Happy Labor Day and National Payroll Week (imagine creating a system of taxation so complex that no company could pay its workers without the assistance of a contractor who in turn must rely on at least 1 million lines of software).
What does it cost to hire decent people these days? A similar-vintage (i.e., old!) friend in San Francisco recently started a job at a VC-backed AI/robotics company. It would have been rude to ask how much he is getting paid, so of course I did. “About $400,000 per year in cash,” he replied, “plus $500,000 or $600,000 in lottery tickets.” Apparently, the tax value of the lottery tickets is much lower than $500k and, therefore, the current taxes on what might turn out to be worthless aren’t severe.
If you’re wondering why your health insurance bills are so high… A mid-career radiologist friend was offered $1.3 million to work at a community hospital in New Jersey. She turned it down because she doesn’t agree with the progressive politics of the state, a disagreement that would be exacerbated by New Jersey’s high taxes (10.75% for state income, ranked #49 for tax environment by the Tax Foundation; the most recent ranking for tax burden, the percentage of peasant income taxed away by the governing elites, has New Jersey taking 13.2% vs. 15.9% in New York and 7-9% in the most efficient states, such as New Hampshire, Texas, Tennessee, and Florida). As a legacy American (white/Christian) she probably wouldn’t enjoy being represented by her replacement Adam Hamawy, an Egyptian immigrant to the U.S. with an “association with a terrorist Muslim cleric” (Politico) and “an opponent of Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system and a supporter of a complete arms embargo and the right of return for Palestinian refugees” (Forward).
How soon before all of America’s smart people post “Gone to the Klondike” signs on their doors and can’t be hired because they’re doing AI startups?
Anyone else want to contribute some data on real-world recruiting and pay right now? I feel that the BLS data aren’t the full picture. Median pay for a software developer was supposedly around $131,000 in 2024, but does that include people who can’t program and who work 2 hours/week while being paid for 40 at a state government agency or contractor? I’m more interested in a survey of what it costs to hire someone who is capable and productive.
We’re informed that immigrants come to the United States to work, not to enjoy our cradle-to-grave welfare state for four generations.
We’re informed by the U.S. Census Bureau that the number of foreign-born residents of the U.S. (a.k.a. “immigrants”) is down by almost 3 million. “Census Bureau Survey Shows Total Foreign-Born Down 2.9 Million” (CIS, yesterday):
since January 2025 … the government’s monthly household survey, officially called the Current Population Survey (CPS), shows an unprecedented 2.9 million decline in the foreign-born population — naturalized citizens, lawful permanent residents, long-term temporary visitors, and illegal immigrants.
Latin American non-citizens who arrived in 1980 or later account for all of the decrease. This population overlaps significantly with illegal immigrants.
Only 44 percent of the decline in the foreign-born are workers; the rest are children, the elderly, and other non-workers. This fact, along with employment gains by the U.S.-born, mitigates the impact on the labor market and may help explain why the survey of businesses does not show a dramatic decline in workers.
The total number of people working in the United States is up (CBS, today):
Here’s a wider picture of steady-then-increased numbers of workers as immigrants departed:
The increase doesn’t seem to have been caused by an increase in the working-age population, which is down slightly over the same time period:
How can this apparent paradox be explained?
One possible explanation is that immigrants displace the native-born in the labor force. When an immigrant with a job leaves, his or her job is sometimes taken over by a native-born American who had been sitting on the couch playing Xbox. If that were true, though, we’d see an increase in the labor force participation rate and/or a decrease in unemployment rate over the same time period, but that hasn’t happened.
Another explanation is that immigrants were working off the books and, therefore, their jobs weren’t counted in most government surveys. If this were true, we’d see a divergence in CPS data, which asks people “did you work for pay?” vs. Current Employment Statistics (CES) data, which asks employers “did you pay someone to work in at least a quasi-legal fashion?” I ran out of brain power and asked ChatGPT to resolve this possibility:
And in the particular January 2025–August 2026 comparison we just calculated, the divergence isn’t enormous once you compare the CPS consistently: CPS total employment is roughly +0.3 million, while CES payroll employment is roughly +0.8 million. So the data could accommodate some loss of informal immigrant employment, but they don’t by themselves demonstrate it.
What’s left as an explanation, given that we can’t abandon the axiom that foreign-born residents of the U.S. are the hardest workers and, certainly, are never on what used to be called “welfare”? We’re living in the Age of Miracles?
Here’s the part of the news story, professionally edited and fact-checked, that interested me:
Women still earn less than men for the same work (81 cents for every dollar made by a man, according to the 2024 census).
Much of the NYT is devoted to decrying corporate greed, workers who are “underpaid”, and capitalism’s tendency to exploit workers. In this article, however, we are told about corporate altruism and a class of workers who are overpaid by about 25 percent (every man who has a job is paid, on average, 25 percent more than a woman who would do “the same work”).
It’s also a little interesting that someone who died childless is the “personification” of a movement for a class of people (“women”) previously associated with having children (“becoming pregnant people” in modern parlance).
Some other media coverage… AP uses the term “potent” to describe someone who died childless:
BREAKING: Gloria Steinem, the potent voice of the U.S. women’s movement and a co-founder of Ms. Magazine, dies at 92. https://t.co/ok97z6S8K0
Nancy Pelosi talks about a “trailblazer” (followed by no children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren of her own) and future generations in the context of someone who had no genetic role in any future generation:
Gloria Steinem was a fearless trailblazer who transformed the fight for equality in America and inspired generations of women to know their power.
Her voice, courage and relentless advocacy helped break down barriers and open doors once firmly closed to women.
If white feminists had limited or no fertility we can ask the question of who are the future generations to whom white feminists passed down their intellectual legacy? Observant Muslims in hijabs (Rahmanullah Lakanwal‘s wife and five children, for example)? Latinx who follow Catholicism? Will these future generations want to continue down the “trail” purportedly “blazed” by Gloria Steinem and fellow white gals?
“White feminism is a term which is used to describe expressions of feminism which are perceived as focusing on white women while failing to address the existence of distinct forms of oppression faced by ethnic minority women and women lacking other privileges.” (Wikipedia)
“Feminists and the Clinton Question” (Gloria Steinem in the NYT, 1998), pointing out that a woman might have accused Bill Clinton of sexual harassment in order to make money: “If any of the other women had tried to sell their stories to a celebrity tell-all book publisher, as Ms. Willey did, you might be even more skeptical about their motives. But with her, you think, ”Well, she needs the money.””
American and European peasants are often told by their respective elites that immigration is necessary because a shrinking and/or aging population inevitably leads to an economic crisis.
Let’s look at Taiwan. The working-age population peaked in 2015. In real terms (adjusted for inflation), the economy has grown by more than 50 percent since then. What about right now? It’s growing at a rate of over 10 percent per year.
What does Google AI say about South Korea in two separate queries?
South Korea is experiencing an unprecedented demographic crisis, driven by having the world’s lowest fertility rate.
South Korea’s real GDP grew by an impressive 1.8% in the first quarter of 2026, representing a 3.8% year-over-year increase.
Japan’s labor force has been shrinking since the mid-1990s:
During what we’re told is a demographic catastrophe, Japan’s real GDP has been growing steadily:
(Of course, this means that the real GDP per worker is growing quite robustly.)
How does the religious belief that population shrinkage is an economic catastrophe remain unchallenged given the above examples?
“The Post‑COVID Decline in the Labor Share” (by a group of Federal Reserve Bank economists) shows that, as the percentage of immigrants in the U.S. population increased (we opened our borders starting in 1965, but the effects were gradual at first), the percentage of income captured by labor decreased:
Even if American IQ doesn’t continue to fall, if Americans continue to become relatively less capable than machines every year shouldn’t we expect the labor share to continue to fall? A robot or NVIDIA server is a capital investment, after all, and the fruits of the work by the robot/server would, absent a heroic transferist government, ordinarily end up primarily in the hands of the investors who paid for it.
Llosely related…
They said we couldn't build AI because intelligence is too complex to understand, so we just built AI that we don't understand either.
Here’s a cautionary for folks like me with portfolios that are 100% invested in SpaceX:
One interesting story sheds light on the limitations of government economic forecasts. A booming economy and stock market swelled federal tax collections so much that there were unheard-of federal budget surpluses during the final years of the Clinton Administration. The non-partisan Office of Management and Budget, in the first half of 2001, predicted that federal budget surpluses would grow year after year. Everyone was trying to figure out what the Feds would do once they’d paid off 100 percent of U.S. long-term debt. Would there be massive tax cuts? Would the U.S. government start buying hard assets in other countries, the way that sovereign wealth funds from China and the Arab countries do now? Everyone in the government, including Greenspan, was shocked when the surpluses evaporated almost overnight. The forecasters hadn’t figured out that a sagging stock market would mean an end to collecting capital gains tax.
It looks as though Greenspan was prescient regarding the issue that has propelled socialists and “super-progressives” into political power here in the U.S. recently.
Greenspan sprinkles the book with discussions about income inequality. Greenspan says that as an economy becomes more productive, the returns to having good skills and being smart will increase (Gregory Clark has some statistics in Farewell to Alms showing the opposite; the returns to skilled labor in England fell and unskilled laborers were the biggest beneficiaries of economic growth). He thinks that the minimum skill level necessary to be productive in the U.S. is now far above what the graduates of our pathetic public school systems are capable of. He thinks it would be politically infeasible to turn our schools from unionized employee paradises into centers of educational excellence. With only dumb young Americans as a labor source, the U.S. economy will stagnate. His solution to continued economic growth is therefore a massive expansion of immigration of smart, well-educated, highly skilled workers from other countries. (Note that Chinese schools on average don’t have to be better than U.S. skills; we just need to attract immigrants from among the millions of Chinese who are better educated than the U.S. average.) Greenspan opposes our current immigration system, which does not give much weight to an immigrant’s potential as a worker.
It seems that Alan Greenspan didn’t realize that Somali immigrants had built Minneapolis and Boston, as their respective mayors now inform us. We can also look at this part of the book as an example of how little effect on policy even the most powerful Washington insiders can be. Greenspun was Chairman of the Fed. He had access to every member of Congress and four presidents. He presumably did tell these lawmakers “Hey, you should really put in IQ, education, working age, health, and income requirements on every immigrant and eliminate the U.S. asylum system so that you don’t just import needy humans into a massive welfare state.” What was the effect? The politicians doubled down and and then tripled down on low-skill immigration, oftentimes of people too old to work and guaranteed to need taxpayer-funded everything (e.g., automatic green cards for 75-year-old parents of new U.S. citizens, who might themselves be aged 50 or 60).
Perhaps we can give Greenspan credit for predicting our Age of AI and Robots (the perfect time to be importing low-skill humans!)?
Various portions of the book are sprinkled with Greenspan’s enthusiasm about technology and what it can do for productivity growth. He is basically optimistic about the future because humans will figure out how to do more with less. Like any good economist, he hedges his predictions of a prosperous 2030 here in the U.S. The main risks that he sees are Islamic terrorism and a resurgence of protectionism that would undo the benefits of globalization (you won’t find Greenspan showing up to protest a WTO meeting!). The main challenge that he sees is funding Medicare and Social Security, which are currently pay-as-we-go (i.e., Ponzi schemes). Despite increased immigration, taxes will rise to crushing levels and benefits will fall. The Europeans will be in even worse shape because they don’t have as much immigration. Greenspan does not address the issue of why a group of citizens would wish to pack their country with double the number of people in order to pay for their retirements. He puts no value on living in an uncrowded place with reasonable real estate prices and traffic.
(I don’t give him credit for predicting the impending insolvency of Social Security, which was obvious from them paying out benefits to the very first recipient that were 1000X what she’d paid in via taxes. Maybe I can give myself credit for predicting that immigration between 2009 and now would doom Americans to UNreasonable “real state prices and traffic”?)
Speaking of real estate prices, New York Times today (example of “When the market gives you an answer that you don’t like, declare market failure”):
Excerpts:
“We’re in a full-blown housing crisis,” Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, said in an interview. “Home prices are sky high, rent is through the roof. The median age of a first-time home buyer is at an all-time high. So the pressure to move was almost irresistible. This bill got through because it is big.”
Chief among the sticking points was a provision to check institutional investors, which had been crafted in negotiations among White House officials, Senator Tim Scott, the South Carolina Republican who leads the Banking Committee, and Ms. Warren.
The measure prohibits corporate entities from owning more than 350 existing single-family homes, although it does not require them to sell homes purchased before the measure became law. A stricter proposal that would have required investors to sell single-family homes built explicitly as rentals after seven years was dropped; it had prompted a backlash by home builders and affordable housing advocates, who feared it would discourage new home construction.
I can’t figure out how this is Constitutional. Most of what the federal government does is allowed, despite contradicting the Framers’ intent, because of the Commerce Clause:
[The Congress shall have Power] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;
Suppose that a corporate entity in the Mamdani Caliphate buys 351 houses in Buffalo, NY in order to rent them out via Section 8 to noble asylum-seekers from the world’s various dysfunctional societies. How is that an example of interstate commerce “among the several states”? Let’s assume that the corporation is a New York corporation based in New York and that 100% of its employees are New York State residents. The houses are all in New York State. It would be physically impossible for one of these houses to be sold for use in, e.g., the Islamic Republic of Michigan. Regardless of the merits of the law, how can the federal government do this? Why doesn’t it have to be a state-by-state decision?
White-collar men in the 1950s often characterized their world as a “rat race”. If college-educated, they competed with only a small subset of Americans for high-paid desk jobs. Men in the 50s did not compete with immigrants because substantial importation of humans into the U.S. stopped in 1924, not to be restarted until President Johnson signed the Hart-Celler Act in 1965 (see below). A house in a safe suburb with good schools and A/C could be purchased, at the end of the 1950s, for about one quarter the cost today (in real dollars; see $112/month to live in a brand-new house in Bowie, Maryland). Relative to income, a house cost about 1.7X annual salary vs. over 5X today (ChatGPT table below). Partly due to this low cost for housing in a safe suburban neighborhood with decent schools ($1+ million today?), a man’s income was generally sufficient to support a wife and 2-3 children as well as himself. Sex outside of marriage was discouraged both legally and socially and, therefore, the man would usually be married before age 25. No-fault divorce (“unilateral” in research parlance) did not exist and, therefore, if the man wasn’t behaving outrageously (beating the wife, drinking heavily, failing to work, having affairs), the wife couldn’t profit via a divorce lawsuit (a divorce might be arranged by mutual agreement, of course). In addition to marital security, the 1950s man often enjoyed a lot of job security from (1) the lack of competition in the labor market, and (2) the tendency of large companies to provide lifetime jobs, which today is limited to government work.
What’s the correct term for what similar men face today? They inhabit a world in which you can’t spit in the street without hitting a college graduate. Men must compete with women for jobs and, despite women being more likely to earn college degrees, be passed over for hiring or promotion when a company decides that “diversity” is its strength. If a female or favored minority human competitor doesn’t take the white-collar man’s job, Claude is ready to replace him. The companies that once offered native-born Americans jobs for life are now home to platoons of H-1B “non-immigrant” immigrants.
A house in a neighborhood with low crime, an orderly familiar culture, and good schools, is about 10X the median college graduate’s income (5X for houses overall, but the typical suburb is no longer a white picket fence idyll). A college education for the kids, so that they can get into the “rat race” that the parents ran, is now 5X more expensive state colleges and 9X more expensive at elite Queers for Palestine-type schools . (ChatGPT on the history of federal government programs to make college more affordable: “GI Bill for veterans in 1944, first general federal student loans in 1958, major modern federal aid framework in 1965, and Pell-style direct grants in 1972/1973”)
Where in the 1950s he likely partnered with a virgin aged 20 (ChatGPT says 10-25% of 1950s brides might have had sex with someone other than their fiancé/husband), today he’s with a 30-year-old veteran of the sexual revolution. If he is persuaded to marry her, she can sue him for divorce a day later for any reason or for no reason. For men who strayed in the 1950s and got sued for a “fault divorce”, the resulting financial drain was primarily alimony and it lasted only a few years because the plaintiff would remarry and that shut down the alimony revenue stream. The risk of losing his role as a father was controllable due to the requirement that a plaintiff find a “fault” ground, such as infidelity. If a man gets sued today because the wife found someone she likes better, the man can lose his “father” role, and access to the young people who used to be his children, due to factors entirely beyond his control. The man’s biggest financial exposure in a divorce lawsuit is typically “child support” (paid to an adult female to spend on whatever she wants, not to a “child”), which can last for 23 years (Massachusetts) or 21 years (New York) even if the plaintiff has married her lover and that lover earns far more than the defendant and even if the lover is the biological father of the child (nytimes: “I pay child support to a biologically intact family, a father and mother, married, who live with their own child.”). (In the cases where alimony is the primary profit from a divorce lawsuit, the defendant might be paying for 50 years because there is no longer any social pressure for the plaintiff to remarry. She can have sex with 100 men and write a magazine article about the “single MILF” lifestyle and this has no impact on her cash entitlement.)
This is not to say that American in the 1950s was better overall, of course. We had been starved of enrichment via immigrants since 1924 and, therefore, weren’t as strong under the “diversity is our strength” axiom. We didn’t have Internet or LLMs for personal use. A 1950s car, though beautiful in our museums today, came out of the factory as a junk heap compared to a 3-year-old Toyota today. We had three TV channels to watch on a 21″ CRT. But in terms of career security and personal life security, the 2020s are inferior to the 1950s. So, returning to the title question… if the 1950s were a “rat race” for white-collar men, how would we characterize the situation today?
Loosely related…
I really want to find a wife but man where do I even look?
All the girls I work with are whores.
All the girls from my university are whores.
All the girls I meet on tinder are whores.
Where do I even look?
Being born in Gen Z is the worst experience ever.
I’d gladly give…
— The Right Wing Patriot (@DavidRobinr0) June 22, 2026
A post on X from an offensively titled username so I’ll just copy the text:
White Americans and Europeans are the ONLY people worldwide that are EXPECTED to compete with the ENTIRE world for jobs.
50+ years ago White men with STEM degrees got good jobs. Things like engineering or applied mathematics guaranteed a good career.
Now we are required to compete against not just our own people, but the brown and black hordes worldwide that are willing to work for pennies.
It was an ECONOMIC CRIME committed against our people.
(I post this not for the truth or falsehood of what the author writes, but for the expression of a feeling of insecurity and, therefore, pressure even worse than the rat race of 50 years ago.)
Microfinance, loans issued in communities not served by traditional banks, would help poor people in developing countries start businesses and work their way toward prosperity. That was the goal of Muhammad Yunus, a U.S.-trained economist, who pioneered the practice in Bangladesh during the 1970s.
“In a poverty-free world, the only place you would be able to see poverty is in the poverty museums,” Yunus told his audience in Oslo in 2006 when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for his work.
Led by the adage of “doing good while doing well,” microfinance lenders have since advanced hundreds of billions of dollars to poor people in countries from Albania to Zimbabwe. Prominent voices including Hillary Clinton and Natalie Portman told inspiring tales of women entrepreneurs lifting the fortunes of their communities. Along with easing poverty, microfinance aimed to expand access to education and end gender inequality.
That was the dream, including for yours truly (I kicked in some money circa 2000 to a web-based microfinance portal). What has been the reality?
Academic studies, including randomized controlled trials, have found that microfinance doesn’t improve the economic conditions of most borrowers. Economists found excessive microfinance lending has set off repayment crises for borrowers in half a dozen countries, including Bosnia, India and Cambodia.
High interest rates, which can top 100% in some Latin American countries, and pressure tactics by loan officers have been tied to suicides, homelessness and children pulled from school to work. Rather than using the loans to invest in small businesses, many borrowers spend the money on medical expenses and other necessities.
Does failure to achieve stated goals have an effect on nonprofit organizations? No.
The hardening evidence of microfinance’s failure to alleviate poverty should have led to a rethinking of its use as a development tool, said Rafe Meager, an associate professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia, who has studied the academic research on microfinance.
“There still hasn’t been this kind of reckoning in a serious way,” Meager said.
The average microfinance borrower in Cambodia owes more than $3,900, nearly three times the median annual per capita income. Average debt per borrower is more than $6,000 when including small loans from microfinance lenders that are now commercial banks also providing other financial services.
Microfinance’s breakneck expansion in Cambodia in the early 2010s coincided with a government push to formalize land ownership. Contrary to Yunus’s vision that debts shouldn’t be collateralized, most of Cambodian microfinance loans greater than $3,000 are secured by a borrower’s land, which is the main hard asset for most poor families.
What happens when we throw AI into this mixture? Some people were already poor because their skill levels were too low to compete in a globalized economy. Do they get a boost in value for a while, at least, because the Optimus-style robots won’t be ready until well after the AI brains are perfected? Or do already-poor people in poor countries become further devalued by AI because they’re being partly paid for the use of their brains? Or, on the third hand, do they get a boost in income because they’ll use AI to become much more productive?
Separately, now that Elon is well on his way to a second $trillion, why isn’t he loaning Bosnians, Indians, and Cambodians however much money they want?
For the past couple of months I’ve been wondering here why U.S. consumers are paying more for gasoline than in 2025 (albeit still less than in 2022) if the Trump administration could simply limit exports of oil and gas to 2025 levels with a simple “it’s a war” explanation. This question is answered, to some extent, in “The World Can’t Get Enough U.S. Energy, Keeping Prices High for Americans” (WSJ, yesterday):
The Trump administration is trying to tamp down rising prices, including by waiving restrictions on trade between U.S. ports and releasing oil from strategic stockpiles. Trump said last week he supports suspending the federal gasoline tax. Gasoline prices nationally averaged $4.51 a gallon on Sunday and could keep climbing into Memorial Day weekend, the starting gun to the busy summer driving season.
The administration has said it wouldn’t impose a ban on energy exports. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on CNBC last week that the U.S.’s economic future depends on selling its energy abroad and that this was a top item on the Trump agenda.
“We can’t be a major energy exporter to the world if we decide sometimes to stop exporting our energy,” he said.
In other words, the Trump administration is allowing Democrats, previously climate change alarmists who wanted fossil fuel prices to be higher, to harp on lower-than-2022-but-higher-than-2025 gasoline prices, possibly resulting in dramatic losses of Congressional seats in November 2026, in order to preserve the U.S.’s long-term market position.
What’s the scale?
The ports of New York, Philadelphia and Albany, N.Y., exported 174,000 barrels a day of gasoline, diesel and other petroleum products last month, according to Kpler. That is 10 times the volumes they shipped over the same period last year. Halfway through May, the pace of exports is even higher, well over 200,000 barrels a day—the highest monthly pace on Kpler’s records since 2017.
These barrels so far this month are predominantly heading to Europe, including France, Belgium, the Netherlands and the U.K., Kpler’s Smith said. Analysts say that is a sign that a shortage of refined products has spread from Asia to Europe.
The U.S. exported 2.7 million barrels of U.S. diesel, gasoline and other refined products to Australia in March, according to Kpler. Before the war broke out, exports there had been sporadic. An additional 1.8 million barrels headed to Australia in April.
I wonder if the Trump administration’s policy makes sense even for those who have a long-term perspective. If Democrats can take control of Congress maybe they will obstruct the U.S. fossil fuel industry in some other ways, e.g., with a long-dreamt-of carbon tax.
Separately, why isn’t there a lot more production in response to the higher price? The current price of oil is about 15% lower than it was in 2022 (chart below), but still much higher than it was in 2025:
Maybe it is because the market is predicting a sag down to $89/barrel by October 2026 and a further sag to $75/barrel by October 2027?
The lower chart is curious. Investors have changed their opinion of the likely cost of oil in October 2027, up from about $60 to $75. Are they expecting that we’ll still be at war? That inflation will go back to the raging 2022 levels?
Florida’s migration patterns are changing dramatically. Residents in their prime working years are heading to other states, often citing affordability concerns. At the same time, the stream of people arriving from other states is shrinking.
Meanwhile, an influx of wealthy people from other states—turbocharged during the pandemic—has helped drive up home prices. Inflation in parts of Florida outpaced the national average over the past decade and home-insurance rates soared.
These side-by-side trends could spell trouble for a state whose economy relies on continued population growth and real-estate development.
“The affordability picture has changed in Florida almost more than anywhere else in the country,” said Eric Finnigan, vice president of demographics research at John Burns Research & Consulting.
First, note the assumption that underlies almost all American politics: infinite growth should be the goal. (Never mind that growth without limit in an organism, and without regard to available resources, is known as “cancer”.)
Second, the WSJ implicitly assumes that a place that is affordable is better than a place that is unaffordable for median-income residents.
Third, the WSJ lumps all of “Florida” together. Florida is about the same size as all of New England. The WSJ wouldn’t lump together Boston and western Maskachusetts, much less Bridgeport, Connecticut and Houlton, Maine. (It’s still possible to get a brand-new single-family house in central Florida for less than $300,000, though the same can’t be said for coastal Florida; the house will be about 1500 square feet, which is the size of the house I grew up in (family of five) and with the added advantage that Floridians don’t need as much indoor space.) The most convenient housing for a SpaceX or Blue Origin engineer is in Titusville, where a decent (not new) house can be purchased for $300,000 (relocation guide).
Fourth, the WSJ assumes that the market is full of stupid people who bid up the prices of houses in places that aren’t desirable. Single-family home prices are $10.15 million in Palm Beach and $212,000 in Dearborn Heights, Michigan, where Ayman Ghazali mostly peacefully lived. From this we can infer that living among Iraqi and Lebanese immigrants in Dearborn Heights is better than living among Manhattan immigrants in Palm Beach (perhaps not an unreasonable inference!).
Maybe in a country with a shared language and culture it would make sense to try to find an inexpensive place to live. However, in a country that is jammed with low-skill migrants from all of the world’s most violent and dysfunctional societies (our asylum-based immigration system ensures that someone from Switzerland or Japan goes to the back of the line), isn’t it actually an advantage from a typical native-born perspective that a place is out of reach for the median present-day American? Google AI: “Newport Beach has lower racial diversity and worse racial disparity across various indicators compared to the average for California cities.” Given the stratospheric real estate prices, it seems that a lot of people are willing to pay for low racial diversity and “worse racial disparity”. As of 2021, the town was supposedly 85 percent white (source):
The Dallas metro area is more affordable than most parts of the US with jobs, which has enabled a mostly-immigrant community of 130,000 Muslims to set up more than 60 mosques and lay out EPIC City, “a master-planned Islamic community-centered residential development project”. Non-Muslim Americans who don’t want to hear the muezzin calling five times per day might prefer to spend more on a house that is in an area that is “unaffordable” to immigrants from Syria, Egypt, Afghanistan, and Somalia.
We could take this to an extreme. Aspen, Colorado is absurdly unaffordable for the median worker. My friend doesn’t like Aspen (see An actual skier goes to Aspen to ski), but apparently a lot of people do like it. Would we say that Dearborn Heights, Michigan is a better place to live than Aspen? That Aspen is bad because the population isn’t growing 3% per year like Gaza’s or Somalia’s? (Maybe Gaza and the West Bank are the ultimate examples of affordability. US and EU taxpayers pay for all of the basics, e.g., shelter, food, health care, education, etc. Nobody needs to work. Hamas-ruled Gaza is a model society by Ivy League standards, but wouldn’t the typical American rather be in St. Barts, Aspen, or Nantucket (all of which rank near the bottom for affordability on a median income)?) We could also consider a massive public housing project in Chicago or New York City. They’re “affordable” by definition since no tenant is charged more than 30% of his/her/zir/their income (often 30% of $0 since the tenants aren’t stupid!). Would a typical American prefer to live in the 6000-person Queensbridge Houses (“well known for its contributions to hip hop and rap music”; “a problem with drug dealers and drug users”) or in Atherton, California (population 7,000; home to Larry Ellison before he spent $450 million to escape to Florida)?
In short, given the continued flood of low-skill migrants (70 million since 1976) maybe “affordability” shouldn’t be the goal for any city or state that seeks to maintain a pleasant environment.
