Still, we in the USA literally stabbed Iran in the back under twice-impeached criminal defendant Donald Trump, so it’s pretty rich to talk about invading them. Best to stick to targeted sanctions and humanitarian aid to dissidents and refugees.

Which is why the current skepticism of trade scares me, and why bad actors like Trump, Putin, and Xi need to be fought.

And unfortunately such a breakdown in global trade would likely reward (relatively speaking) those nations that are a) xenophobic and b) already well-off.

Yeah. Regions are interdependent. But still, most of Asia and much of Africa and Native America have been able to sustain great civilizations more or less independent of Western aid and have much more fresh water and agricultural potential than the Arab world does.

African fertility is declining, though, and Russia, Canada, and northern China have mind-boggling amounts of land and resources available. World population as a whole is expected to stabilize this century without catastrophic mass death, which is a good thing unless the growing African (and Latin American and to an extent South Asian) populations are completely untrainable.

Which is why I welcome the birth rate collapse in the West and East Asia. Unless ethnic groups are fundamentally unequal, those populations bloodlessly shrinking means more land, water, resources, and employment opportunities for the rest.

Humanity has two settings:

Massive, likely unsustainable population growth

Disorderly, also likely unsustainable population decline (at best, due to an unplanned baby bust as we’re seeing across East Asia and to an extent Europe, and at worst due to famine or war)

Working age populations in developed western countries are historically low when compared to the amount of elders they must sustain, and the ratios may be even worse in developed Asia. Furthermore, lately a lot of developing countries have been struggling with infrastructure and skill issues. Look at population pyramids. Or articles like https://www.reuters.com/markets/davos-2023-talent-shortage-rules-tight-labour-markets-manpowergroup-2023-01-20/

If you have the same number of mouths to feed but fewer prime-age workers relatively speaking, there are going to be issues unless you can convince the elders to retire overseas or in low-cost areas.

1920s, 2000s, 2020s

Each saw a massive property boom centered in Florida that spiraled into a massive global downturn

In 2008 we learned that huge chunks of the American economy were fraudulent (mortgages). I don’t think that fintech has the potential to be nearly as damaging, but we on Earth also have less access to natural resources, fewer young skilled Westerners in the labor pool, and a lot more debt than we did in ‘08.

We could easily go back to mid-2000s housing bubble levels where it’s impossible to tell how much of the economy is actually legit vs fraudulent.

I just hope we don’t encounter another 2008 situation where there is so much systemic fraud that it becomes impossible to tell how much of the global economy is legit.

This is why I don’t get ethnic nationalism. Native cultures are endangered more by mass media than they are by migration. Maybe if there are fundamental differences between peoples or extreme resource scarcity that requires people to localize they have a point, but the Internet has done more to erode local differences than anything else.

This isn't about "average quality" but about everything from architecture to fashion to branding converging on a pseudo-midcentury modern, upper-middle class American aesthetic, due in great part to mass/social media.

Break up mass media and consumerism.

Hopefully the IPO cleans that up too.

World debt is several times GDP, and that increased fast between 2008 and the COVID stimuli.

Again, MENA problem only. Geographic balancing and recruiting deeper in Asia and Africa (as well as the Americas) would help unless those regions really are a desert of culturally compatible talent.

In Europe, and only because asylum seekers outnumber labour migrants. That’s a geographic balancing problem, not a problem of mass migration per se. And I acknowledge religious extremism as an exceptional circumstance, at least until the Near East gets out of its Thirty Years War phase.

But in a mixed society you wouldn’t get homophobic echo chambers. Native Indians Hindus and Thais and Chinese don’t have religious homophobia. Still there better not be a genetic component to culture. That would be full 1930s.

But in many cases it is one that comes from existing power structures and would likely be disrupted by mass emigration. Brain drain has a way of forcing reforms, as can be seen in most Eastern EU members as well as some of the more developed Asian countries.

And I’m glad you are willing to shoot down the argument of genetic impact on culture. That would be unthinkably bad on a finite planet.

Many of the problems with bad places are due to institutional corruption that’s decades or even centuries old, natural resources (either shortages of them or curses due to fighting over oil and diamonds), or overcrowding. A lot of those problems won’t follow the migrants.

People being able to live where they want should generally be a right with exceptions (criminal record, endangered native language, high levels of religious extremism). Hopefully this works and Germany is able to clean up its bureaucracy and open its housing and supply chains.

I just hope we don't see them go after immigration (beyond essential skills) and even international trade. Increasingly locally-bound populations reduce contact between countries/cultures and civilizations and can spawn tensions and stereotypes.

Mass immigration between continents is something I really hope we can make work. I’ll never accept the possibility that national culture/ethnic makeup matters except to the extent that it reflects political and mass-media influences. The last time Western and Northern Europeans were convinced of their superiority, we saw the rise of literally the worst civilization since the fall of the Aztecs.