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A few thoughts about Paris, France and the state of the world in general: 1. What happened yesterday is bad, but not as bad as it looks. Yes, they burnt the town hall of another city; yes, they pillaged shops and ruined some people’s lives; but it’s in line with previous protests and still confined to specific (shitty) areas. Basically: “don’t go to the 10th arrondissement and you’ll be fine” is a piece of advice I’d give every day, protest or not. 2. Yes, it’s true, immigration doesn’t work, but it’s not the main problem. It’d be easy to call for mass deportation, but a much simpler, fairer and better solution would be to… enforce the law. Yes, it’s that simple. Put these people in jail for a long time. We should merely remember that jail’s purpose is primarily to remove toxic individuals from society and that it’s OK to throw someone in prison if it’s justified and socially optimal. 3. It’s bigger than that. What’s happening is a collapse of social-democratic regimes. Tocqueville wrote that democracy narrows any inequality down to either corruption or merit. And since it’s pretty hard to admit you’re dumb, people tend to flock to revolts against the system. One way to fight that is strong growth, but there hasn’t been growth for the past 30 years. As a result, we have to deal with an increasingly angry crowd. 4. It’s not only France. France is always pretty loud about these issues, but the same is happening everywhere. You can think it’s exclusively due to immigration, but one simple rebuttal is that this anger is shared by people of various classes and ethnicities across most Western countries. 5. The truth is that our economies are collapsing and have been collapsing for the past 30 years. Up until now, we’ve made up for it with debt. But even that is coming to an end. Individually, this doesn’t mean there is no money to make, but as a group, we’re getting poorer and using as many credit cards as we can to pretend we’re not.