"zeb haradon" <zebharadon@hotmail.com> wrote:
> I'm not sure what you're saying - are migrants incapable of improving
> themselves in the way you or I have? Do you not see this as condescending?
Improve myself? I'm a lazy, lucky, First World kid. Improvement has been
poured down my throat from birth. Tons of books in the house, intellectual
parents, the genes (what else?) able to bootstrap from that environment and
teach myself to read before I was 3, piano lessons, gifted classes and
fast-paced programs in the public schools, magnet high school, access to
computers and programming classes and zero difficulty in visualizing a
computer's operation
(I TA'ed one such class; the students clearly varied from completely not
needing me to being completely clue-proof. And it looked like they were
trying, not that we were experienced teachers or anything)
followed by Caltech and Silicon Valley, with jobs and high salaries dropping
into my lap.
Vs. someone born in a Third World village, no running water or modern
medicine, minimal books or electricity, not surrounded by a literate and
industrial society so that the values of such can seep into their soul through
osmosis... yet they move to a foreign country, without money or the language
(but probably with knowing previous migrants in the area), working as long or
longer hours than the most dedicated IPO hunter, at more physically taxing and
mind-numbing work.
Improve themselves? Far more so than I have. But from so far behind... their
children might catch up, some of them.
> There's a catch-22 - is it possible for someone to be implicitly superior to
> anyone else, via genetics or whatever? I believe that, no it is not. In rare
> cases, such as mental retardation, someone is at a natural disadvantage, but
You see the human brain as binary? Either retarded, or infinitely plastic and
trainable? All normal brains are alike? A gradation of mental abilities
doesn't seem more likely, especially after the vicissitudes of education?
> else, then you would expect and want it to be reflected in differences in
> income.
Sure. But that doesn't mean being blind to the misery of others.
How'd we start this, anyway? Oh, right: Bonnie said people work harder in
proportion to financial reward, and Damien B. pointed out that the migrants
are working harder for less ultimate reward than, say, me. And they're
grateful for the opportunity, compared to back home.
Hell. People like me don't even 'work', ideally. Yeah, we want money for
creature comforts and toys. But after that work should be intellectual play,
or at least a mixture of that and hired labor for someone else.
And Bill Gates is driven, probably. He's talking about giving most of his
money to charity when he dies, not to his kids, or on transhumanist causes or
anything. I doubt he planned to work hard so that he could set up a vaccine
or ghetto education fund. He was a good agressive CEO, and now he literally
has more money than he knows what to do with.
> immigrants, they couldn't anyone. Solution: slowly increase immigration
> quotas until they exceed the actual amount of immigration, then do away with
> them, while slowly lowering the minimum wage until it is zero.
I wonder what the unrestricted rate of immigration would be. Possibly we
could extrpolate from 19th century rates, if I knew them. But travel is so
much easier, and there are so many more people out there...
-xx- Damien X-)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:14:44 MDT