Tuesday, April 30, 2019

Wikipedia: US Population


Source: Immigration to the United States 17 April 2019
Note: 10-year intervals except 2010-2015
It reached a low in 1970, and has been increasing since 1980. Is this a coincidence, or is it part of neolithic policy? Uh, neoliberal, I mean.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

nothing neolithic about it. it's when capitalism starts to mature (as all systems do) and service jobs were needed. politics and results needn't always be either red or blue.
the binary game is what they want us to play.
https://www.npr.org/news/graphics/2013/12/serv_h.gif

The Arthurian said...

"the binary game is what they want us to play."

Okay, yeah. But they also want us to think that the way the economy turned out is just a natural outcome, like "maturing". But I think it's an outcome that resulted largely from bad policy.

The Arthurian said...

From Return of the oppressed
at Aeon, two paragraphs that fit what the "Percent Foreign-Born" graph shows:

"From 1800 to the 1920s, inequality increased more than a hundredfold. Then came the reversal: from the 1920s to 1980, it shrank back to levels not seen since the mid-19th century. Over that time, the top fortunes hardly grew (from one to two billion dollars; a decline in real terms). Yet the wealth of a typical family increased by a multiple of 40. From 1980 to the present, the wealth gap has been on another steep, if erratic, rise. Commentators have called the period from 1920s to 1970s the ‘great compression’. The past 30 years are known as the ‘great divergence’."

"First, we need to think about jobs. Unless other forces intervene, an overabundance of labour will tend to drive down its price, which naturally means that workers and their families have less to live on. One of the most important forces affecting the labour supply in the US has been immigration, and it turns out that immigration, as measured by the proportion of the population who were born abroad, has changed in a cyclical manner just like inequality. In fact, the periods of high immigration coincided with the periods of stagnating wages. The Great Compression, meanwhile, unfolded under a low-immigration regime."