For those interested in the economic problems of less developed countries, there is "Equality, the Third World, and Economic Delusion" by Professor Peter Bauer of the London School of Economics. He spent years living in poor countries and more years trying to talk sense to the foreign aid establishment in Western nations.

Once dismissed as someone outside the mainstream, Peter Bauer was part of the mainstream by the time of his death last year. He hadn't changed. The mainstream had moved over to where he was, after decades of bitter experience had proved him right.

One of the reasons for the many disappointments of foreign aid programs has been that some cultures do and some do not promote the kind of behavior that produces economic development. This is particularly apparent in a book on Latin America by Lawrence Harrison titled, "Underdevelopment Is a State of Mind."

Institutions -- or lack of institutions -- can also hold back development. "The Mystery of Capital" by Hernando de Soto explores why capitalism works in Western nations but not in most non-Western countries.

The non-judgmental notion that "all cultures are equal" is unlikely to survive reading "The Character of Nations" by Professor Angelo Codevilla of Boston University. It is a grown-up's demolition of childish ideas that have become fashionable in our times.

Voter wrote:

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The population of Mexico doubled between 1970 and 2000. Much of the migration problem has to do with sheer numbers. It is long past time for the U.S. to make "carrying capacity" (i.e. no. of people our environment can reasonably support) a major factor in public policy decisions. As draconian as China's one-child policy may strike us, it may turn out to be one of the most important decisions of our time. The explosive growth in U.S. population comes almost exclusively from immigration. While Plantation certainly has a point that we have reaped what we have sown with NAFTA, we nonetheless cannot strain our very support system in order to accommodate the errors of our foreign policy or the population problems of other countries.

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Invictus wrote:

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Patriot wrote: Voter, Isn't the population problem in poverty areas just the culture's Social Security system? That is, elderly parents would be too heavy a burden on a small number of poor children, but a large family, even though poor,  could support two elderly parents.

I thought it reflected the lack of cable television, which forces the population to seek other entertainment options...

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Mexican population explosion wrote:

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http://www.americanpatrol.com/GUESTCOLUMNS/DWYER/PopExplMex050111Dwyer.html

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Voter wrote:

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The population of Mexico doubled between 1970 and 2000. Much of the migration problem has to do with sheer numbers. It is long past time for the U.S. to make "carrying capacity" (i.e. no. of people our environment can reasonably support) a major factor in public policy decisions. As draconian as China's one-child policy may strike us, it may turn out to be one of the most important decisions of our time. The explosive growth in U.S. population comes almost exclusively from immigration. While Plantation certainly has a point that we have reaped what we have sown with NAFTA, we nonetheless cannot strain our very support system in order to accommodate the errors of our foreign policy or the population problems of other countries.

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Where I come from, the usual reply to arguments that developing nations need to restrain population growth is that the USA, Japan, Canada and the EU, because of their exponentially higher per capita consumption of resources, have a much greater impact on the environment than the third world population boom. There's what one might call poetic justice in having the victims of our consumption binge--in the present Mexican diaspora--come to the USA to "strain our very support system."

The time may have passed when it would do any good, but the developed world simply has to muster the political will to institute sustainable economies. That is, economic policies must be premised upon the double realization that, one, natural resources are finite and, two, that unregulated consumerist-oriented production poses massive social disorder and environmental holocaust.

For instance, a sustainable free trade policy w/Mexico, unlike NAFTA, would have worker protection clauses and sane environmental regulations built into it. Things like a living wage and social investment protocols would also have gone a long way towards preventing the Mexican diaspora and improving the standard of living of the Mexican people. The fact that NAFTA had no such provisions built into it gives creedence to charges, such as those levelled in the Common Dreams and Alternet articles that head this thread, that NAFTA was a sweetheart deal between the Mexican and American ruling classes, that it was intended to increase the wealth of the upper one percent of the North American wealth pyramid at the expense of the lower half.

Thus, it's revealing that the two econometric evaluations of Mexico and Latin American "performance"--posted above--have nothing to say about actual people's living standards and quality of life in the nations studied. Further they say nothing about income distribution when describing GDP and per capita economic growth. Just because domestic wealth increase is measured on a per capita basis doesn't mean that wealth is distributed equally. If anything, distributional equity has become ever more unlikely in the last twenty years: in the USA, now, people in the upper one percent income bracket control a greater share of wealth and income than at any time before in American history. More than in the Robber Baron/Gilded Age, more than during the Great Depression.

The abstractions of econometrics measure only part of the equation of economic growth and development; it takes a sociologist's eye to parse out the human dimension. To turn "growth" and "production" into abstractions is to assure an imperfect picture of that human dimension, with potentially disastrous results. One of them is the Mexican dispora.  

And of course, it has to be said, pace Lest We Forget, that capitalism has always been premised upon the ready, relatively unrestricted movement of populations of workers, upon diaspora. The American produce, meatpacking and construction industries (yes, my roof was repaired by Mexicans, from Nuevo Leone, how about yours?) simply could not exist in a profitable form without diaspora, in this case of Mexican workers. Neither could the West Indian sugar economy and the ante-bellum cotton economy have existed without diaspora, of African slaves and European factory operatives.

In other words, we're looking at a real paradox here: food and home construction costs are affordable to everyday Americans in large part because of the Mexican diaspora, and yet that diaspora threatens to push native-born Americans' wages into a third world sub-basement, and could certainly overwhelm the American "support system" of schools, medical services, roads, sewers and housing. The diaspora will also weaken the already dangerously threadbare social supports provided by the central government: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, WIC, AFDC, Pell, VA, etc..

Of course, in the short run, that's only going to affect the vast majority of the American people. For awhile, the overclass will still be able to feast on the wealth created by "free trade" while the rest of us scramble for leftovers and crumbs, the same as the "illegals" and "undocumented aliens" whose economic plight and social status we increasingly come to share.

There will be a reckoning, however. Environmental collapse. A massive extinction event. Terrorism. Economic depression. Social chaos. To mangle Freud, "That which is repressed will always return."

Post Script: I was taught that the largest diaspora in North American history was history was the "Great Migration" of African Americans from the USA's rural South to urban North in the 20th century. The Mexican Diaspora we've been discussing--much of it in the last decade--is at least twice as large, isn't it? What could we learn from the comparison?

Income Distribution wrote:

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http://www.econlib.org/LIBRARY/Enc/DistributionofIncome.html

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LVN wrote:

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Somewhere above here the word "draconian" is used. Mexico's own immigration laws, if I understand correctly, are "draconian" -- they are extremely harsh to immigrants from Central America.

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