A Reply on "Places" by PdxSag

[From our correspondent @PdxSag. His previous guest posts on CBS include What I've Learned the Past Decade, A "Wonderlic" Test for Agency, and his supplement regimen.] 

A recent edition of CBS Links quoted Hickman: "there are only a handful of 'place genres' out there, and each is generally produced by geography above all."

Hickman is getting his causality a little backwards here. He is correct that there are only handful of first-tier locales, but that's because there is only a handful of first-tier people in the world. What you need is a critical mass of high-agency people. High-agency means self-selection, and that implicitly requires immigration.

At the fundamental level you need a filter. You want to separate high-agency people from NPC's. Immigration, because it is a formidable barrier in both cost and effort, functions as the ultimate people-filter. Once you realize immigration is an implicit functional requirement, which means people have to make a large effort and move, all else equal, nice geography beats bad geography every single time. Obviously.

The next thing that follows from immigration as a filter is that that filter is lowest for rich people. So first-tier places will have the most rich people and the rich people that are there will have the lowest agency, which is to say most NPC-like mentalities. If that doesn't describe the world, I don't know what does. Yogi Berra famously meme-ed this phenomenon with the line “nobody goes there anymore, it’s too popular."

Once a fist-tier place is established, its high cost creates a self-reinforcing cycle that drives away low-agency people that through whatever hereditary luck landed them there. As cost to be in a place goes up, the pay-off for leaving goes up. If you’re an NPC, there is an easy and obvious arbitrage for selling and moving elsewhere. For people immigrating, whether high-agency or NPC's, the relative high cost dissuades both, the exception is the high-agency people that are into whatever specific scene makes that locale first-tier.

As more proof, the self-reinforcing cycle creates an interesting failure condition at the extreme. If cost gets so high that it becomes the sole barrier, high-agency people won't even immigrate there any more. The place becomes a rich-person amusement park. It is no longer a “real” place. It becomes a “place genre” where rich NPC’s just act out their genre programming. Examples: NorCal (to a lesser extent — it’s a big place), Sedona (obvious because it’s so much smaller), Martha’s Vineyard (smaller still), Aspen (tiny), Monaco (tiniest, relative to the whole planet from which it draws). Each place is smaller, and as it gets smaller price becomes a bigger barrier, until it is the only barrier.

Finally, we can test our assertion that immigration is the ultimate people-filter by looking at what happens when we subvert that filter through financial subsidies and perverse incentives. It so happens this is the nature of third-world to first-world immigration today. Third world immigrants the last several years are the worst of any cohort in history. This cohort has the most criminals, the least skills, and the least interest in assimilating. Immigration is not selecting for agency of any kind, rather it is selecting for criminals fleeing prosecution and grifters looking for easy social services scams and retail theft rings. These are not even high-agency thieves. These are ethnic fraud rings that often just need bodies to show-up and run a farcically simplistic scam that is only possible because the host countries are willfully ignoring the scams for political purposes.

And where are these immigrants moving to? All things equal, it should be the best, or at least the better half. Yet, it is almost the worst in the United States: Minnesota, Michigan, Maine. The implication is obvious: the immigrants are not choosing their destination, it is being chosen for them. There is one notable geographical exception too: Texas. Why Texas? If Democrats can flip Texas, Republicans will never again win the White House. The one good state with the most need for foreign immigrants to flip it for Democrats is the one state with the most H1B immigration from the Middle East and India. This is so glaringly obvious only an NPC could miss it. These are not high-agency immigrants. These are NPC's serving a political purpose for the Elites sponsoring the whole project.