Turkey

What is the point of democracy?

pnrj cognitive science, core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Apr 9, JDN 2457853

[This topic was chosen by Patreon vote.]

“Democracy” is the sort of word that often becomes just an Applause Light (indeed it was the original example Less Wrong used). Like “freedom” and “liberty” (and for much the same reasons), it’s a good thing, that much we know; but it’s often unclear what is even meant by the word, much less why it should be so important to us.

From another angle, it is strangely common for economists and political scientists to argue that democracy is not all that important; they at least tend to use a precise formal definition of “democracy”, but are oddly quick to dismiss it as pointless or even harmful when it doesn’t line up precisely with their models of an efficient economy or society. I think the best example of this is the so-called “Downs paradox”, where political scientists were so steeped in the tradition of defining all rationality as psychopathic self-interest that they couldn’t even explain why it would occur to anyone to vote. (And indeed, rumor has it that most economists don’t bother to vote, much less campaign politically—which perhaps begins to explain why our economic policy is so terrible.)

Yet especially for Americans in the Trump era, I think it is vital to understand what “democracy” is supposed to mean, and why it is so important.

So, first of all, what is democracy? It is nothing more or less than government by popular vote.

This comes in degrees, of course: The purest direct democracy would have the entire population vote on even the most mundane policies and decisions. You could actually manage something like a monastery or a social club in such a fashion, but this is clearly unworkable on any large scale. Even once you get to hundreds of people, much less thousands or millions, it becomes unviable. The closest example I’ve seen is Switzerland, where there are always numerous popular referenda on ballots that are voted on by entire regions or the entire country—and even then, Switzerland does have representatives that make many of the day-to-day decisions.

So in practice all large-scale democratic systems are some degree of representative democracy, or republic, where some especially decisions may be made by popular vote, but most policies are made by elected representatives, staff appointed by those representatives, or even career civil servants who are appointed in a nominally apolitical process not so different from private-sector hiring. In the most extreme cases such civil servants can become so powerful that you get a deep state, where career bureaucrats exercise more power than elected officials—at that point I think you have actually lost the right to really call yourself a “democracy” and have become something more like a technocracy.
Yet of course a country can get even more undemocratic than that, and many are, governed by an aristocracy or oligarchy that vests power in a small number of wealthy and powerful individuals, or monarchy or autocracy that gives near-absolute power to a single individual.

Thus, there is a continuum of most to least democratic, with popular vote at one end, followed by elected representatives, followed by appointed civil servants, followed by a handful of oligarchs, and ultimately the most undemocratic system is an autocracy controlled by a single individual.

I also think it’s worth mentioning that constitutional monarchies with strong parliamentary systems, like the United Kingdom and Norway, are also “democracies” in the sense I intend. Yes, technically they have these hereditary monarchs—but in practice, the vast majority of the state’s power is vested in the votes of its people. Indeed, if we separate out parliamentary constitutional monarchy from presidential majoritarian democracy and compare them, the former might actually turn out to be better. Certainly, some of the world’s most prosperous nations are governed that way.

As I’ve already acknowledge, the very far extreme of pure direct democracy is unfeasible. But why would we want to get closer to that end? Why be like Switzerland or Denmark rather than like Turkey or Russia—or for that matter why be like California rather than like Mississippi?
Well, if you know anything about the overall welfare of these states, it almost seems obvious—Switzerland and Denmark are richer, happier, safer, healthier, more peaceful, and overall better in almost every way than Turkey and Russia. The gap between California and Mississippi is not as large, but it is larger than most people realize. Median household income in California is $64,500; in Mississippi it is only $40,593. Both are still well within the normal range of a highly-developed country, but that effectively makes California richer than Luxembourg but Mississippi poorer than South Korea. But perhaps the really stark comparison to make is life expectancy: Life expectancy at birth in California is almost 81 years, while in Mississippi it’s only 75.

Of course, there are a lot of other differences between states besides how much of their governance is done by popular referendum. Simply making Mississippi decide more things by popular vote would not turn it into California—much less would making Turkey more democratic turn it into Switzerland. So we shouldn’t attribute these comparisons entirely to differences in democracy. Indeed, a pair of two-way comparisons is only in the barest sense a statistical argument; we should be looking at dozens if not hundreds of comparisons if we really want to see the effects of democracy. And we should of course be trying to control for other factors, adjust for country fixed-effects, and preferably use natural experiments or instrumental variables to tease out causality.

Yet such studies have in fact been done. Stronger degrees of democracy appear to improve long-run economic growth, as well as reduce corruption, increase free trade, protect peace, and even improve air quality.

Subtler analyses have compared majoritarian versus proportional systems (where proportional seems, to me, at least, more democratic), as well as different republican systems with stronger or weaker checks and balances (stronger is clearly better, though whether that is “more democratic” is at least debatable). The effects of democracy on income distribution are more complicated, probably because there have been some highly undemocratic socialist regimes.

So, the common belief that democracy is good seems to be pretty well supported by the data. But why is democracy good? Is it just a practical matter of happening to get better overall results? Could it one day be overturned by some superior system such as technocracy or a benevolent autocratic AI?

Well, I don’t want to rule out the possibility of improving upon existing systems of government. Clearly new systems of government have in fact emerged over the course of history—Greek “democracy” and Roman “republic” were both really aristocracy, and anything close to universal suffrage didn’t really emerge on a large scale until the 20th century. So the 21st (or 22nd) century could well devise a superior form of government we haven’t yet imagined.
However, I do think there is good reason to believe that any new system of government that actually manages to improve upon democracy will still resemble democracy, because there are three key features democracy has that other systems of government simply can’t match. It is these three features that make democracy so important and so worth fighting for.

1. Everyone’s interests are equally represented.

Perhaps no real system actually manages to represent everyone’s interests equally, but the more democratic a system is, the better it will conform to this ideal. A well-designed voting system can aggregate the interests of an entire population and choose the course of action that creates the greatest overall benefit.

Markets can also be a good system for allocating resources, but while markets represent everyone’s interests, they do so highly unequally. Rich people are quite literally weighted more heavily in the sum.

Most systems of government do even worse, by completely silencing the voices of the majority of the population. The notion of a “benevolent autocracy” is really a conceit; what makes you think you could possibly keep the autocrat benevolent?

This is also why any form of disenfranchisement is dangerous and a direct attack upon democracy. Even if people are voting irrationally, against their own interests and yours, by silencing their voice you are undermining the most fundamental tenet of democracy itself. All voices must be heard, no exceptions. That is democracy’s fundamental strength.

2. The system is self-correcting.

This may more accurately describe a constitutional republican system with strong checks and balances, but that is what most well-functioning democracies have and it is what I recommend. If you conceive of “more democracy” as meaning that people can vote their way into fascism by electing a sufficiently charismatic totalitarian, then I do not want us to have “more democracy”. But just as contracts and regulations that protect you can make you in real terms more free because you can now safely do things you otherwise couldn’t risk, I consider strong checks and balances that maintain the stability of a republic against charismatic fascists to be in a deeper sense more democratic. This is ultimately semantic; I think I’ve made it clear enough that I want strong checks and balances.

With such checks and balances in place, democracies may move slower than autocracies; they may spend more time in deliberation or even bitter, polarized conflict. But this also means that their policies do not lurch from one emperor’s whim to another, and they are stable against being overtaken by corruption or fascism. Their policies are stable and predictable; their institutions are strong and resilient.

No other system of government yet devised by humans has this kind of stability, which may be why democracies are gradually taking over the world. Charismatic fascism fails when the charismatic leader dies; hereditary monarchy collapses when the great-grandson of the great king is incompetent; even oligarchy and aristocracy, which have at least some staying power, ultimately fall apart when the downtrodden peasants ultimately revolt. But democracy abides, for where monarchy and aristocracy are made of families and autocracy and fascism are made of a single man, democracy is made of principles and institutions. Democracy is evolutionarily stable, and thus in Darwinian terms we can predict it will eventually prevail.

3. The coercion that government requires is justified.

All government is inherently coercive. Libertarians are not wrong about this. Taxation is coercive. Regulation is coercive. Law is coercive. (The ones who go on to say that all government is “death threats” or “slavery” are bonkers, mind you. But it is in fact coercive.)

The coercion of government is particularly terrible if that coercion is coming from a system like an autocracy, where the will of the people is minimally if at all represented in the decisions of policymakers. Then that is a coercion imposed from outside, a coercion in the fullest sense, one person who imposes their will upon another.

But when government coercion comes from a democracy, it takes on a fundamentally different meaning. Then it is not they who coerce us—it is we who coerce ourselves. Now, why in the world would you coerce yourself? It seems ridiculous, doesn’t it?

Not if you know any game theory. There are in fall all sorts of reasons why one might want to coerce oneself, and two in particular become particularly important for the justification of democratic government.

The first and most important is collective action: There are many situations in which people all working together to accomplish a goal can be beneficial to everyone, but nonetheless any individual person who found a way to shirk their duty and not contribute could benefit even more. Anyone who has done a group project in school with a couple of lazy students in it will know this experience: You end up doing all the work, but they still get a good grade at the end. If everyone had taken the rational, self-interested action of slacking off, everyone in the group would have failed the project.

Now imagine that the group project we’re trying to achieve is, say, defending against an attack by Imperial Japan. We can’t exactly afford to risk that project falling through. So maybe we should actually force people to support it—in the form of taxes, or even perhaps a draft (as ultimately we did in WW2). Then it is no longer rational to try to shirk your duty, so everyone does their duty, the project gets done, and we’re all better off. How do we decide which projects are important enough to justify such coercion? We vote, of course. This is the most fundamental justification of democratic government.

The second that is relevant for government is commitment. There are many circumstances in which we want to accomplish something in the future, and from a long-run perspective it makes sense to achieve that goal—but then when the time comes to take action, we are tempted to procrastinate or change our minds. How can we resolve such a dilemma? Well, one way is to tie our own hands—to coerce ourselves into carrying out the necessary task we are tempted to avoid or delay.

This applies to many types of civil and criminal law, particularly regarding property ownership. Murder is a crime that most people would not commit even if it were completely legal. But shoplifting? I think if most people knew there would be no penalty for petty theft and retail fraud they would be tempted into doing it at least on occasion. I doubt it would be frequent enough to collapse our entire economic system, but it would introduce a lot of inefficiency, and make almost everything more expensive. By having laws in place that punish us for such behavior, we have a way of defusing such temptations, at least for most people most of the time. This is not as important for the basic functioning of government as is collective action, but I think it is still important enough to be worthy of mention.

Of course, there will always be someone who disagrees with any given law, regardless of how sensible and well-founded that law may be. And while in some sense “we all” agreed to pay these taxes, when the IRS actually demands that specific dollar amount from you, it may well be an amount that you would not have chosen if you’d been able to set our entire tax system yourself. But this is a problem of aggregation that I think may be completely intractable; there’s no way to govern by consensus, because human beings just can’t achieve consensus on the scale of millions of people. Governing by popular vote and representation is the best alternative we’ve been able to come up with. If and when someone devises a system of government that solves that problem and represents the public will even better than voting, then we will have a superior alternative to democracy.

Until then, it is as Churchill said: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”

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?