In recent years, the idea has spread that a jobless future is lurking just around the corner. Here on Youtube, the famous Youtuber CGP Grey has a good video summarizing the matter called ‘Humans Need not Apply,’ which we’ll link to in the video description below.

The argument is that the combination of new machinery and robots, as well as the possible advert of Artificial Intelligence will result in mass automation, which in turn will lead to a global dearth of jobs. With self-driving cars and automated software writing our newspapers, grading papers, and processing forms, this all seems very plausible. But the matter isn’t as clear-cut as a quick glance might have one believe.

First, it is nothing new that the invention of new technologies leads to the destruction of jobs. When cotton came onto the European markets, replacing clothes made of more labour-intensive materials such as flax, people angsted in the same way. And when, later, the spinning wheel was invented, people angsted again. When computers became widespread in the workplace, people too were told stories about work-less futures. Stories that seemed plausible at the time.

One could name several more examples to amplify this point. In most European nations, roughly 50% of the labor force was engaged with farming until just a few hundred years ago. Now, most modern countries have just 1-3% of the labor force engaged in farming. But losing roughly 50% of the continent’s jobs in just a few decades didn’t cause mass unemployment – instead, it opened the door to industrialization.

Every time in the history of the world that jobs have been destroyed by innovation, we have not been met with a lack of jobs that is constantly prophesied, but with the freeing-up of labor to pursue more productive tasks. But in almost many cases, even the smartest people of the time could not have predicted how the economy would adapt to the new conditions.

One could summarize the situation as a thought experiment: A man can’t see around the corner, but he knows that he has to turn it. Every time he is about to turn the corner, he hears the roar of a fierce lion, and he is sure that the end of his life is near. You observe the man repeating this experiment 300 times, but the lion never shows up. Every time he turns the corner he finds that – in spite of the fearsome roar – it’s safe to do so.

Now, if you had to bet your entire life savings on what would happen the 301^st time he turns the corner, would you bet on him being eaten or safe? You might object that this time is different, but remember, that’s what everyone said the other 300 times. Every single time, it was impossible to predict what was waiting around the corner. People were just as prohibited from looking around the corner then as they are now – all they could take stock of is the scary lion’s roar – as is all you can do now. So which option will you bet on?

Of course, abstract frequentist arguments are rarely as grabbing as the concrete threat of lions and robots. That’s part of the reason why every time this happens smart people remain convinced that this time is different. However, there are a few other metrics we could look at.

One is economic growth rates relative to the pace of innovation. To economists, it is paradoxical that we are seeing predictions of a flood of innovation and paired with low growth rates. The opposite should be the case, since innovation boosts productivity, which in turn boosts growth. This might point to there being too little innovation going on these years, as opposed to too much. In fact, the pace of top-level invention has slowed considerably since the 70ies. True, we get new apps and smartphones, but broadly speaking, most of the fundamental technologies driving the economy today are simple extrapolations of technologies that are in many cases 50 or even 100 years old. Global power generation is still very much achieved with fossil fuels and today commercial flights are actually slower than they were 50 years ago.

Another is that regardless of how the actual numbers turned out historically, predictions of jobless futures have always had an especially easy time attracting attention in periods of low growth and insecurity. Which is just what the West is characterized by these years.

Of course, one may argue that observations made of the past are no guarantee of what the future will be like. This is true. But all in all, there is good reason to stop and pause, before rushing in to proclaim that this time is different.

Text a redux reworking by by Mikkel Andersson / Berlingske.

Only rarely does one see professional researchers argue that more factual knowledge is a bad thing. But in Sweden, that is just what has recently happened.

In January 2017, the Swedish TV-channel SVT2 ran a feature on why the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention does not assess the crime rate of immigrants to Sweden.

The Swedish authorities have refrained from calculating these numbers since 2005, when they released a report showing that foreign-born Swedes were likely to commit more than twice as much crime as Swedes born in Sweden. For immigrants from certain parts of Africa, the number was more than five times as high.

As followers of Swedish politics will know, the number of immigrants to Sweden has exploded since 2005. Might it not be prudent to get some statistics regarding the consequences of this development then? In Sweden’s brother country of Denmark, the authorities release data on crime and ethnicity every year. But in Sweden, the authorities have decided that this is a number that the population should not be allowed to know.

In the SVT2 feature, we saw one representative of the Swedish authorities after another, all saying the same thing: That the numbers from 2005 were enough to tell anyone all they could wish to know on the matter of crime and immigration in Sweden. At the same time, the feature interviewed an employee of the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention who said that the Council is constantly contacted by Swedes who want to know the figures on crime and immigration. But even this employee said that in spite of the many phone calls she received, she saw no reason to update the figures from 2005.

The feature also has the Swedish professor of criminology Jerzy Sarnecki saying that it’s not relevant to know exactly how much more criminal the immigrants are, since everyone can see from the 2005 figures that that they are more criminal. According to Sarnecki, we should not ask how much more crime the immigrants commit, but rather set our resources to attempting to uncover why immigrants commit crimes.

Now, if you’ve been following Swedish politics, you know that one of the major drivers of anti-immigrant sentiment is that both the authorities and the media are constantly – and often rightly – accused of hiding, underreporting and down-playing the problems associated with the mass immigration to Sweden that has taken place in certain years.

In the SVT2 feature, several representatives of the Swedish authorities say that they don’t want the real crime rate of immigrants to become known since the figure could be used to demonize certain groups. Obviously, any fact can be used politically. But, as many prominent political philosophers have pointed out, impartial knowledge is the essential precursor for people to be able to make up their minds about an issue. Likewise, if you don’t know what is actually going on in your country, not only does it become impossible to accurately take stock of the issue – it also becomes impossible to work out sensible solutions.

For example, as the matter stands right now, the Swedish populace has no way of knowing if the almost tripling of rape and sexual assault rates that has taken place in Sweden since 2011 is in any way connected with the huge influx of migrants to the country. And in the absence of solid facts and statistics on the matter, unfounded speculations and theories explode on social media, on alternative media and in extremist political circles – all in completely predictable fashion.

As the SVT2 feature made clear, much of the Swedish elite believes that if the problems are hushed up then the population will stop brooding about them.

It won’t – all their approach accomplishes is that discussions on these matters become more unqualified and embittered.

Prior to the upcoming meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the non-profit organization Oxfam-IBIS have released their annual report on world inequality. The World Economic Forum is a meeting of powerful politicians and businessmen, spiced up with a few celebrities, who are there for no one really knows what reason. This year, Shakira will be attending.

Oxfam’s report strikingly concludes that the eight richest people in the world own as much wealth as the world’s poorest 50%. Oxfam use this figure to argue that the world is marred by inequality and the story has been picked up by several major news outlets, such as ABC News, USA Today, Newsweek, The Guardian, and others. But is the figure even correct?

Well, let’s look at a few things.

For one, Oxfam arrive at this number by looking at the net fortune of individuals. This means that an unemployed African man owning two dollars is technically richer than a medical student in Beverly Hills who is still in student debt (and thus has a negative net fortune). Since people in the developed world have access to credit and loans that people in developing countries do not have access to, many people in the developed world actually have a negative net fortune, since they have loans to finance their cars, houses, educations, or even bonds and stock portfolios. In short, net fortune is a misleading way to look at wealth. Does anyone seriously believe that someone who is soon to be a successful doctor or lawyer in the Beverly Hills area is worse off than someone in the developing world with no education and no job opportunities who just so happens to have no debt? Of course not! There are many other metrics that would give a better picture of the world’s distribution of wealth and it is hard to see how Oxfam could have chosen this metric in good faith. Especially since year after year, they release a report like this, and year after year, they are criticized by developmental economists, yet they never do much to defend their approach.

Another way to look at the silliness of Oxfam’s insistence on net fortune is an apocryphal story sometimes told about Donald Trump. One day, when Trump was one billion dollars in debt, he took a walk with his daughter, pointed to a homeless man and said: “See that bum? He has a billion dollars more than me.” In this instance, Trump and Oxfam are using the same approach to economics to arrive at spectacular conclusions like this. Technically, Trump had a negative net fortune, just like our doctor-to-be in Beverly Hills is poorer than an African villager with no job and no debt. Looking at net fortune in isolation is just completely misleading, if not to say useless, when you want to find out how the world’s wealth is distributed. It’s bad economics and ignores not only prospects and economic opportunities but also what economists call human capital, that is, an individual’s stock of knowledge, habits, talents, creativity, and so on. Every economic analysis is of course an approximation – we’re not faulting Oxfam for not having made a perfect analysis, because no analysis is – it’s just that Oxfam’s report is so far out of the ballpark as to barely qualify as an analysis at all.

Secondly, Oxfam is basing their report on data from banks, but as shown by one of the most original studies in economics in the last 10 to 15 years, namely The Mystery of Capital by the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, a lot of property in the third world is not registered or documented anywhere. In much of the developing world, people live in communities where everyone just knows who owns what house and what rice fields, without there ever existing any formal documents detailing that ownership. This means that many people in the developing world who actually have a positive net fortune will be registered as having no fortune. And this is of course another reason that one shouldn’t leap to spectacular conclusions like “eight people own as much as the poorest 50% of the world.”

A third point is that the executive director of Oxfam, in speaking about their report on inequality, claims that “inequality is undermining democracy.” This is a claim that often gets thrown around in economics debates by non-economists, and only very rarely is the argument corroborated by any kind of data. As we talked about in our Thomas Piketty video, economists have actually run analyses on the correlation of democracy and civil rights on the one hand and inequality and the amassment of wealth on the other. The best studies of this kind show that there is no correlation. If Oxfam has any data to suggest that there is one, they have not presented it to the public. They have simply claimed that there is a connection, and the press has bought their claim wholesale.

Now of course, the world is by no means equal. Opportunity, capital, and ability are not distributed equally amongst the people of the world. The most influential political philosopher of the 20^th century, John Rawls, dedicated his major work to trying to find out how the world could be made more just and equal. There are many interesting discussions that one could have on how to do this. But most social scientists agree that it’s not as easy as it seems. And basing one’s arguments on false and misleading claims the way Oxfam does certainly doesn’t help.

On 19 December 2016, a truck was driven into a Christmas market in Berlin, leaving 12 people dead and 56 injured. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack.
Every time an attack like this takes place on European soil, you hear certain voices saying that Islamic terrorism in Europe is only about 0.3 percent, the implication being that the media and the right wing are engaged in a campaign to prop up this infinitesimal threat.
So have we all been duped? No. The idea that Islamic terrorism is but a drop in the sea is usually drawn from a Europol dataset from 2012. So for one thing, the numbers are out of date.
But more seriously, the Europol dataset is not politically neutral. It’s compiled by member states that have an interest in propping up separatist terror. This means that someone tagging “Free Corsica” on a government building is counted on par with the killing spree of Anders Behring Breivik which cost more than 70 people their lives.
Here is another way to look at the data. Out of the 20 most lethal terrorist attacks in Western Europe since 2001, 16 are Islamic and only 4 are not Islamic. Furthermore, in 2011 the number of people arrested for planning Islamic terror attacks on European soil was 122, while by the end of 2015, the number had increased to 687.
So no – we have not all been duped by a sinister right-wing narrative. Islamic terrorism in Europe is more lethal than all other terrorist threats combined. And according to European intelligence services, the threat is only increasing

Watch as video here.

Liberalism, in the broadest possible sense, does not mean the American left wing. Nor does it mean classically liberal or libertarian. It means a system of government based on individual rights, such as freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion and so on. Liberal societies are also characterized by a free press, independent courts, and checks on government power.

During the Cold War, many Western intellectuals and artists on the left sympathized with the Soviet bloc. In their opinion, the autocratic Soviet states were morally superior to the liberal West. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the exposure of the extent of Soviet atrocities against their own populations, many of the artists and intellectuals on the left who supported the Soviets have been broadly condemned for promoting authoritarian dictatorships over liberal democracies. How could they have sympathized with these mass-murdering dictators who quite possibly killed more people than Nazi Germany?

These days, we have the opposite problem, namely that many on the right express admiration for Putin and – much like the leftist intellectuals and artists of the Cold War era – are engaged in apologetics that try to make Putin’s rule out as being somehow not so bad.

Now, if you don’t think a liberal society is the most desirable form of government, you might have a consistent case. However, most pro-Putin voices on the right still profess to be liberal democrats. Many plead ignorance or outright deny what has taken place in Russia under Putin. Or when confronted with specifics on Russia, they simply avoid information that is inopportune for their argument. At the same time, a lot of them have bought into information and bluster received from Russian propaganda sources such as Russia Today.

Let’s look at the state of civil liberties in Russia. They have continually been curtailed under Putin. More than 200 critical journalists have died of non-natural causes since he assumed power. In the West, the most well-known example of Putin’s curtailment of civil liberties is the law against “propagandizing” alternative sexual orientations which has in practice been used to crack down on political protesters and people arguing that homosexuality is a case of nature over nurture.

Less well-known in the West is the ban on all religious communities preaching outside of their places of worship. In practice, this means that people can’t propagate their faith on the internet or hold religious services in their own homes. And faiths that are too small to finance their own places of worship could be left unable to cultivate their religion at all.

Likewise, laws have been passed that make it illegal to incite breaches of Russia’s territorial integrity. In practice this means that anyone criticizing Russia’s annexation of Crimea can be put in jail (as indeed many have already been).

Then there is the question of the arbitrary incarceration of people who criticize Putin’s rule. The most famous example here is the imprisonment of Russia’s richest man, Mikhail Khodorkovskij, which is broadly agreed by independent observers to have been politically motivated. Besides Khodorkovskij’s imprisonment, many other critics of Putin’s rule have been killed or imprisoned. Most recently, the government has taken to shutting down entire private companies and imprisoning everyone from the CEO to lowly workmen. In many cases, the rank-and-file employees never conducted any political criticism of the system whatsoever. But all are punished anyway.

While the people’s opportunities for staging political protests have been curtailed, the democratic system in Russia has also been undermined. During the elections of 2011, many public employees were forced to vote for Putin’s party and the people who counted the votes were instructed to doctor the votes in order to put Putin’s party ahead of the opposition. Exit polls showed that Putin’s party was only due to get about one third of the vote count that it officially ended up with, and Austrian researchers from the University of Vienna conducted analyses of the vote tallies which concluded, unequivocally, that election fraud in favor of Putin’s party had taken place.

Contrary to popular belief, the Russian population did not take kindly to this obvious election fraud, and popular protests against the regime persevered from 2011 and all the way to the summer of 2013. While the protests endured, the regime tried anything from deploying the military and police, to the ministry of health and the ministry of education in order to frighten and discourage the protesters.

Somewhat unfairly, in spite of these massive popular protests, it ended up being three young women who played punk in a church – members of the protest group Pussy Riot – who became the symbol of dissidence against the regime. The young women were sentenced to two years of imprisonment and alleged forced labor in a penal colony.

If you mention facts like these to Western Putin apologists, they tend to skirt them like the plague. Rather than offering a response, they very quickly try to steer the conversation onto other subjects, such as how Putin has supposedly restored national pride in Russia or brought about a Christian awakening and taken a harsh stance on Russia’s 9 to 14 million Muslims.

Concerning the so-called Christian awakening, one should remember that Christianity was all but illegal in the officially atheist Soviet Russia. When the Soviet regime fell, thousands of people came out to voluntarily contribute to the restoration of Orthodox churches all over the country. Many of these developments happened prior to Putin’s ascension to power and should more properly be credited to the population itself, and not to Putin. It’s like someone jumped in front of a parade that was already in full swing and now gets credit for having planned it all.

As for the Muslims, many right-wing Westerners are fed up with Islam and see Putin as being able to chart a tougher, sterner course than the liberal values of Western democracies allow for.  Thus it is often said among Western pro-Putin conservatives that Russia and the West could unite as Christian partners in a common crusade towards Islam, or that Putin’s threat to bomb entire Muslim cities as retaliation for terrorist attacks on Russian soil should provide inspiration for politicians in the West.

Now what most Western pro-Putin conservatives seem to miss is that in spite of the stern rhetoric, Putin has not followed through on the spectacular threats made against Islam as a whole, in spite of terror attacks continuing to take place in Russian cities. Likewise, Western pro-Putin conservatives tend to miss that somewhere between 9 and 15% of the Russian population are Muslims and that, far from attempting to punish them collectively, Putin has generally struck an appeasing tone towards them.

In 2015, Putin attended the opening in Moscow of one of Europe’s biggest mosques. Flanked by the Turkish leader Erdogan and Palestinian leader Abbas, he declared that there was a “pure Islam” which had been tainted by operatives such as the Islamic State. In other words, Putin made that same so-called politically correct distinction between “pure Islam” and “radical Islam” that many Western pro-Putin pundits fault their own politicians for adhering to!

Likewise, Putin has many times praised the Muslim community in Russia. Several times he has wished the Russian Muslims happy Eid celebrations, which is another one of those things that Western pro-Putin conservatives tend to fault their own politicians for doing.

Another way to see where Putin’s allegiances lie is to look at how Russia has voted in the UN over the last ten years. Again and again, Russia has voted against the West and with the Muslim countries of the OIC. Most notably, Russia has supported the Islamic countries’ attempts to create a global resolution against insulting religions, a proposal made specifically to target criticisms of Islam in Western media and outlaw the publication of Muhammad cartoons.

Indeed, the Russian political scientist Sergej Markov, who has held many appointments under Putin’s rule, has said that while Putin welcomes the new wave of European right-wing populism, his regime does not support their fight against Islam and multiculturalism. “Russia is a multicultural society and Russia has 15% Muslims,” he said.

So Putin does not promote individual liberty for Russians, is not democratic, cannot take credit for the Christian revival in Russia, and is not especially harsh towards Islam. In fact, he appears to appease Islam and repeatedly does many of the exact same so-called “politically correct” things to appease Muslims that Western right-wing populists fault their own politicians for doing.

So why do certain voices on the Western right nevertheless idolize Putin?

Some people sympathize with him because of his perceived savviness. Through the inattention and passivity of the West, as well as his own tactical acumen, Putin has been able to re-emerge on the world-stage as a powerful leader. For some people, there seems to be the payoff that if they identify with this allegedly savvy leader, then some of that savviness supposedly rubs off on them as well.

Another segment of people seem to consider it cool and edgy to sympathize with Russia’s geopolitical aims in the face of the West. These people typically argue that the West has been too arrogant in expanding NATO and EU, right up to Russia’s borders and mingling in the Ukrainian government’s internal affairs. To these people, Russia’s invasions in Caucasus and the annexation of Crimea are entirely predictable responses to what they see as the West’s attempts to contain Russia. These people can surprisingly often be found in conspiracy circles, where many are traditionally keen to blame the West for foreign aggression. For these people, siding with Russia against the West is just one facet of a general attitude of antagonism towards the West.

But this video isn’t about those segments: It’s about Western right-wingers who profess to be adherents of liberal democracy, yet somehow think Putin is a role model for the West that our own politicians could learn from. They trivialize or ignore Putin’s very active role in curtailing civil liberties in Russia. They claim that Putin restored the Christian faith to his nation, but in fact, the Christian revival was underway before he ascended to power and recent laws have made it harder to the Orthodox Church to carry out missionary activities in Russia. The Western pro-Putin voices claim that Putin has taken a tough stance on Islam, but in fact, he buys into the very same so-called politically correct distinction between militant Islamism and a pristine “pure Islam” that Western right-wingers fault their own politicians for adopting. Russia’s votes in the UN side with the Islamic countries against the West, and Putin has abstained from following through on some of the more spectacular threats of collective punishment that he’s voiced towards Muslims.

One wonders then, whether these pro-Putin voices support him. One could certainly be forgiven for thinking that they do so based on an idealized image of what they would like Putin to be, and not on what he actually is and does.

Jeg ser NB (so far) som en blanding af knaldhård liberalisme på den økonomiske politik, faktisk tager de masser af de samme kampe, som LA kunne have taget før de blev “corporate.” Eks. har de været ude med en klar antiprotektionistisk holdning, samt argumentet om, at individet ikke til tvinges til at finansiere fremstød, der går mod dets personlige overbevisninger (e.g. liberale skal ikke tvinges til at finansiere røde aviser over skatten). Begge disse positioner er jo egentlig formuleret klarest in den amerikanske tradition med især Jefferson, som ordret har fremført begge disse argumenter.

Når man alligevel kan nævne Hayek, så er det fordi NB adskiller sig fra LA ved at have blik for kulturens evolutionære proces. NB er mindre rationalistisk; mindre konstruktivistisk på socialpolitikken end LA har tendens til at være. Men dette synes jeg egentlig hører hjemme i tradtitionen fra Hume, som netop skriver meget om, hvordan dyder opdages evolutionært over tid og tilpasses de kulturfællesskaber, de opstår i (danske normer indeholder således århundreders opsparet kulturel viden, om hvordan tingene gøres bedst i netop Danmark; en viden der overstiger ethvert centraliseret bureaukratis fatteevne). I det omfang Hayek passer på NB synes jeg egentlig, at det er traditionen fra Hume og den angelsaksiske evolutionære konservatisme, der er det egentlige fit.

Baglandet er sandsynligvis mere økonomisk moderat end ledelsen. Personligt er min store frygt, at NB ender som UKIP, AdD, etc. — alle startede de med en liberal økonomisk politik og islamkritik, og endte som socialdemokratier med islamkritik.

Video here.

As of August 2016, not many people believe that Trump will win. Since spring, Clinton has been significantly ahead in the polls. Present odds with bookmaker sites and political prediction sites place Clinton’s chances of winning in November around 66% and Trump’s around 33%.

However, basing one’s political forecasts on the polls tends to come with a lot of pitfalls. They don’t really tell you this in the media, but opinion polls tend to be pretty unreliable. And there is evidence to suggest that they’ve been getting more and more unreliable in recent years.

To give but a few examples, in August of 1988, Michael Dukakis was ahead in the polls by 17 percentage points. However, the winner of that race wasn’t Mike Dukakis, it was George Herbert Walker Bush. In August 2012, Romney had a lead over Obama as well.

So let’s look at some other measures. One is simply to count the number of primaries one. Electoral history suggests that the candidate who does best in the primaries will also win the general election. Trump did better in the primaries than Clinton.

Another way to approach the matter is through public choice research. Public choice predicts that after two terms or more, the voters will start craving change and be more inclined to vote for the other party. This phenomenon is referred to as “the cost of ruling,” and empirical studies, by the professor of economics Martin Paldam among others, have shown that the average cost of ruling amounts to a loss of 2,25 percentage points of popularity over the course of a term. Clinton will thus have a five percentage point popularity penalty come November.

Finally, a model that has received a lot of attention recently, and which factors in the cost of ruling as well, is the Primary Model, as proposed by professor Helmut Norpoth. This model has a better track record than most other models in political science, and predicts that there is a 87% chance that Trump will become the next president.

So all in all, there is serious cause for doubting the media’s narrative and to take seriously the possibility that Trump might win in November.