Nationalist accounting tricks – from The Economist:
The only reason to make the within-borders population of a nation-state our analytical touchstone is a prior commitment to the idea that the nation-state is the correct unit of normative evaluation.
You can make your national income distribution whatever you like if you’re willing to ship all your poor people overseas, which is in no small part what the western world has done since the 1970s — not by moving actual people, but rather by relocating those portions of our economies which tend to be occupied by the poor. Nation state boundaries become more and more irrelevant every year, economically, informationally, environmentally. What kind jurisdictional authority will replace them?
