Week 24 / 2024

Welcome back to weeknotes at Worldbuilding Agency!

This week has mostly involved:

• the production of stories for the latest collaborative foresight cycle book from Media Evolution, plus
• a certain amount of admin, and a related amount of hurry-up-and-wait, related to PROJECT TEMPORAL

(Yes, I have grudgingly decided to give the project codenames thing a try. Yes, it still feels pretentious as hell. We'll see how it goes.)

One Big Thing

It is a rule of thumb that, if you have a stretch of calendar which features a bunch of deadlines or planning or travel or non-work emotional heavy lifting—or some combination of all of these categories—then this is the stretch of calendar in which you will also surely get sick.

This is almost certainly quite obvious to most people, but hey—I never promised that every week's One Big Thing would be a profound revelation, did I?

(On weeks when I've been a bit sick, the odds of revelation are lower.)

One Small Thing

Less obvious—at least to me, until recently—is the corollary: when the illness arrives, go easy on yourself. You'll get less done than usual, perhaps, but you'll get more done (and get less sick!) than if you try to thrash full days of productive work out of a body and mind that just aren't up to it.

(It has taken forty-seven years of life on this planet for me to figure this out, and it still feels deeply counterintuitive. The protestant work ethic is one hell of a drug, &c &c &c.)

A Clipping

Last week's EU election results have been interpreted as fairly grim for anyone to the left of center—though things actually look a little more positive up here in the Nordics, where a red-green resurgence stands in contrast to the brown-blue drift to the south.

Now, pretty much everybody agrees that the causal force behind this surge of right-wing sentiment is immigration. But the thing is, that's not really true—though it's a theory that has been cynically encouraged by politicians on both sides of the spectrum, which goes a long way to explain its stickiness.

In truth, the strongest anti-immigrant sentiment is usually found in areas where the inflow of immigrants is lowest. So what's the real issue? According to one David Laitin, writing for The Conversation, it's actually emigration from these areas that's the problem:

First, as many studies have shown, the people who move from the periphery to urban areas are more likely to lean left. With their departure, the remaining pool of voters naturally contains a greater proportion of conservatives than before. But composition of the electorate is only part of the story.

The political leanings of voters in depopulating regions also changed, from center-left to populist right. Here, emigration played a key role. As communities lose more and more of their working-age population, they experience a decline in public services – due both to dwindling numbers and a shrinking tax base. As a result, schools and hospitals are shuttered, public transportation is cut and local businesses close.

Along with these quality-of-life declines, living in a place that so many people choose to leave generates a sense of status loss among those who stay.

It seems unlikely that this is quite so total an explanation as is being claimed here; speaking as a former academic, I am aware that there is a tendency in academic work to imply a more exclusive or predominant influence for a factor than may actually be the case!

But speaking also as someone who spent some time late last year and early this year editing a report dealing with the futures of migration, this piece also has a genuine "ah-hah" feeling to it—a sense of having missed something that's obvious in hindsight, and which fills a gap in your argument.

Laitin concludes that tacking further to the right with promises to "crack down" on immigration will be counterproductive, at least for center-left parties trying to regain control of their states. Unfortunately, it seems that the UK Labour party hasn't gotten that memo:

The poisonous myth that candidates are battling against all along [the East] coast is that there’d be plenty of [doctors] or affordable flats to go round if there were fewer immigrants: if they don’t see change quickly under a Labour government, those dark sentiments may only grow.

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 24 of 2024. Thanks for reading! If you've enjoyed them, it's free to subscribe, but please consider supporting this research journal with a small monthly payment—you'll get access to the occasional bit of Exclusive Content ™️, but first and foremost you'll get the warm glow that only ever comes from enabling fully independent and climate-focussed foresight research to continue.

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Have a good weekend.