The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - August 13, 2024


PREVIEW： Brokenomics ｜ Economics of Civil Unrest

Topics
population vs. GDP per worker immigration debate 2001 integrated Ghanaian lad integration success ≠
Hosted by
Callum Edmunds Carl Benjamin Connor Tomlinson Harry Robinson John Wheatley Joshua Ferme Edward McLaren Elizabeth Heverin
Mentioned
Brexit Blair Manchester Arena Keir Starmer Taylor Swift Rishi Sunak Lee Rigby Koh Lanta Westminster Wayne
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #976 The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #978

Episode Stats


Length

26 minutes

Words per minute

143.85

Word count

3,846

Sentence count

274

Harmful content

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

25

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of Brokernomics, I look at the economic impact of civil unrest in the UK, focusing on the key indicator that can be used to predict it: population growth. And the answer is... not much.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hello, and welcome to Brokonomics. Now, in this episode, I'm going to be sticking with the theme 0.72
00:00:04.700 of last week, and we're going to be looking at this civil unrest a little bit more. But
00:00:09.200 in the last episode, it was a bit more heartfelt. It was a bit more reacting to the events as they
00:00:15.680 unfolded, saying some things that needed to be said. In this one, I kind of wanted to look at
00:00:21.280 more the hard practical realities. I've got lots of numbers in this, lots of graphs.
00:00:24.960 What actually are the government's options? Why are they behaving like this? How strong is their
00:00:32.580 hand? Spoiler alert, not particularly strong. So, economics of civil unrest. I'm going to start
00:00:42.660 with perhaps the key indicator that I found predicting civil unrest. This is a chart that
00:00:49.020 shows the red line is the growth in population, and the blue line is real GDP per worker. So,
00:00:56.880 you know, per capita GDP, or you could look at it as the income level per the individual.
00:01:04.060 And for those of you who are listening, basically, they're opening up like alligator jaws. So,
00:01:09.020 population is going up, straight up and to the right. The real GDP per worker, or the income per
00:01:16.020 worker is going down, straight down and to the right. And it's opening up an enormous gap between
00:01:22.740 the two. Now, this particular chart is actually for Canada. It doesn't matter. It's the same chart
00:01:28.740 for the UK. And I found a whole bunch of basically this indicator for a whole bunch of different
00:01:36.040 situations. And going right back to the French Revolution, an absolute swathe of periods of
00:01:43.860 strong civil unrest have had this chart. Now, I did think briefly about trying to mesh it all
00:01:50.140 together and overlaying it, but the data was all in such different formats, it would have been a hell
00:01:55.460 of a job to do it. So, I just thought, I'll take the Canadian chart and show you that one,
00:01:59.080 because it shows it quite clearly. That gap in population and income of the population,
00:02:05.580 it makes people a little bit fiery, a little bit up for civil unrest. Now, this is a
00:02:12.980 sufficient but not necessary condition for unrest to occur. This is the perfect backdrop for that.
00:02:22.280 But of course, you need the spark. And of course, we all know what the spark was in this case,
00:02:26.360 and we'll come back to that in a moment. But just talking about the population side of this for a
00:02:31.140 moment, because I think that's also worth capturing. There has always been immigration. I'm going to
00:02:36.060 give you figure two. This is population of the British Isles. And this goes back to, you know,
00:02:43.060 the turn of the previous millennia. So, this is quite a long data series. That first blip you can see
00:02:49.640 is the Black Death, of course, or one of the Black Deaths. And what you basically have is a fairly low 0.88
00:02:55.320 level organic population rise. Black Death, a bit of a sharp decline, but a fairly organic population
00:03:02.300 rise up until about the early 1700s, the advent of much easier modes of travel. And then you start to
00:03:12.160 get this inexorable upper rise. So, I'm just kind of making the point here that population, rapid
00:03:19.120 population rise is not a particularly new phenomenon. It's been happening for many hundreds
00:03:23.980 of years. Everything captured on this chart is going to be largely European, inter-European
00:03:30.220 immigration. And actually, for most of this chart, it's going to be inter-British Isles immigration.
00:03:37.180 You can actually see on large sections here, the populations of Ireland, Scotland and Wales
00:03:42.960 declining as the population of England went up, as it became an industrial manufacturing powerhouse.
00:03:51.340 So, population rise is not a new thing. But as you will also know from previous episodes of
00:03:56.000 Brokernomics, there has been a long period of which productivity has gently increased over this
00:04:03.640 same time scale, about, well, anywhere between half a percent to one and a half percent per year.
00:04:09.380 So, even though the population was rising, the income per individual was also rising. So, life was getting
00:04:17.800 just a little bit better every year alongside the population increase. And the population that was
00:04:25.500 coming in was as productive as the existing population. So, you had that organic and genuine
00:04:35.160 income level rise, GDP level rise. But of course, that is not what we've been talking about in
00:04:43.280 modern times. So, the country can absorb, quite effectively, significant increases in population
00:04:52.200 when those increases in population are sufficiently well matched with the population that they're
00:05:00.200 integrating into. I now want to move on to figure three. This is a pie chart of 1981, the ethnic mix of
00:05:11.260 Britain in 1981. And for those of you who are listening, the white population makes up 95%, over 95% of the
00:05:21.620 of the pie chart. Asian, which I presume in 1981 would have been largely, largely Indian, perhaps a smattering of
00:05:31.860 Pakistani, but largely Indian. 2.7. Black is actually quite low, 1.5. And then 0.4 for everybody else. So, in 1981, the
00:05:42.680 country was a predominantly, overwhelmingly white country. And then we're going to advance this another 10 years, to 1991.
00:05:51.740 A modest increase. Black is up fairly organically from, was it 1.5 to 1.9. The Asian population, a stronger increase,
00:06:05.740 from 2.7 to 3.7. But the population is still 94% white in 1991. And I will remember 1991. I'm old enough to remember many of you,
00:06:17.800 some of you won't, but many of you will be old enough to remember 1991.
00:06:21.800 2001. This is after Blair has come into government. In 2001, he was still largely behaving himself.
00:06:33.860 He was still largely sticking to the spending plans of the major era government. But by now, the ramp up in immigration was
00:06:45.860 starting to kick in. Now the population is down to 87% white. And we're starting to break it out. And actually, the big 0.95
00:06:57.920 new entrant here was other whites. Typically, that was Eastern Europeans. That was, by and large, it was, it was Polish. 1.00
00:07:08.600 4% of the population, they rapidly caught up with the Asians. I mean, the Asians are now higher. 1.00
00:07:15.200 They're at 5%. Blacks are modest growth at 2.3%. And we're now getting mixed. Because, of course, 1.00
00:07:23.200 immigrant populations tend not to mix Generation 1. Generation 2, they often will. So you're starting 0.99
00:07:30.920 to get that mix come through and still a negligible amount of others. And that was the concern in Britain
00:07:39.440 of immigration at the time, which is always worth remembering when you get these sort of leftist 1.00
00:07:44.260 idiots telling you that it's all about skin color and racism. Well, no, because there was a lively 1.00
00:07:50.620 debate about immigration back in 2001. And it was directed at the rapid increase of Polish coming
00:07:56.980 in. And they did sort of colonize a bit. I mean, my hometown of where I grew up, Bognor,
00:08:01.720 Regis. I have a mental image of the place. I mean, I haven't been back there for a long time. I moved
00:08:08.720 out when I was 18. But I mean, I have a mental image of the high street that I remember. And when I sort
00:08:13.660 of briefly visit again now, the main high street is just full of Polish signs, Polish shops everywhere.
00:08:21.540 I mean, the place has been colonized. So let's jump forward another 10 years, 2011. Blair has really had the
00:08:31.040 opportunity to do things and things are really starting to shift now. The white British population is down below 0.65
00:08:37.140 80% at this point. White other is now up to 5.7. But what's interesting is the Asians are being caught up 1.00
00:08:48.060 on by the white other. They are surging ahead now 7.8%. And the black is starting to show a respectable 1.00
00:08:59.640 increase. It will increase still only up to 3.5. Mixed is growing all the time at 2.3. 2021.
00:09:11.640 The white British are now down to 73%. White other 75, 7.5%. The Asians very close to 10%. Black up to 4%. 0.99
00:09:23.880 Mixed now at 3%. And other because of course, you know, the doors have been fully opened at this point. So,
00:09:28.920 you know, let's make use of that other category, 2%. But let's just stop and think about the remarkable
00:09:35.360 change in the space of a single human lifespan. 1981, 95% white British. In the space of a single
00:09:44.380 human lifespan, that has gone down to barely above 70%. This is a rapid level of demographic change.
00:09:53.420 Now, this does not have anything to do with skin colour by itself, which is of course the lefty
00:10:01.400 narrative, which is, oh, you just don't like people with higher melanin. No, no, no. That's not what's
00:10:06.740 going on here. What it's got to do with is cultural change. Now, any man who, any single man who's ever
00:10:15.800 taken on a woman will know about cultural change. Um, you know, you have your perfectly sensible house, 0.99
00:10:22.240 um, with your perfectly sensible limited amount of furniture and everything is order and there's
00:10:28.980 lots of nice empty space everywhere. And then a woman turns up and suddenly you've got bloody soft 0.89
00:10:33.480 furnishings everywhere. You know, your curtains were not sufficient. They need to be replaced with
00:10:37.920 puffy wavy curtains and your single cushion, which is perfectly sufficient. All of that time now needs
00:10:44.080 to be replaced with about 30 cushions and God knows what else. Drapes and extra tables, far more
00:10:50.860 crockery than you could ever possibly need. Even you've invited over all of your friends, but you
00:10:55.840 know, a big cultural shock. The difference with that though, is that you chose it. You made the decision
00:11:02.260 to take the trade off. That is not what's happening here. There has been no popular clamoring for the
00:11:11.300 sort of cultural change that comes with it. I mentioned my hometown has been largely colonized
00:11:16.640 by the Polish, at least the high street. Swindon has apparently been colonized by absolutely
00:11:23.020 everywhere. I mean, there isn't a dominant, um, foreign ethnicity here. It is just people seemingly
00:11:30.700 from everybody and different groups integrate in different ways. And of course it's affected
00:11:34.780 by the speed of the integration. I mentioned in the last episode that I don't really have a problem
00:11:39.820 with immigration per se, as long as it is limited, as long as it is, you know, the, the best of the
00:11:46.600 rest of the world. The native population of this country is, is about 50 million. Population of the
00:11:53.820 entire world is about 8 billion. If we took the top 0.1% of the rest of the world, that mean an extra
00:11:59.460 8 million people. I, I would be fairly comfortable with that if it was the best of the best of
00:12:05.340 everywhere else, you know, um, personal example, I was friendly with a lad at university who was,
00:12:12.360 um, originally Ghanaian, well, his parents were Ghanaian anyway. And Wayne described himself as
00:12:17.840 Ghanaian as well, cause he wasn't in for this lefty nonsense. Um, and his father was a, was an
00:12:23.260 aerospace engineer who came over. I mean, brilliant, fine. Don't have a problem with that. Um, and as
00:12:31.280 far as I can remember, he was the only, I mean, he wasn't the only black lad on the campus, but he
00:12:34.840 was, you know, there weren't many Ghanaians. That idea of taking the best and the brightest from
00:12:43.240 wherever they may be in the rest of the world in limited numbers and bringing them here, you know, 1.00
00:12:47.400 as, as, as mentioned in the previous episode, perfect, perfectly happy with that. But obviously
00:12:52.480 you don't go from 95% white to, you know, barely 70% white by taking the, the best of everywhere
00:13:02.520 else. You do it by fairly indiscriminate open borders, which is entirely what's happened.
00:13:08.820 And people recognize this. They recognize the cultural shift. Um, they recognize that the, um,
00:13:20.300 speed and the numbers are a qualitative difference of their own. So, you know, that Ghanaian lad 0.54
00:13:25.400 that I'm thinking of integrated perfectly into, you know, what we all did, how we all behaved.
00:13:31.760 You know, there was, there was no incompatibility in culture there. If you bring over thousands
00:13:40.720 and, you know, put them in a town, especially if they are from a culture, which has a particular
00:13:47.500 antithetical way of doing things to Western values, then they ghettoize and they don't integrate 0.90
00:13:53.800 and they don't become one of the lads. Interestingly, I did know a couple of, um, um, Muslim lads
00:14:01.380 at university as well. One of them has integrated since, and another one of them has basically
00:14:08.060 gone full Islamist since then. I mean, he's, he doesn't, doesn't do any of the things he 0.99
00:14:14.300 used to do. He doesn't drink. He doesn't go out. He's, you know, he's just fully, I mean,
00:14:18.600 he puts his wife in the whole thing, the hijab. Um, you know, different, different groups 0.91
00:14:26.480 will integrate in, in different ways and, and not always will it be successful. So now
00:14:31.640 I want to turn to figure eight. How have the British public reacted to this? Well, basically
00:14:39.000 they voted to cut immigration at every opportunity. Now this is a, um, a chart that's going to,
00:14:45.640 um, go back to, you know, the early nineties. My former colleague Callum did a segment where
00:14:53.080 he actually went back to the post-war period and at every election, the British public
00:14:58.840 have voted for a government promising to curb immigration and they've never done it. But
00:15:05.700 this, this chart is a, is a good example. Labour's 1997 manifesto stated very clearly,
00:15:11.700 every country must have firm border controls over migrants. 0.97
00:15:15.460 Not what they actually did. Um, one hiccup in this is in 2005, their manifesto said that the,
00:15:27.680 you know, the Labour Party declared that, um, a priority is building a strong, diverse country.
00:15:34.160 So that is an example, a rare example of when a, um, uh, political party is one with a, um,
00:15:43.180 very soft claim on, on immigration. But certainly from 2010 onwards, it has been unequivocal. So
00:15:50.660 the 2010 conservative manifesto, conservatives pledged to bring down immigration to the tens
00:15:55.800 of thousands repeated in the subsequent election and the election after that. Um, and in the 2019
00:16:06.800 one, conservatives pledge numbers will come down. These are clear unequivocal statements that
00:16:15.480 the intention is to reduce immigration levels. But Westminster has become unresponsive to the views
00:16:25.200 of voters, not just on this, but a whole range of issue. But, but immigration is perhaps the issue
00:16:30.860 where the people and the democratic and the, and the elite are most at odds with each other,
00:16:40.040 where they, where their views diverge most widely. Now, partly, I think this is, comes from a
00:16:47.120 misunderstanding of the benefits of, of low skilled immigration. Um, you know, I've made the argument 0.60
00:16:54.100 last week and I've just made it again today that I think the benefits of, um, the best of the best,
00:17:02.060 you know, the, you know, the 0.1% is obvious. Clearly there would be benefits, um, to that bringing 1.00
00:17:10.080 limited number of very high skilled people who can then integrate. Recent governments have got
00:17:16.220 themselves into a trap through a, presumably a desire to avoid appearing racist, but they must treat
00:17:26.080 everybody the same. They must make no assumptions that anyone is different. And therefore, if the
00:17:32.080 economy is GDP per capita times capita, well, if you increase the capita, you must therefore increase
00:17:40.560 GDP. Because everybody that you bring in, you know, that guy from Somalia, he must be equally as 1.00
00:17:51.280 productive as somebody who has grown up their entire life here, is immersed in the culture, speaks the
00:17:56.560 language, understands the social conventions, and has been fully educated. Clearly that guy that's just
00:18:03.160 off the boat must have an equal GDP per capita output to that original purse. And therefore you can then
00:18:10.880 go on to start making OBR projections where you say, yes, okay, the debt has got excessive and we can't
00:18:16.100 possibly pay it. But if we just bring in large amounts of new capita, then GDP will go up and our debt
00:18:25.720 situation will become affordable. This is, of course, complete and utter nonsense. It has been demonstrated
00:18:32.620 in more recent studies. I don't know why you need a study, though, to tell you this, since it's
00:18:39.180 blindingly obvious. So, incorrect assumptions about the benefits of low-skilled migration.
00:18:46.160 That coupled with the changes to party structure. Now, what do I mean there? It used to be the case that
00:18:52.480 the local constituency would select their candidate and then they would go off to Westminster. What happens
00:18:58.360 now, as we've covered in a number of brokenomics, is that the party selects a shortlist of candidates
00:19:04.320 and then drops that on the constituency and they have to choose between a couple of different people,
00:19:10.440 all of who believe exactly the same thing. All of this has served, along with the way that the
00:19:17.840 first-past-the-post system works, to basically insulate the political class from having to deliver
00:19:24.740 on any of their actual promises. As a result of which, turnout in general elections has been falling
00:19:32.720 very sharply over the last 30 years. It's pretty much a down and to the right chart of, you know,
00:19:40.480 turnout at general elections because people understand that their vote simply doesn't matter.
00:19:46.400 Farage managed to force what was essentially an immigration referendum in 2016 with a Brexit referendum.
00:19:53.380 And he went on to win it. And largely, I think what happened there is people believed the Tories
00:20:01.040 when they said that they wanted to honour their promises, lowering immigration, but they were being
00:20:07.620 blocked by the EU. So the people handed them Brexit as this sort of great enabler,
00:20:12.860 only to watch Rishi Sunak drive immigration to absolutely unprecedented levels with those great
00:20:24.980 hopes of these OBR surpluses in his mind. And the people at this last election, they destroyed the
00:20:33.200 Tory party in revenge for the utter betrayal that they inflicted upon us. Conservative MPs, I think they knew
00:20:40.900 that cutting immigration would require fixing things that they had broken. It would require
00:20:47.200 curbing spending, getting the debt under control. The debt isn't in control with immigration. It's just 0.90
00:20:55.440 that they had found an accounting fudge that enabled them to borrow more because they said,
00:21:02.640 OK, we're increasing the capita and therefore we can afford the borrowing to get us through,
00:21:07.080 you know, the next few months and the next few months and so on it rolls. So in order to fix
00:21:13.540 this problem, I think Conservative MPs knew that they had to fix a lot of other things that they'd
00:21:17.900 broken. They would need to take some short-term pain. They would need to cut spending. And also,
00:21:24.700 they would get some stick and not be invited to media studios. They would perhaps have some of
00:21:33.280 the more liberal friends not invited to dinner parties, etc., etc. And so they simply didn't
00:21:38.800 bother doing this and thought that they could just fob their way through it. They were unsuccessful in
00:21:46.120 that. So this is all of the background
00:21:49.880 to the immense changes that have taken place in this country. Cultural, demographic. Let's get on
00:22:00.100 to this particular period of unrest. Keir Starmer, the media class, were all acting as if people have
00:22:06.400 no legitimate grievances whatsoever. Let's talk about some of those legitimate grievances. And I'm
00:22:12.320 going to have to give you a very redacted list. And I can only start at 2005, otherwise we'd be here
00:22:18.380 all day. So let's start with 2005. Central London bombings, the bus bombings. 52 people
00:22:24.480 were killed. Bombs placed on the London Underground and on buses. The British public's response was
00:22:31.500 outrage. There were no riots. The government promised that they would get a handle of things
00:22:38.680 and they lied. 2013, Lee Rigby was hacked to death on the streets by two immigrants 0.96
00:22:48.200 with machetes. There was outrage, but there was no rioting. And the government promised to get a handle
00:22:54.920 on things and they lied. 2017, the Westminster attack. And there are still traffic stopping
00:23:04.460 bollards on Westminster Bridge to this day. There was outrage, but no rioting. The government promised to get a handle on things. They did not.
00:23:13.200 2017, this is a big one. The Manchester Arena bombings. At a Taylor Swift concert. Kids concertgoers were blown apart by a bomb in a kids' music festival.
00:23:35.200 2017, there was outrage. There was outrage, but there were no riots because the government promised to get a handle on things.
00:23:41.920 And they lied. Same year, the London Bridge attack. Outrage, no riots, government lies. 2019, London Bridge stabbings.
00:23:53.840 People were outraged. People were outraged, but there was no riots. Because the government contained it and they lied.
00:24:02.160 Before I go on, I'll give you a quick anecdote. It kind of makes the point well.
00:24:06.000 When I married the missus, we went to Thailand, a little Thai island, Koh Lanta, I think it was, for our honeymoon.
00:24:16.800 There was a little sign in the hotel that said, you know, we urge patrons to not hire a motor vehicle,
00:24:24.800 because under Thai law, if you get into any accident, regardless of the circumstances,
00:24:30.560 as a foreigner, you will be held responsible, on the logic that if you were not there, the accident could not have happened. 0.69
00:24:41.280 And therefore, you are responsible.
00:24:43.360 I've always wondered if that actually is Thai law, but it's probably one of those things that it would be treated as true, if not.
00:24:51.760 And I've always thought, I mean, that's kind of based, isn't it?
00:24:57.920 You know, even if you're driving along, and you slam on the brakes because a kid runs out in front of you,
00:25:02.800 and somebody goes into the back of you, you know, you're still going to be held responsible,
00:25:07.280 because, you know, if you weren't there, that accident would not have happened.
00:25:12.000 Another accident would have happened, but not that one, including you.
00:25:17.200 The obvious point is, is that if we had not had such mass immigration post, well, certainly post-1997,
00:25:29.280 and even more so after Brexit, a lot of these attacks would not have happened.
00:25:36.080 A decent number of these are second generation immigrants.
00:25:40.160 And I think when leftists make the argument, oh, actually, they're second generation immigrants,
00:25:47.280 well, I mean, all that makes you think is, okay, well, since we've rapidly increased the numbers of
00:25:53.200 immigration, doesn't that just mean we have vastly more of these incidents 20 years down the line,
00:26:03.120 when we get the second generation lot grow up?
00:26:07.680 And of course, most, the vast majority, will not do that, but some of them have and will.
00:26:17.200 And like the Thai anecdote story that I just gave you, had we not have open borders,
00:26:23.280 others, those attacks would not have taken place.
00:26:26.320 To watch the full video, please become a premium member at LotusEaters.com.
00:26:40.800 All by which I began.
00:26:41.840 Okay.
00:26:42.200 All right.
00:26:42.400 All right.
00:26:42.880 Let's thank you.
00:26:43.400 All right.