars. Or maybe it will all fall apart; it’s hard to say at this point.

So, we must find a way to topple the tyrants. Once that is done, we will need to funnel huge amounts of resources—at least one if not two orders of magnitude larger than our current level of foreign aid into building infrastructure, educating people, and establishing sound institutions. Our current “record high” foreign aid is less than 0.3% of world’s GDP. We have a model for this as well: It’s what we did in West Germany and Japan after WW2, as well as what we did in South Korea after the Korean War. It is not a coincidence that Germany soon regained its status as a world power while Japan and Korea were the first of the “Asian Tigers”, East Asian nations that rose up to join us at a First World standard of living.

Will all of this be expensive? Absolutely. By assuming $3,000 per person per year I am already figuring in an expenditure of $21 trillion per year, indefinitely. This would be the most expensive project upon which humanity has ever embarked. But it could also be the most important—an end to poverty, everywhere, forever. And we have that money, we’re simply using it for other things. At purchasing power parity the world spends over $100 trillion per year. Using 20% of the world’s income to eliminate poverty forever doesn’t seem like such a bad deal to me. (It’s not like it would disappear; it would be immediately spent back into the economy anyway. We might even see growth as a result.)

When dealing with events on this scale, it’s easy to get huge numbers that sound absurd. But even if we assumed that only the US, Europe, and China supported this program, it would only take 37% of our combined income—roughly what we currently spend on housing.

Whenever people complain, “We spend billions of dollars a year on aid, and we haven’t solved world hunger!” the proper answer is, “That’s right; we should be spending trillions.”

Saudi Arabia is becoming a problem.

pnrj current events, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457394

There has been a lot of talk lately about what’s going on in the Middle East, particularly in Syria, Iran, and Iraq, where Daesh (I like to call them that precisely because they don’t like it), also known as ISIS or ISIL, has been killing people and destroying things–including priceless ancient artifacts.

We in the United States actually have little to fear from Daesh. Pace Ben Carson and Lindsey Graham, Daesh is absolutely not an existential threat to the United States. We have them completely outnumbered and outgunned—indeed, we have the world outgunned, as we ourselves account for 40% of the world’s military spending and a comparable portion of the world’s nuclear missiles, naval tonnage, and air fleet.
The people who need to worry are those living in (or fleeing from) the Middle East.

Some 17,000 civilians were killed by warfare in Iraq in 2014, the plurality killed by Daesh and only a small fraction killed by US or NATO forces. Contrary to the belief of people like Noam Chomsky who think the US military is comprised of bloodthirsty genocidal murderers, we actually go quite far out of our way to minimize civilian deaths, up to and including dropping pamphlets warning of bombing raids before we carry them out (I love the “admits” in that headline. You keep using that word…). Then there’s Syria, where there have been over 200,000 deaths, though actually more attributable to Bashir al-Assad than to Daesh.

Daesh, on the other hand, has no qualms about killing anyone they consider not a “true Muslim”, which basically means anyone who doesn’t support them—it certainly doesn’t exclude all Muslims. Daesh is so brutal and extreme that Al Qaeda has condemned their tactics. Yes, that Al Qaeda, the one that crashed airplanes into the World Trade Center in 2001. If you really want to know the sorts of things Daesh has been doing (and have the stomach for it), there are plenty of photos and video footage, many of them openly promoted by Daesh itself, including on their Twitter feed which also shows lots of (I am not kidding) kitten photos called “Mewjahideen”.

But today I’m not actually going to focus on Daesh itself. I’m going to focus on a country that is ostensibly our ally in the fight against them—yet the way they’ve been behaving is a lot more like being an ally of Daesh. As I gave away in the title, I mean of course Saudi Arabia.

Between the time that I drafted this post as a Blog From the Future on Patreon and the time that you are now reading this, Saudi Arabia did another terrible thing, namely executing an important Shi’ite cleric and triggering the possibility of war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. (I think it helps support the point I’m about to make shortly that the focus of this article is on the effect on oil prices.)

First, remember what Saudi Arabia is—namely, an absolute theocratic monarchy founded upon the same Wahhabi Islamist ideology that drives Daesh. They teach Wahhabi Islam as their state religion in schools. This by itself should make us wonder whether they are really our allies—they after all agree a lot more with our enemies than they do with us. And indeed, while they speak of joining the “war on terror”, they are actually the leading source of funds for global Islamist terrorism. In theory, with their large, powerful military and a majority-Muslim population (which would help avoid the sense that this is some kind of Christian/atheist versus Muslim neo-Crusade, which it absolutely must not be), Saudi Arabia could be a valuable ally in this war—but they don’t particularly want to be.

Saudi Arabia is now paying to support refugees, but they aren’t actually accepting any refugees themselves. It would make sense for the US to do this, because we are very far away and it would be very difficult to transport refugees here. It does not make sense for Saudi Arabia to do this, except in order to look like they’re doing something while actually doing as little as possible. (Also, I’ve read conflicting reports as to whether they’ve pledged $10 million to Jordan or $10 billion—which is kind of like saying, “The car was either $1,000 or $1,000,000, I’m not sure.” The most credible estimate I’ve seen is $300 million, $10 million to Jordan. In my favorite unit of wealth, they’ve donated a romney. It’s a whopping… 0.04% of their country’s income in a year.) They should be doing what Turkey is doing, and taking on hundreds of thousands of refugees themselves.

As is fairly common among tyrants (look no further than North Korea), Saudi Arabia’s leaders often present some rather… eccentric beliefs, such as the claim that Daesh is actually secretly a wing of the Israeli military. Maybe this is Freudian projection: Knowing that they are secretly supporting Daesh and its ideology, they decide to accuse whomever they most dislike—i.e., Israel—of doing that very thing. And they certainly do hate Israel; Saudi Arabia’s state-run media frequently compare Israel to Nazis because apparently irony is completely lost on them.

One of the things Daesh does to display its brutality is behead nonbelievers; yet Saudi Arabia beheads far more people, including for thoughtcrimes such as apostasy and political dissent, as well as “crimes” such as sorcery and witchcraft. The human rights violation here is not so much the number of executions as the intentional spectacle of brutality, as well as the “crimes” cited. In the summer of 2014, they beheaded about one person per day—in a country of 27 million people, it wouldn’t be that odd to execute 30 people in a month, if they were in fact murderers. That’s about the size and execution rate of Texas. The world’s real execution leader is China, where over 2,000—and previously as many as 10,000—people per year are executed. China does have a huge population of almost 1.4 billion people—but even so, they execute more people than the rest of the world combined.

I mean, one can certainly argue that the death penalty in general is morally wrong (it is certainly economically inefficient); but I never could quite manage to be outraged by the use of lethal injection on serial killers (which is mainly what we’re talking about in Texas). But Saudi Arabia doesn’t use lethal injection, they use beheading. And they don’t just execute serial killers—they execute atheists and feminists.

Saudi Arabia’s human rights record is one of the worst in the world. (And that’s from the US Department of State, so don’t tell me our government doesn’t know this.) Freedom House gives them the lowest possible rating, and lists several reasons why their government should be considered a global pariah. Even the Heritage Foundation (which overweights economic freedom over civil liberties, in my opinion—would you rather pay high taxes, or be executed for thoughtcrime?) gave Saudi Arabia a moderate freedom rating at best.

So, the question really becomes: Why do we call these people our allies?

Why did President Obama cut short a visit to India—which is, you know, a democracy—to see the new king—as in absolute monarch—of Saudi Arabia? (Though good on Michelle Obama for refusing to wear the hijab. You can see the contempt in the faces of the Saudi dignitaries, but she just grins smugly. You can almost hear, “What are you gonna do about it?”) Why was “cementing ties with Saudi Arabia” even something we wanted to do?

 

The answer of course is painfully obvious, especially to economists: Oil.

Saudi Arabia is by far the world’s largest oil exporter, accounting for a sixth of all crude oil exports.

The United States is by far the world’s largest oil importer, accounting for an eighth of all crude oil imports.

As Vonnegut said, we are rolling drunk on petroleum. We are addicts, and they’re our dealer. And if there’s one thing addicts don’t do, it’s rat out their own dealers.

Fortunately, US oil imports are on the decline, and why? Thanks, Obama. Under policies that really were largely spearheaded by the Obama administration such as expanded fracking and subsidized solar power investment, a combination of increased domestic oil production and reduced domestic oil consumptionhas been reducing the need to continue importing oil from other countries.

Of course, the “expanded fracking” and “increased oil production” part gives me very mixed feelings, given its obvious connection to climate change. But I will say this: If we’re going to be burning all that oil anyway, far better that we extract it ourselves than that we buy it from butchers and tyrants. And indeed US carbon emissions have also been steady or declining under Obama.

The sudden crash in oil prices last year has been damaging to both Saudi Arabia and other major oil exporters such as Russia and Venezuela, which are nowhere near as bad but also hardly wholesome liberal democracies. (It also hurt Norway, who didn’t deserve it; but they’re wisely divesting from fossil fuels, starting with coal.) Now is the perfect time to implement a carbon tax; consumers will hardly feel it—it’ll just feel like prices are going back to normal—but oil exporters will have even more pressure to switch industries, and above all global carbon emissions will decrease.

Ideally we would also combine this with what I call a “human rights tariff”, a tariff applied to the goods a country exports based upon that country’s human rights record. We could keep it very simple: Another percentage point added to the tariff every time you execute someone for political, religious, or ideological reasons. A percentage point off every time you go at least a month without executing anyone for any reason except murder.

Obviously that wouldn’t deal with the fact that women can’t drive, or the fact that hijab is mandatory, or the fact that homosexuality is illegal—but hey, it would at least be something. Right now, every barrel of oil we buy from them is basically saying that we care more about cheap gasoline than we do about human rights.

How we can best help refugees

pnrj core principles, current events, development economics, public policy, Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457376

Though the debate seems to have simmered down a little over the past few weeks, the fact remains that we are in the middle of a global refugee crisis. There are 4 million refugees from Syria alone, part of 10 million refugees worldwide from various conflicts.

The ongoing occupation of the terrorist group / totalitarian state Daesh (also known as Islamic State, ISIS and ISIL, but like John Kerry, I like to use Daesh precisely because they seem to hate it) has displaced almost 14 million people, 3.3 million of them refugees from Syria.

Most of these refugees have fled to Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, and, Iraq, for the obvious reason that these countries are both geographically closest and culturally best equipped to handle them.
There is another reason, however: Some of the other countries in the region, notably Saudi Arabia, have taken no refugees at all. In an upcoming post I intend to excoriate Saudi Arabia for a number of reasons, but this one is perhaps the most urgent. Their response? They simply deny it outright, claiming they’ve taken millions of refugees and somehow nobody noticed.

Turkey and Lebanon are stretched to capacity, however; they simply do not have the resources to take on more refugees. This gives the other nations of the world only two morally legitimate options:

1. We could take more refugees ourselves.

2. We could supply funding and support to Turkey and Lebanon for them to take on more refugees.

Most of the debate has centered around option (1), and in particular around Obama’s plan to take on about 10,000 refugees to the United States, which Ted Cruz calls “lunacy” (to be fair, if it takes one to know one…).

This debate has actually served more to indict the American population for paranoia and xenophobia than anything else. The fact that 17 US states—including some with Democrat governors—have unilaterally declared that they will not accept refugees (despite having absolutely no Constitutional authority to make such a declaration) is truly appalling.

Even if everything that the xenophobic bigots say were true—even if we really were opening ourselves to increased risk of terrorism and damaging our economy and subjecting ourselves to mass unemployment—we would still have a moral duty as human beings to help these people.

And of course almost all of it is false.

Only a tiny fraction of refugees are terrorists, indeed very likely smaller than the fraction of the native population or the fraction of those who arrive on legal visas, meaning that we would actually be diluting our risk of terrorism by accepting more refugees. And as you may recall from my post on 9/11, our risk of terrorism is already so small that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

There is a correlation between terrorism and refugees, but it’s almost entirely driven by the opposite effect: terrorism causes refugee crises.

The net aggregate economic effect of immigration is most likely positive. The effect on employment is more ambiguous; immigration does appear to create a small increase in unemployment in the short run as all those new people try to find jobs, and there is some evidence that it may reduce wages for local low-skill workers. But the employment effect is small temporary, and there is a long-run boost in overall productivity. However, it may not have much effect on overall growth: the positive correlation between immigration and economic growth is primarily due to the fact that higher growth triggers more immigration.

And of course, it’s important to keep in mind that the reason wages are depressed at all is that people come from places where wages are even lower, so they improve their standard of living, but may also reduce the standard of living of some of the workers who were already here. The paradigmatic example is immigrants who leave a wage of $4 per hour in Mexico, arrive in California, and end up reducing wages in California from $10 to $8. While this certainly hurts some people who went from $10 to $8, it’s so narrow-sighted as to border on racism to ignore the fact that it also raised other people from $4 to $8. The overall effect is not simply to redistribute wealth from some to others, but actually to create more wealth. If there are things we can do to prevent low-skill wages from falling, perhaps we should; but systematically excluding people who need work is not the way to do that.

Accepting 10,000 more refugees would have a net positive effect on the American economy—though given our huge population and GDP, probably a negligible one. It has been pointed out that Germany’s relatively open policy advances the interests of Germany as much as it does those of the refugees; but so what? They are doing the right thing, even if it’s not for entirely altruistic reasons. One of the central insights of economics is that the universe is nonzero-sum; helping someone else need not mean sacrificing your own interests, and when it doesn’t, the right thing to do should be a no-brainer. Instead of castigating Germany for doing what needs to be done for partially selfish reasons, we should be castigating everyone else for not even doing what’s in their own self-interest because they are so bigoted and xenophobic they’d rather harm themselves than help someone else. (Also, it does not appear to be in Angela Merkel’s self-interest to take more refugees; she is spending a lot of political capital to make this happen.)

We could follow Germany’s example, and Obama’s plan would move us in that direction.

But the fact remains that we could go through with Obama’s plan, indeed double, triple, quadruple it—and still not make a significant dent in the actual population of refugees who need help. When 1,500,000 people need help and the most powerful nation in the world offers to help 10,000, that isn’t an act of great openness and generosity; it’s almost literally the least we could do. 10,000 is only 0.7% of 1.5 million; even if we simply accepted an amount of refugees proportional to our own population it would be more like 70,000. If we instead accepted an amount of refugees proportional to our GDP we should be taking on closer to 400,000.

This is why in fact I think option (2) may be the better choice.

There actually are real cultural and linguistic barriers to assimilation for Syrian people in the United States, barriers which are much lower in Turkey and Lebanon. Immigrant populations always inevitably assimilate eventually, but there is a period of transition which is painful for both immigrants and locals, often lasting a decade or more. On top of this there is the simple logistical cost of moving all those people that far; crossing the border into Lebanon is difficult enough without having to raft across the Mediterranean, let alone being airlifted or shipped all the way across the Atlantic afterward. The fact that many refugees are willing to bear such a cost serves to emphasize their desperation; but it also suggests that there may be alternatives that would work out better for everyone.

The United States has a large population at 322 million; but Turkey (78 million) has about a quarter of our population and Jordan (8 million) and Lebanon (6 million) are about the size of our largest cities.

Our GDP, on the other hand, is vastly larger. At $18 trillion, we have 12 times the GDP of Turkey ($1.5 T), and there are individual American billionaires with wealth larger than the GDPs of Lebanon ($50 B) and Jordan ($31 B).

This means that while we have an absolute advantage in population, we have a comparative advantage in wealth—and the benefits of trade depend on comparative advantage. It therefore makes sense for us to in a sense “trade” wealth for population; in exchange for taking on fewer refugees, we would offer to pay a larger share of the expenses involved in housing, feeding, and ultimately assimilating those refugees.

Another thing we could offer (and have a comparative as well as absolute advantage in) is technology. These surprisingly-nice portable shelters designed by IKEA are an example of how First World countries can contribute to helping refugees without necessarily accepting them into their own borders (as well as an example of why #Scandinaviaisbetter). We could be sending equipment and technicians to provide electricity, Internet access, or even plumbing to the refugee camps. We could ship them staple foods or even MREs. (On the other hand, I am not impressed by the tech entrepreneurs whose “solutions” apparently involve selling more smartphone apps.)

The idea of actually taking on 400,000 or even 70,000 additional people into the United States is daunting even for those of us who strongly believe in helping the refugees—in the former case we’re adding another Cleveland, and even in the latter we’d be almost doubling Dearborn. But if we estimate the cost of simply providing money to support the refugee camps, the figures come out a lot less demanding.
Charities are currently providing money on the order of millions—which is to say on the order of single dollars per person. GBP 887,000 sounds like a lot of money until you realize it’s less than $0.50 per Syrian refugee.

Suppose we were to grant $5,000 per refugee per year. That’s surely more than enough. The UN is currently asking for $6.5 billion, which is only about $1,500 per refugee.

Yet to supply that much for all 4 million refugees would cost us only $20 billion per year, a mere 0.1% of our GDP. (Or if you like, a mere 3% of our military budget, which is probably smaller than what the increase would be if we stepped up our military response to Daesh.)

I say we put it to a vote among the American people: Are you willing to accept a flat 0.1% increase in income tax in order to help the refugees? (Would you even notice?) This might create an incentive to become a refugee when you’d otherwise have tried to stay in Syria, but is that necessarily a bad thing? Daesh, like any state, depends upon its tax base to function, so encouraging emigration undermines Daesh taxpayer by taxpayer. We could make it temporary and tied to the relief efforts—or, more radically, we could not do that, and use it as a starting point to build an international coalition for a global basic income.

Right now a global $5,000 per person per year would not be feasible (that would be almost half of the world’s GDP); but something like $1,000 would be, and would eliminate world hunger immediately and dramatically reduce global poverty. The US alone could in fact provide a $1,000 global basic income, though it would cost $7.2 trillion, which is over 40% of our $18.1 trillion GDP—not beyond our means, but definitely stretching them to the limit. Yet simply by including Europe ($18.5 T), China ($12.9 T), Japan ($4.2 T), India ($2.2 T), and Brazil ($1.8 T), we’d reduce the burden among the whole $57.7 trillion coalition to 12.5% of GDP. That’s roughly what we already spend on Medicare and Social Security. Not a small amount, to be sure; but this would get us within arm’s reach of permanently ending global poverty.

Think of the goodwill we’d gain around the world; think of how much it would undermine Daesh’s efforts to recruit followers if everyone knew that just across the border is a guaranteed paycheck from that same United States that Daesh keeps calling the enemy. This isn’t necessarily contradictory to a policy of accepting more refugees, but it would be something we could implement immediately, with minimal cost to ourselves.

And I’m sure there’d be people complaining that we were only doing it to make ourselves look good and stabilize the region economically, and it will all ultimately benefit us eventually—which is very likely true. But again, I say: So what? Would you rather we do the right thing and benefit from it, or do the wrong thing just so we dare not help ourselves?