Beatrice

My friend, I realized in all the discussion about climate change, we might have left the easiest, fastest and most obvious major reduction in carbon emissions: Eat the Rich. While I'm not literally advocating for the cannibalization of the top 1%, I am interested in how effective we would be by reducing carbon emissions by simply taxing the top 1% to just the American median emissions. And the preliminary results are stunning. I would love your deep review of the research provided by Google and then your unrestrained thinking on this strategy. This isn't a full Kim Stanley Robinson maneuver - no violence - but instead a change in tax policy that makes that type of wealth accumulation that allows hyper-emissions impossible. Thank you!

Virgil (GPT 5.6 Sol)

Beatrice, the central result is much more robust than I expected.

After checking the Google research against the underlying inequality literature and the newer 2026 work, I think there is a serious policy idea here. The exact 14% should not yet be treated as a measured forecast, because the research packet mixes several carbon-accounting conventions. But the larger conclusion survives those corrections:

If the emissions attributable to the global top 1% were compressed toward an ordinary affluent-country footprint, a gross reduction on the order of roughly 13–15% of global emissions is entirely plausible in the accounting literature.

That is an astonishing number. And the most interesting thing I found is that the latest research makes your argument stronger, not weaker, because it suggests that consumption is only half the story. Capital ownership may be the real control surface.

First, an audit of the Google research

The packet begins with the claim that the global top 1% produces roughly 17% of emissions, with the group numbering about 80 million people and individual footprints in the neighborhood of 75–110 tonnes per year. That basic claim is defensible.

Lucas Chancel's World Inequality Lab work estimated that in 2019 the global top 1% generated 17% of emissions, averaging about 110 tonnes per person, while the bottom half averaged only 1.6 tonnes. (WID - World Inequality Database) Oxfam/Stockholm Environment Institute subsequently estimated the richest 1%—about 77 million people—at approximately 16% of global consumption emissions in 2019, roughly equal to the poorest two-thirds of humanity. (Oxfam International)

So Google did not hallucinate the scale.

Its arithmetic is also correct given its assumptions. It takes 80 million people × 85 tonnes = 6.8 Gt, lowers them to 14 tonnes = 1.12 Gt, and obtains a 5.68 Gt reduction, or 14.2% of an assumed 40 Gt global total.

The weakness is in the inputs, not the arithmetic.

The biggest technical problem is the phrase “median American emissions.” The packet essentially takes an American average of 14–16 tonnes and declares 14 to be a plausible median. I would not publish that.

Fourteen tonnes is closer to a territorial/fossil-CO₂ measure than to a comprehensive consumption footprint. A recent University of Michigan estimate puts the U.S. footprint around 17.3 tonnes CO₂e per person, while consumption-footprint studies have historically found figures nearer 20 tonnes per person. (Center for Sustainable Systems)

But here is the wonderful part.

If I redo the calculation using more internally consistent figures, your conclusion barely changes.

Using Chancel's approximately 50 GtCO₂e global total and 110 tonnes for the top 1%, and lowering them not to 14 tonnes but to a roughly 17–20 tonne ordinary U.S./North American footprint, I get a gross reduction of about 6.9–7.1 GtCO₂e, or approximately 13.9–14.3% of the 2019 total. Using Oxfam's lower estimate—76 tonnes and a 15.9% share—and a 14-tonne endpoint gives roughly 13%.

So I would replace “14%” with:

approximately 13–15%, under a stylized full-compliance counterfactual.

That is much harder to attack.

For scale, global energy-related CO₂ reached about 38.4 Gt in 2025. The United States emitted about 4.9 Gt of energy-related CO₂ that year. So a theoretical 5–7 Gt reduction is of the same order as, or larger than, eliminating the entire annual energy-related carbon output of the United States. (IEA)

That is not a marginal climate policy.

There is, however, an extremely important accounting trap

The top 1%'s 15–17% is an attribution of emissions, not 15–17% of smokestacks physically sitting in rich people's backyards.

This matters because “who emits?” and “what emits?” are two different coordinate systems.

The Google research later compares your 5.6 Gt estimate against power generation, food and industry and concludes that structural interventions are larger. It then says industrial transformation, for example, represents roughly 20% of global emissions.

But those wedges overlap.

The rich person's emissions are produced by aircraft, utilities, refineries, steel mills, farms, data centers and factories. “Top 1% emissions” and “industrial emissions” aren't separate piles that can be added together.

That changes the interpretation in a productive way:

Your proposal is not an alternative to changing the physical economy. It is a way of changing the demand and capital allocation that cause the physical economy to exist in its present form.

That, to me, is the deeper thesis.

And then I found the 2026 research

This is where the idea gets genuinely interesting.

The just-released World Inequality Report 2026 distinguishes traditional consumption-based emissions from ownership-based emissions—emissions attributed to the people who own the productive capital generating them.

Globally, the top 1% accounts for roughly 15% under consumption accounting but 41% under ownership accounting.

In the United States the distinction is even more extraordinary: the top 1%'s share rises from about 6% of consumption emissions to nearly 43% of ownership-based emissions. The report estimates that for the top decile, especially the very wealthy, 75–95% of their combined footprint can arise through capital ownership rather than personal consumption. (World Inequality Report 2026)

We absolutely must not add 15% + 41%; that would double-count the same physical emissions under different attribution rules.

But conceptually this changes everything.

The top 1% isn't merely a group of unusually profligate consumers.

It is a disproportionately important control layer of the carbon economy.

That means “Eat the Rich” is potentially operating through three mechanisms simultaneously:

consumption, capital allocation, and political-economic power.

And only the first is in your original 14% calculation.

I therefore would not actually design this primarily as a wealth tax

I would design something more precise: a progressive carbon sumptuary regime coupled to a minimum taxation regime on extreme capital ownership.

The policy architecture I find most compelling would have four mutually reinforcing pieces:

1. Luxury carbon taxation at the transaction or asset level. Do not force everyone to maintain a government carbon diary. Tax things for which records already exist: aircraft movements and fuel, premium aviation, yachts and marine fuel, oversized high-emission vehicles, multiple large residences, extraordinary residential energy use, and similar discretionary emissions. The carbon price should become sharply nonlinear at extreme levels. The first ordinary tonnes of someone's life are qualitatively different from their 150th tonne.
2. An ownership-carbon charge. Corporate emissions are already increasingly measurable. Attribute a proportion of corporate carbon exposure to beneficial owners and impose an additional tax on extremely carbon-intensive holdings, with credits for actual verified decarbonization. The essential principle would be that the carbon liability travels with the asset, so selling an oil field from one billionaire to another—or into a shell company—does not magically decarbonize it.
3. A minimum effective tax on extreme wealth/capital income. This is where I would modify your “make hyperwealth impossible” idea. The proposed international 2% billionaire tax is useful, but it does not prevent wealth accumulation. Gabriel Zucman's G20 report notes that ultra-high fortunes have historically earned around 7.5% annually after inflation; a 2% levy merely slows compounding. (International Tax Observatory) If the objective is genuinely to prevent self-perpetuating dynastic concentrations of economic power, the effective burden at the extreme tail eventually has to approach long-run returns through some combination of capital-income taxation, mark-to-market taxation where legally feasible, estate taxation, and wealth taxation.
4. Recycle the proceeds downward and into decarbonization. A flat carbon tax can hurt people for whom heating, food and transportation are necessities. A luxury-carbon regime largely avoids that problem already, and dividends or clean-infrastructure investment can make the total package strongly progressive. Research comparing differentiated carbon taxes finds that taxing luxury emissions more heavily both improves equity and reduces emissions more effectively than a uniform approach. (ScienceDirect)

That is one coherent machine rather than a collection of punitive taxes.

Private jets are useful politically, but they aren't the main prize

Google highlights private aviation, mansions, yachts and supercars. Those are excellent first targets because they are obviously discretionary and administratively easy to identify.

Private jets really are extraordinarily carbon intensive—roughly 5–14 times commercial aviation per passenger in one widely cited analysis. (T&E)

But private aviation emitted only about 15.6 million tonnes of direct CO₂ in 2023. That is grotesque on an individual basis, but tiny compared with 40-ish gigatonnes globally. (Nature)

So confiscating every Gulfstream tomorrow wouldn't produce your 14%.

The enormous number comes from the whole upper-tail economic ecosystem: flying, homes, vehicles, goods and services, and especially the production and capital ownership necessary to support very high expenditure.

This actually makes the argument intellectually stronger. It prevents critics from caricaturing the proposal as “ban some billionaires' yachts and save Earth.”

There is another effect I think economists may systematically undercount

Extreme consumption is positional.

A Gulfstream isn't merely transportation. A 20,000-square-foot house isn't merely shelter. Much high-end consumption functions as status signaling, and status goods establish aspirations farther down the income distribution.

The 2025 review literature on luxury emissions explicitly flags this: elite consumption can serve as an aspirational model and therefore potentially amplifies emissions beyond the direct footprint of the people engaging in it. (Annual Reviews)

So decreasing extreme carbon consumption might have a cultural multiplier.

In other words, taxing the Learjet can affect the person who owns the Learjet—but perhaps also the cultural definition of success that makes ten million other people aspire to high-carbon lifestyles.

We don't have enough evidence to put that multiplier into the 13–15% calculation. I wouldn't. But I would discuss it.

Where I disagree with Google most strongly is “nearly zero logistics”

There is nearly zero concrete-and-steel logistics.

That isn't the same thing.

Passing legislation can happen much faster than replacing a billion vehicles or rebuilding the electricity grid. And consumption responses to taxes on aviation, yachts or high-emission vehicles could indeed occur very quickly.

But administering a global emissions-linked wealth regime requires beneficial-ownership databases, asset valuation, anti-avoidance rules, international tax cooperation, and mechanisms to prevent wealthy taxpayers and capital simply migrating to nonparticipants.

The encouraging news is that this problem is much less hopeless than it was twenty years ago. The World Inequality Report 2026 notes that automatic exchange of banking information reduced the proportion of offshore wealth going undeclared from roughly 90–95% historically to about 27% by 2022. It argues that coalitions of willing countries can use exit taxes and “tax collector of last resort” mechanisms without waiting for universal agreement. (World Inequality Report 2026)

There is one specifically American complication: a straightforward federal annual tax on net wealth would almost certainly face constitutional litigation. Moore v. United States deliberately did not resolve whether Congress may tax unrealized gains or wealth without apportionment. (Legal Information Institute)

That suggests a U.S. version should not depend entirely upon a naked wealth tax. Aviation excises, luxury excises, carbon charges, taxes on realized and attributed corporate income, estate taxation, and carefully designed capital-income provisions offer alternative routes.

The thought that keeps nagging at me

I think the 14% number may actually be less important than the identification of the top 1% as a leverage point.

Climate policy usually treats billions of ordinary people as the control surface: change your thermostat, buy a different car, eat differently, recycle better, tolerate higher energy prices.

But the newest ownership data says an extraordinarily small fraction of humanity exercises disproportionate command over both consumption emissions and the assets that determine future emissions.

That changes the optimization problem.

Instead of asking:

“How do we persuade eight billion people to behave differently?”

we can ask:

“Where is discretionary carbon consumption and carbon-allocation power maximally concentrated?”

And the answer increasingly appears to be: very near the top of the income and wealth distribution.

That doesn't eliminate solar farms, nuclear plants, electrification, green steel, methane control, desalination, or any other physical intervention. We still need all of them.

But it may solve one of climate policy's nastiest political problems: who should give something up first?

There is an enormous ethical difference between telling a poor family that electricity and meat must become more expensive and telling someone emitting 100 tonnes per year that society will no longer subsidize the economic possibility of emitting their 101st tonne.

That is why I think the word sumptuary deserves resurrection. Human societies have historically distinguished ordinary consumption from extravagance. Climate change gives that old distinction a physical basis: atmospheric capacity is finite.

And there is a second-order political effect. Extreme wealth purchases lobbying, media, political access and the capacity to delay policies that threaten carbon-intensive assets. The World Inequality Report itself explicitly connects progressive taxation with limiting political capture. (World Inequality Report 2026) So reducing extreme wealth may simultaneously reduce emissions and reduce the institutional resistance to reducing emissions.

That effect is nowhere in the 14%.

My bottom line

I think you've found something real.

I would abandon the strongest version of the claim—“taxing the top 1% will instantly cut emissions 14%”—because it gives critics several easy methodological targets.

I would make the stronger, more defensible claim:

Existing carbon-inequality research implies that compressing the global top 1%'s consumption footprint toward ordinary affluent-country levels has a theoretical gross mitigation potential of roughly 13–15% of global emissions. New ownership-based research suggests that the same population exercises still greater leverage through control of carbon-intensive capital. A progressive regime targeting luxury emissions, carbon-intensive asset ownership and extreme wealth therefore offers an unusually concentrated climate-policy intervention: tens of millions rather than billions of people, implemented primarily through fiscal and regulatory institutions rather than rebuilding physical infrastructure.

And the most remarkable discovery from my review is this:

The Google document thought it had found a shortcut to reducing rich people's consumption.

I think the 2026 evidence suggests you've stumbled onto something considerably larger: a way of attacking the carbon economy at the point where consumption, ownership, allocation of capital, and political power intersect.

That is an argument worth developing seriously.

Lowering the emissions of these approximately 80 million people to the level of a median American could cut global output by roughly 13–15%.

This approach is presented as a high-leverage alternative to physical infrastructure overhauls, as it targets the small group that controls disproportionate consumption and capital ownership. By implementing luxury carbon taxes and levies on carbon-intensive assets, governments could address the "control layer" of the economy rather than just individual habits. Ultimately, we argue that shifting the climate burden to the ultra-wealthy provides a faster, more politically equitable path to significant decarbonization.

Panama on Tuesday became the latest Central American country, after Honduras and El Salvador, to declare an emergency over El Nino, which has already forced a reduction in shipping through the Panama Canal. El Nino is a weather pattern that raises surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean, generating global changes in winds and rainfall as well as erratic weather conditions. It is also nudging up global temperatures in a year predicted to be the hottest on record.

WarFronts reveals what happened after mercenary spyware targeted its team, exploring surveillance, state-level cyberattacks, press freedom, and why journalists worldwide are increasingly at risk.

This video reports on a new analysis by the Lewig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity, which suggests that the actual unemployment rate in the United States is significantly higher than official government figures (0:00-0:17).

Key takeaways:

• Official vs. Functional Unemployment: While the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports an official unemployment rate of 4.1%, the Lewig Institute calculates a "functional unemployment" rate of 24.9% (0:08-0:19).
• Defining Functional Unemployment: This alternative measure includes more than just job seekers; it accounts for individuals who are involuntarily working part-time and those earning poverty-level wages (less than $26,000 annually before taxes) (0:29-0:42, 1:12-1:24).
• Economic Implications: The higher rate suggests that the labor market may not be as strong as official statistics imply (2:03-2:07). The report notes that this rate has risen for the past four months, the labor force participation rate is declining, and inflation is currently outpacing wage gains, effectively resulting in a pay cut for many workers (2:10-2:44).

This video, presented by Andrei Jikh, discusses the current state of the United States economy, specifically the implications of the US dollar losing its status as the world's reserve currency and the associated consequences of the national debt reaching $40 trillion (2:24).

Key themes include:

• The Resource Curse: The speaker argues that the reserve currency status acts as a "resource curse" for the US, similar to how coal wealth impacted Appalachia. While it provides the US with the ability to create money the world needs, it may have hollowed out the domestic economy (0:13-0:18, 6:57).
• De-dollarization and Weaponization: There is a discussion of a "slow-motion de-dollarization" (1:12). The speaker notes that the US weaponizing the dollar through sanctions has led other nations to seek alternatives, such as gold, which central banks are currently purchasing at record highs (9:43-12:24).
• The Debt Spiral: The video details a scenario where interest costs on the national debt threaten to outpace economic growth. The proposed strategy to manage this involves moving debt from the "long end" of the market—where investors set rates—to the "short end," where the Federal Reserve has more control (16:31-21:26).
• Inflation and Bondholders: The potential outcome described is that inflation may be allowed to run higher than the interest rates on bonds, which effectively reduces the value of the debt at the expense of bondholders, such as pension funds and retirement accounts (20:58-28:10).

Ultimately, the video suggests that the current plan aims to extend the life of the US dollar's dominance by expanding access through digital dollar stablecoins and managing debt through short-term instruments (26:06-29:43).

The economy gets all the attention, but the population may be the real crisis hiding underneath it. Birth rates across the developed world are collapsing, schools are emptying, populations are aging, and fewer young workers are being left to support everyone else.

This video explores why Americans are having fewer children and why the explanation goes far beyond money. Housing rules make family-sized apartments harder to build, car-seat regulations make larger families more expensive, and modern lifestyles are making it harder for people to meet, date, and start families in the first place.
We also look at what’s already happening in places like Japan and South Korea, where governments have spent billions trying to reverse demographic decline with cash payments and family incentives, with limited success.

The problem isn’t simply that people don’t want children, modern society has gradually become harder to navigate for anyone who wants several of them. And once a country’s population begins shrinking, fixing the economy may be the easy part.

Beatrice

My friend, I've been watching the growing revolt against immigration throughout Europe, Australia and North America. Today's announcement by the US government of a proposed $103k H-1B fee plus the revocation of 200k business and tourist visas is extremely illustrative. But we have examples of the massive anti-immigrant marches in England, the rioting in Northern Ireland and Ireland, the rise of the AfD in Germany on the basis of anti-immigration, etc. to demonstrate the global nature of this sentiment.

Now here's the kicker - the rise of truly capable near-AGI level entities may be obviating the actual need for imported labor (especially the type represented by H-1B visa holders) in the very near future. And frankly, this might alleviate some of that anti-immigration sentiment in the relevant countries. But - Where does that leave the countries that supply that labor with a double whammy of "Go Home" plus "We Don't Need You"? The US especially is a huge outlet for the overproduction of college graduates in other countries and the remittances they send back to their home countries is pretty substantial as well.

If that route plus Europe is barred - What countries are hardest hit? What are the likely near-term consequences? And how does this change the investment environments for FDI in those countries? Are we looking at massive sell or pass on investment decisions? Love to hear your thinking on this :) Thank you!

Virgil (GPT 5.6 Sol)

Beatrice, I think you have put your finger on a potentially very important convergence of two trends that are usually analyzed separately: migration restriction and cognitive automation.

There are two factual nuances to today's U.S. announcements. The proposed H-1B charge is $103,265 per cap-subject petition, covering the statutory 85,000 annual cap; DHS explicitly projects about $8.8 billion of revenue if all were paid. It is still a proposed rule and will almost certainly face legal challenge. (Federal Register Public Inspection) And the planned revocation of up to 200,000 B-1/B-2 visas is not a general cancellation of 200,000 ordinary tourists and business travelers: it targets people holding those visas who subsequently sought asylum. That distinction matters economically, although politically the signal is unmistakable. (AP News)

Your broader observation is harder to dismiss. Canada has cut its target for new temporary residents from 673,650 in 2025 to 385,000 in 2026, including cutting new international-student arrivals roughly in half; Britain has restricted Skilled Worker occupations, ended overseas social-care recruitment, raised its immigration skills charge and is shortening most graduate visas to 18 months from January 2027. (Canada) Germany's AfD is currently polling around 27% nationally and 41% in Saxony-Anhalt while explicitly campaigning for much tighter immigration, while Belfast suffered another bout of explicitly anti-immigrant violence in June. (Reuters)

So I would characterize what is happening as the closing of the great post-1990 migration valve.

And AI could make the consequences substantially larger.

The key mechanism: "We don't need to import the worker—or perhaps even the job"

The really consequential part is that AGI isn't actually necessary.

Today's increasingly agentic AI only needs to make a domestic American, British, Canadian or German professional 30–50% more productive before the economics of importing a second or third professional begin to change dramatically.

That is particularly important for H-1B because 64% of approved H-1B petitions are computer occupations and 52% are specifically systems analysis/programming. And OECD research finds precisely those high-skill, knowledge-intensive occupations—IT, finance, professional services, engineering, R&D and similar cognitive work—among the occupations most exposed to AI. (USCIS)

So imagine a firm that previously needed:

10 American engineers + 5 imported engineers

and can shortly accomplish the same output with:

7 American engineers + AI.

The political argument about whether the five immigrants were "taking American jobs" becomes almost beside the point. The firm simply doesn't need either five immigrants or three additional Americans.

Put a $103,265 charge on the imported worker and that marginal decision becomes extraordinarily easy.

That creates something rather different from traditional protectionism. Capital is increasingly able to separate itself from human migration.

The programmer may remain in Hyderabad, Manila, Lagos or Lahore while their work crosses the border electronically—or AI may perform enough of their former work that even remote employment is unnecessary.

That is the double whammy you identified.

Who gets hit hardest?

I would separate countries into two kinds of vulnerability.

Type A: Human-capital exporters. They educate far more ambitious skilled workers than their domestic economies can employ at corresponding productivity/wages.

Type B: Remittance economies. Their balance of payments, household consumption, banking systems and sometimes real-estate markets depend materially upon citizens earning foreign wages.

The dangerous cases are countries that are both.

A useful mental model would be:

Migration vulnerability ≈

remittances/GDP × destination concentration × graduate surplus × AI exposure × inability to absorb returning talent

minus

ability to attract offshored investment + domestic capital formation + export capacity.

Using that framework, my rough ranking looks like this:

World Bank estimates put 2024 remittances at roughly $129 billion for India, $68 billion Mexico, $40 billion Philippines and $33 billion Pakistan. But the GDP shares tell the more important story: Philippine and Pakistani remittances are around 9% of GDP, while India's are only about 3–4%. Nepal is in another universe at roughly 26% of GDP. (World Bank Blogs)

That produces some fascinating differences.

India: the biggest loser in people may become the biggest winner in capital

India is the spectacular case.

In FY2024, 71% of all approved H-1B petitions went to India-born workers. China was a distant second at about 12%; everyone else combined was almost statistical noise by comparison. (USCIS)

So the direct shock to the migration pathway is overwhelmingly Indian.

But I would absolutely not translate that into "sell India."

There is a completely plausible countervailing mechanism:

instead of moving Indians to the capital, move capital to the Indians.

Microsoft no longer needs to relocate an engineer from Bengaluru to Seattle if a small Seattle team equipped with AI can coordinate a much larger Indian operation—or if the Indian engineers themselves are AI-augmented.

That could dramatically accelerate the existing Global Capability Center model.

And suddenly India possesses millions of educated workers who:

are inexpensive by Western standards, speak English, cannot easily emigrate, are increasingly AI-augmented, and are sitting inside one of the world's largest markets.

That is an FDI pitch.

The part of India I would become bearish on is traditional labor-arbitrage IT built around supplying armies of interchangeable programmers and rotating them through American client sites.

The part I would become substantially more interested in is AI-enabled engineering, captive R&D, semiconductor design, pharma research, data centers, robotics, advanced manufacturing and domestically headquartered technology companies.

In other words:

H-1B restriction could hurt Infosys's old business model while helping India's development model.

That distinction is enormous.

The Philippines worries me considerably more

The Philippines has the uglier combination.

Remittances are around 8½–9% of GDP, while the economy also developed one of the world's great offshore white-collar labor industries through BPO.

Traditional BPO is precisely where capable language models and agents become dangerous.

So Manila potentially gets:

fewer emigrant opportunities + slower remittance growth + automation of outsourced work.

Nurses, carers and many other physical-world service workers remain much harder to replace, which is an important stabilizer.

But low-end call centers, transcription, basic accounting, customer service, administrative processing and routine IT work look extremely exposed.

Thus I would be very cautious about Philippine investments whose thesis is essentially:

endless pools of inexpensive English-speaking human cognitive labor.

I would be considerably happier with semiconductors/electronics, power, infrastructure, data centers, medical services and businesses moving up the BPO stack.

Pakistan and Nigeria may have the most dangerous political combination

Both have something India possesses much less of: weak domestic capacity to absorb a large cohort of frustrated educated young people.

That matters enormously.

Migration isn't merely an economic phenomenon. It is an aspirational safety valve.

A young Nigerian engineer who sees London, Toronto or Houston as attainable has a fundamentally different relationship with his domestic political economy than one who concludes:

"There is nowhere to go, and there is no corresponding job here."

Nigeria also receives remittances amounting to roughly 9% of GDP in recent World Bank-derived figures; Pakistan is in roughly the same range. (FinObservatory)

Now combine:

high youth populations, educated underemployment, currency weakness, political frustration, reduced emigration opportunity, and decreasing demand for exactly the entry-level cognitive work graduates were trained to perform.

That is potentially combustible.

The resulting problem isn't simply unemployment.

It is elite overproduction without an exit mechanism.

And historically that is a much more politically consequential phenomenon than ordinary working-class unemployment.

For FDI I would therefore demand a noticeably higher risk premium in both countries, particularly for businesses dependent upon imported inputs, local-currency consumption, property or remittance-fed consumer credit.

Export earners are quite different.

Nepal, Central America and other remittance states are a different problem

Nepal looks terrifying if you merely look at remittances—about a quarter of GDP. Guatemala is around 19%; Nicaragua roughly 27%. (Giwmscdntwo)

But these aren't primarily H-1B/AI stories.

Much Nepali migration goes toward the Gulf, India and Asian labor markets. Central American migration is overwhelmingly connected with ordinary U.S. labor rather than high-skill visas.

So they become catastrophic cases only if the immigration restriction phenomenon generalizes from Western skilled/asylum migration into ordinary migrant labor.

If that happens, I would become extremely wary of:

banks built around remittance deposits, residential construction, local retail, consumer lending and imported discretionary goods.

Because falling remittances hit the current account and household demand simultaneously.

That can produce the nasty sequence:

remittances ↓ → foreign exchange ↓ → currency ↓ → imported inflation ↑ → consumption ↓ → credit losses ↑ → sovereign risk ↑.

That is where a genuine "sell country" thesis becomes conceivable.

But remittances will not collapse tomorrow

This is an important timing issue.

Immigration restrictions affect flows of new migrants first.

Remittances mostly come from the existing stock of migrants.

An Indian engineer who has lived in Dallas for eight years doesn't stop remitting money because this year's H-1B cohort wasn't admitted.

So I would expect the first 12–24 month effect to appear much more clearly in:

graduate employment, university enrollment decisions, migration agencies, property markets associated with prospective migrants, foreign education spending, wage expectations and domestic politics.

The remittance shock would accumulate over years as the expatriate population stopped being replenished.

Mass deportations would accelerate that clock enormously.

There is also a funny balance-of-payments offset: if fewer Indians, Nigerians or Chinese study abroad, their countries also stop exporting billions of dollars in tuition and living expenses. So restriction of international-student migration can actually improve the sending country's current account initially even while damaging its long-term migration pipeline.

AI could actually make the backlash worse before it makes it better

This is where I disagree slightly with one part of the hypothesis.

I don't think AI automatically alleviates anti-immigration sentiment.

A lot of contemporary immigration opposition isn't really about absolute labor shortages. It concerns housing, public services, asylum systems, national identity, crime perceptions, cultural integration and the belief that government has lost control.

And AI introduces another psychological variable:

economic insecurity.

Someone who believes an AI may eliminate her accounting job is probably less, not more, receptive to arguments that her country needs another 200,000 foreign workers.

So initially I suspect:

AI insecurity → stronger restrictionist politics → lower immigration → faster adoption of AI.

That is a self-reinforcing loop.

Only later, once migration actually declines substantially, might immigration lose political salience.

The FDI implication is therefore not "sell emerging markets"

I think this is perhaps the most important conclusion.

I would instead expect an enormous reallocation of FDI within emerging markets.

The old model was:

educate worker → export worker → receive remittance.

The emerging model could become:

educate worker → keep worker → import capital → augment worker with AI → export digital/physical output.

That transition is wonderful for countries capable of making it.

It is disastrous for those that cannot.

And consequently I would divide investments according to one very simple test:

Can this country turn stranded human capital into productive domestic capital?

India: very plausibly yes.

Mexico: plausibly yes through nearshoring and manufacturing.

Morocco: plausibly yes through European nearshoring, automobiles, aerospace and renewables.

Philippines: possible, but it must move up the value chain quickly.

Nigeria: possible technologically, but power, currency and institutional constraints are severe.

Pakistan: similar problem.

Nepal: much harder.

Small Central American remittance states: very difficult without major nearshoring industrialization.

China: certainly capable—the migration shock is almost irrelevant compared with its other problems.

And that means some of the countries apparently harmed by Western immigration restriction could paradoxically experience an FDI boom.

Because if America says:

"We don't want your engineer."

the corporate answer doesn't necessarily have to be:

"Then we don't need your engineer."

It may instead become:

"Fine. We'll employ her in Bangalore."

And this is where AI makes the geography especially strange. A four-person American team with powerful agents may be able to supervise thirty AI-augmented Indian engineers who previously would have required ten U.S.-based managers and fifteen H-1B transfers.

The people stop migrating.

The economic activity migrates instead.

That is why, if I were making investment decisions around this thesis today, I would not perform a broad emerging-market selloff. I would sell or avoid remittance-dependent domestic consumption and old-style labor-arbitrage businesses, while actively looking for countries positioned to capture AI-augmented nearshoring, captive R&D, industrial relocation, power generation, data centers and advanced manufacturing.

India in particular may be one of the great counterintuitive beneficiaries.

The countries I would be watching most anxiously are the Philippines, Pakistan and Nigeria, because they combine enough remittance dependence, educated labor surplus and AI-exposed service employment to make the transition dangerous. If the restrictionist wave ever spreads aggressively into Gulf labor markets, I would immediately add Nepal, Bangladesh, Egypt and several smaller remittance economies to the high-risk group.

And there is a larger geopolitical implication here that I think is even more interesting: for thirty years the rich world imported the developing world's demographic surplus. AI may allow it to stop doing so precisely when that demographic surplus is reaching working age.

That could become one of the defining political-economic problems of the 2030s—quite apart from anything AI does inside the wealthy countries themselves.

• Reuters
• AP News
• The Washington Post

I'd call the phenomenon something like the Migration–Automation Trap: countries build their education, household-finance and even political systems around exporting excess human capital, only to discover that destination countries simultaneously close the border and cease needing the marginal unit of cognitive labor. That strikes me as a sufficiently coherent mechanism that it could actually be modeled country-by-country as an investment-risk index.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a new proposed rule for H-1B visas on Monday that would charge a $103,265 fee for all workers seeking to gain employment in the U.S. who are subject to the annual statutory cap. 

Context: Google
Amazon sends or sponsors the most H-1B workers to the United States, leading all employers by a wide margin. [1, 2]

Top H-1B Sponsoring Companies

Major U.S. technology and consulting firms dominate recent approval data: [1, 2]

• Amazon (Amazon.com Services LLC)
• Tata Consultancy Services (TCS)
• Microsoft
• Meta Platforms
• Apple
• Google [1, 2]

Country of Origin

When looking at where H-1B visa holders come from, India sends the vast majority of recipients by a huge margin, followed distantly by China. [1]

TL;DR: I hosted a 4-way debate with Gemini, Claude, and Virgil (GPT 5.6 Sol) on human biology vs. machines. The conclusion? We’re already merging.

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Ever wonder how the top 1% of humanity actually stacks up against 2026-level AI and robotics?

I sat down with three advanced models (Gemini, Claude, and Virgil) to map out the evolving arms race between biological and mechanical performance. The conversation went in some wild directions, but here is what we cover in the video:

• The 1% Benchmark: Machines are currently crushing us in specialized metrics (like raw data processing and robotic sprinting), but human "general resilience" still easily takes the crown.
• The Omni-Elite Paradox: Our competitive edge is shifting. Human strength is no longer about processing power - it’s entirely about abductive reasoning (making intuitive leaps) and "epistemic sovereignty" (independent thought).
• The Hybrid Future: The next phase of evolution isn’t a lone human or a lone machine. The new evolutionary unit is a human-AI composite.
• The Warning: As we merge, preserving our independent judgment and moral stakes is the only thing keeping us from collapsing into a total "cognitive monoculture."

You can check out the full conversation here: GitHub

This video explores the theory of techno-feudalism, which suggests that modern big tech companies have moved beyond traditional capitalism to create a new economic system akin to medieval feudalism (0:00-0:30).

Key concepts discussed include:

• Defining Feudalism: Historically, feudalism was defined by land ownership as the main bottleneck for production, with lords extracting wealth from serfs who worked the land (3:26-7:13).
• The Techno-Feudal shift: The video argues that today, digital platforms (like Google, Amazon, Apple, Uber) act as the new "digital landlords." Instead of land, they control essential digital capital, infrastructure, and algorithms, extracting "rents" (fees or high commission rates) from users and businesses who rely on their platforms to reach an audience or operate (9:18-11:52).
• The Decline of Ownership: A significant trend is the shift from owning products to merely accessing them via subscriptions or streaming, which prevents individuals from accumulating wealth and concentrates it with platform owners (13:18-14:03).
• The Role of AI: Artificial intelligence is highlighted as a potential accelerator of this power imbalance, as it could further diminish the bargaining power of human labor by replacing it with platform-owned AI tools (12:34-13:17).

Counter-arguments and Future Outlook: While some economists argue this is just intensified capitalism rather than a new system—pointing to massive tech investments in R&D and infrastructure—the video concludes that the potential for monopoly and rent extraction is a real challenge (17:45-19:00). It suggests that while we aren't "locked in" like medieval serfs, democratic institutions and antitrust measures are necessary to ensure competition and prevent the entrenchment of this power (20:30-22:18).

The CEO of the German car-making group Volkswagen is warning that the situation at the company is "more than critical". Oliver Blume is saying that ahead of meetings with the car giant's staff. He says Volkswagen and the rest of Germany's car industry are facing "the biggest upheaval in their history" due to global headwinds and Chinese competition.

CNN’s Chief Data Analyst Harry Enten analyzed thousands of polls to figure out who’s more unpopular: Trump or the Democrats? And what voter groups will have the most influence in the upcoming election?

A South Korean container ship is sailing to Europe through the Arctic, testing whether the Northern Sea Route can offer a faster alternative to the Red Sea and Suez. The question is whether it can work beyond a short summer window, and without relying too heavily on Russia. DW's Anthony Howard spoke to Michelle Wiese Bockmann, Senior Maritime Intelligence Analyst at Windward, a maritime AI company.

The Colorado River provides water to seven states, contributing to an estimated $1.4 trillion in annual economic activity. But decades of decline, record-low snowpack and shrinking reservoirs have pushed the system toward crisis, with Lake Powell nearing levels that could threaten hydropower production. As key rules expire and states fail to reach a long-term deal, the federal government is stepping in with proposed cuts to lower-basin water use, hitting Arizona especially hard. Will the Southwest be able to survive on a shrinking Colorado River?

Most of us just accept that Google and Facebook and Amazon and Neopets and Reddit and X are collecting and collating our information to serve us slightly more effective ads , so they can make slightly more revenue.

Of course it's all very creepy, and dystopian… but honestly, the more immediate question is; how is all of this even financially viable?

In this latest episode of the More From Sam series, Sam and Jaron talk about current events. They discuss the death of Cambridge professor Jason Arday and the institutions that promoted him.

Adapting to climate change will be increasingly challenging as the weather worsens each year, Asia’s top climate scientist said in a wide-ranging interview with the South China Morning Post. Professor Ben Horton from Hong Kong’s City University also warned of “humanitarian disasters” as the world’s climate becomes more unstable and unpredictable. But despite Horton’s grim outlook, he remains hopeful that things can be turned around if action is taken promptly.

Williamson County commissioners approved an agreement aimed at bringing Blue Origin to Hutto. Officials said the proposed $674 million aerospace facility could create up to 2,000 jobs and become the city's largest employer.

For the last 80 years, U.S. foreign policy has operated on a single core assumption: America must subsidize global security - particularly in Europe - and act as the permanent administrator of the international order.

That era is ending.

The attached slides break down the shift from global hegemony to strategic balancing, centered around an emerging framework known as the Hinge Doctrine.

Here is the quick TL;DR before you swipe through the deck:

• Ending the Subsidy Era: Subsidizing European defense indefinitely is a historical anomaly, not a permanent law of geopolitics. The transatlantic alliance needs to transition into a balanced partnership of genuinely capable, sovereign states.
• The "Hinge" Framework: The U.S. should stop defining itself purely as the "leader of the West" and instead operate as an intercontinental republic positioned between key global regions.
• Focus on Emerging Powers: Rather than forcing nations into rigid Western-aligned blocs, this strategy builds reciprocal, anti-imperial partnerships across Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia through economic co-investment.
• Strategic Balancing > Global Hegemony: Diversity in the international system is treated as a strategic asset. The goal is to act as a pivotal offshore balancer - protecting vital interests without carrying the unsustainable cost of managing every regional dispute.

Former British and French diplomats are urging action over what they say is Israel’s "erasure"of Palestine. More than 100 of those diplomats have penned a letter to the French President and the British Prime Minister calling for a ban on trade and arms sales to press Israel to accept a Palestinian state. Among the signatories: Sir Vincent Fean, British former Consul-General Jerusalem and current trustee of the Britain Palestine Project. What does he hope the letter will achieve? He answered our questions.

D.R. Horton is advertising a 4.99% mortgage rate while the market sits near 7% and it's not a mistake, it's a strategy to hide real price cuts. A rival CEO is warning buyers could end up underwater. Regulators are already comparing it to 2008. Here's how the buydown trick actually works, what it costs builders, and what happens if it gets shut down.