# Why Cavemen love Remigration ## The Vicious Cycle of Economic Misery, Zero-Sum Thinking and Authoritarianism Europe today is a continent squeezed on every front at once, stuck in what feels like a permanent state of crisis. We are still carrying the debts of the pandemic and the energy disruption that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and taking on new ones as wars continue to disrupt our supply chains. Growth forecasts are being cut, inflation is back above target, and deindustrialisation is accelerating, especially across Western and Central Europe. Underneath these acute symptoms lies a chronic disease: Europe is falling behind in the technologies that drive growth and its old corporations are starting to die without making way for worthy heirs. This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. A European worker now produces only about three-quarters of what an American does, and almost the entire gap comes from IT and AI, where Europe has been mostly a colony of consumers to Silicon Valley. Add the constant worry about energy, security, demographics and the future of work, and you get a citizenry that feels, not without reason, that the ground is sliding beneath its feet. Old people worry about their pensions; the young about diminishing opportunities and rising costs of living. The political response has been a lurch to the hard right. Giorgia Meloni has run Italy since 2022. The Freedom Party won the most votes in Austria’s 2024 election. In Germany the AfD doubled its support to come second in February 2025, and now leads the national polls. The National Rally is ahead in France, and Reform is ahead in Britain. For the first time far-right parties top the polls in the E3, Europe’s three largest economies, at once. Their pitch is much the same everywhere: shut the doors to global labour, cuddle up with the world’s oligarchs and autocrats, weaken the EU, abandon the support for Ukraine, blame the migrant and the ‘woke’ academic, and start ‘remigration’. These are policies that, as almost any economist will tell you, would not fix Europe’s crisis but deepen it. And yes, badly controlled immigration and poor integration do put a strain on European societies today — but this strain is basically a rounding error compared to the economic and social devastation that would wreck Europe should these populist policies like remigration actually be implemented. That is a tragedy — but an all too human and common one. # Remigration has already been tried This is not the first time in history nor is Europe the only place today, where people en masse vote for policies that go against their genuine interests. And it is not the first time, that they think remigration could be a solution to their socioeconomic problems. There are actually several countries in the world, that did try remigration already. There is even one country that did mass remigration on the massive scale the identitarian movement fantasises about, once, mass deporting all immigrants, something like 12% of its population: Ghana in 1969. It is about the closest thing history offers to a controlled experiment of large scale remigration. With cocoa prices collapsed, unemployment rising and the economy shrinking, Ghana’s prime minister Kofi Busia issued in 1969 the Aliens Compliance Order, giving every foreigner without a permit two weeks to leave — and the Ghanaian public cheered it as a patriotic move to kick out the illegals and hand jobs back to Ghanaians. Somewhere between a couple of hundred thousand and a million people, mostly Nigerians, were remigrated out of Ghana. But the illegal immigrants had been doing much of the work that held the economy together — they were perhaps two-fifths of the workforce, labouring on the cocoa farms, in the mines and across the retail trade — so cocoa output and prices fell even harder, the supply networks dried up, and the expulsion deepened the very downturn it was meant to cure. Unemployment and poverty got worse, because the economic pie didn’t redistribute to autochthonous Ghanaians but simply collapsed. Busia’s government was toppled within three years. And the wheel turned: as Ghana’s economy kept collapsing, over a million Ghanaians migrated to oil-rich Nigeria. And when Nigeria experienced an economic crisis in 1983 and 1985, it actually enacted remigration on the Ghanaians living in Nigeria. The same script — each neighbour trying to export its misery, everyone poorer for it. While the remigration policies enacted by Ghana in 1969 and Nigeria 1983/1985 are remarkable to single out due to their scale and their similarity to the remigration policies proposed by the European far right populists today, they are not the only cases of remigration policies in human history. But all of them have a thing in common: They never solved the issues they were supposed to solve, but just worsened every already existing crisis and deepened economic decline. In 1972 Uganda’s expulsion of Asians gutted its commercial sector. Angola’s Operação Brilhante in 2004/05 expelled well over a hundred thousand foreigners — mostly Congolese and West African miners. The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights actually had to prohibit the ‘mass expulsion of non-nationals’ in 1981 because the practice had become as routine as devastating to the African continent. Even in the Western World, remigration has been already tried in the past: In 1929–1936 the USA denaturalised and repatriated several hundred thousand ethnic Mexican US citizens under the slogan American jobs for real Americans. It actually had the opposite effect: less and worse jobs for the remaining Americans, as removing Mexican laborers reduced demand for skilled, managerial, administrative and sales jobs across the economy. There is little doubt looking at the economic scientific literature, that if European countries today would start engaging in mass remigration, that they would at least hurt themselves as the USA did in the 1930s. And in the worst case, European countries would descend into the same vicious cycles of economic collapse and ethnic hatred as the ones many African countries have been trapped in for decades. I can understand, why some wicked people in Washington or Moscow would cheer on for this, but this is nothing any real European patriot should wish for. It’s somewhat ironic, that people like Martin Sellner believe to save European Civilisation, while they themselves think with the mindset of a 1960s African demagogue. Every economics department in Europe could tell them, that remigration will most likely turn Europe not into 1950s Germany, but into 1970s Ghana. The idea of the far right of saving Europe amounts to turning Europe institutionally and economically into an African failed state. Remigration is not only based on a lack of empathy, vile hatred and racism. It is also a dumb policy that solves nothing. Yet it is an increasingly popular policy, catapulting its advocates to the top of the polls. And while propaganda, ignorance and so on all play some (overrated) role here to explain why, there is a deeper economic and psychological mechanism underpinning this devastating popularity. # It Isn’t Ignorance Alone That Feeds Selfharm and Populism In hard times, people vote quite regularly not for the policies that would pull them out of the hole, but tragically for the ones that dig it deeper: against trade, against immigration, for the rich to be cut down rather than the pie grown, for populists who promise to grab someone else’s wealth and share it out. This regularly leads to what economists like Benjamin Friedman describe as vicious circles: economic misery breeds zero-sum thinking which breeds extractive institutions and exclusionary authoritarianism; and exclusionary authoritarianism and extractive institutions breed a zero-sum environment and more economic misery, leading to a downward spiral. Many third world countries are stuck exactly in this kind of vicious circle; yet that a supposedly civilised place like Europe might slip into one, is something people do not take seriously enough as an increasingly real risk. The comfortable explanation for the rise of demagogues that add fuel to the fire in times of economic disruption, popular among those the crisis hasn’t touched, is that populist voters are simply ignorant, or that they have been conned by demagogues … or, lately, by Elon Musk’s shitposting on X. But that describes a symptom, not the cause. The real causes of why demagoguery even finds fertile ground in the minds of the people, I think, are more insidious and more tragic. One of the main culprits is to be found in a deep-seated mental neuropsychological vestige that has outlived the world it was adaptive for. # It’s Zero-Sum-Thinking The mental vestige underpinning much of the hard right and hard left’s populist policies is zero-sum thinking — the gut conviction that one person’s gain must be another’s loss, that wealth and well-being are a fixed pie to be divided rather than something we can grow together; that one has to take from others to advance in life. It is what lies at the dark heart of many of the ugly political phenomena we see rising today: protectionist tariffs, tribalism, discrimination, racism, authoritarianism, gender wars, oppression of women, wars of conquest and exploitation. This insidious tragedy rests on two mechanisms that were already central in my earlier writing: The first is economic: A growing economy is, in the language of game theory, a non-zero-sum game; a stagnant one is, in the aggregate, zero-sum; and a shrinking one is negative-sum. When the pie is growing, everyone can win at once; when it stops, society splits into winners and losers — and that split measurably sours a society’s moral temper, turning people from sharing and cooperation toward gate-keeping and discrimination. The dark irony, well documented in sociological and economic research, is that this very behaviour deepens and prolongs the downturn, as zero-sum thinking becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The second idea is evolutionary: Many of our moral intuitions are based on neural heuristics, on evolved rules of thumb, shaped by and for the conditions our ancestors lived in, and a rule of thumb can outlive its world and curdle into a maladaptive vestige: a leftover that no longer helps and often hurts, surfacing in what behavioural economists call biases. # In the Cave there was no Growth Zero-sum thinking exists because, for almost all of human history, the world really was close to zero-sum. There was barely any growth and barely any specialisation. Technological innovation, the main driver of real per-capita growth, was essentially nil for most of the 300,000 years our species has existed. What a tribe of cavemen could produce, so to speak, stayed roughly fixed over a lifetime. If your neighbour got a bigger slice, yours was smaller, and if another tribe moved into your hunting grounds, conflict over the game was all but certain; strangers promised disease and competition not enrichment. In that world, suspicion of an outsider and of another’s gain was often adaptive. Today we live in generally positive-sum worlds, where constantly improving technology and the division of labour in an expanding economy give us the leverage so that, when we work and trade together, actually everyone can be better off at the end of the day. The trouble is that the neural wiring shaped by and for the zero-sum caveman world is still in our heads. It is tribal, territorial, quick to smell a cheat and wary of the stranger, and when you feed it the news of a modern, impersonal market it reaches the wrong verdict: that trade is a wash, and that a stranger’s profit must be a kind of theft. Policies that match these gut feelings feel right, just and true whether or not they are — and that is exactly the button populists love to press, because it lets them dress a bad idea up as common sense while firing the emotional circuitry that bypasses reason and mobilises voters. Thankfully, zero-sum thinking is not inescapable and it does not run at full strength all the time; the brain is plastic, and in everyday plenty our rational faculties keep the old reflex in check. It flares up when things grow scarce and fades when there is enough to go around. When Sahil Chinoy, Nathan Nunn, Sandra Sequeira and Stefanie Stantcheva surveyed 20,400 Americans, they found zero-sum thinking strongest in people — and in the descendants of people — who had lived through stagnation, blocked mobility or slavery, and weakest where growth had been the norm. The intuition is tuned to its environment, exactly as you would expect of an adaptation. Loss aversion and fear make it worse and into a self-fulfilling prophecy: in a downturn the fear of losing what you have bites harder than the hope of gaining more, so someone else’s rise begins to look like your coming fall. Perception and reality then feed each other, because a shrinking economy really has, for the moment, turned a little more zero-sum. To a mind running on zero-sum thinking, taking from others does often not feel like taking but rather it feels like protecting your own; doing what needs to be done. Closing the border, punishing the visible out-group, handing power to a strongman who promises to divide a fixed pie, all this feels like defence, and like fairness; it feels like the path out of the dark valley instead of into it. # The Tragedy of the Rust Belt America’s Rust Belt offers one of the saddest current examples that is more current and closer probably in understanding to most of my readers than the historic remigration examples cited before. The steel and car country of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia threw its weight behind Trump and his tariffs, sold as the policy that would liberate America and bring the factories back. But tariffs on steel and aluminium raise costs for the far larger number of businesses that use those metals, invite retaliation, and freeze investment under a cloud of uncertainty. The tariffs rolled out in 2025 brought no revival, but caused tens of thousands of lost factory jobs, mills shut in the very towns that had cheered them on, and new plants drifting south to the Sun Belt instead. And this is no one-off. Looking at more than eight hundred elections across twenty democracies since 1870, Manuel Funke, Moritz Schularick and Christoph Trebesch found that the far right gains about thirty per cent in vote share after financial crises in particular. A crisis does not just make people poorer; it makes blaming someone feel like common sense. When economies stall, intolerance, resentment and distrust climb. But also on the other side, when things go well and when economies grow, people grow more open and generous. Few decide consciously to become less generous in an economic downturn — it is simply that, in a shrinking and threatening world, generosity starts to feel like a luxury, and the stranger like a competitor rather than a potential friend. Lasting prosperity is built, as a large body of economic research confirms, on inclusive institutions — property rights that are secure and widely shared, open competition, a real political say for ordinary people, an effective integration of human capital in the labour market undistorted by discrimination — while their opposite, extractive institutions in which a small elite hoards power and profit, chokes off the incentive to invest, build and invent, while discrimination and xenophobia lead to misallocated human capital. Russia is a textbook case of a society that has been stuck in economic misery and feudal systems for decades and is now nearing the end of a self-destructive cycle: under economic pressure it has tightened the grip of a narrow elite, cast the West and its own dissidents as enemies, wrecked its own labour force and finances with the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and in 2023 branded the country’s ‘LGBT movement’ an extremist organisation — scapegoating and seizure dressed up as national defence, while the economy and people it claims to protect quietly rot and despair. Many poor third world countries are just stuck in vicious circles, where they constantly harm themselves with authoritarian measures; for example, when Uganda passed its brutal Anti-Homosexuality Act in 2023, with punishments up to life imprisonment and death, the World Bank suspended new loans to a country that depends on them, worsening the very scarcity that drove the politics. The culture then slides down after the institutions. Where life really is zero-sum, beliefs that discourage effort — envy, a fear of standing out, suspicion of anyone who does well — actually catch on, because they keep a lid on cut-throat competition in the short run even as they smother growth in the long. So the lunge toward exclusion and extraction backfires twice: it dismantles the engine of recovery and locks in the low-trust, low-effort mood that scarcity already breeds. It is far easier to fall into such a spiral than to climb back out; because to climb out, you have to act against your gut instinct and be generous in times of scarcity. # A Stone-Age Reflex in a Modern Economy Zero-sum thinking feels like common sense up close and is disastrous at scale. It was maybe right for the cavemen, where the pie really was fixed and a rival’s gain really was your loss. It is dead wrong in a modern economy, where we enlarge the pie ourselves and the cure for scarcity is to build the open, inclusive institutions that grow it. Our intuitions cannot tell the two worlds apart, because our brain was never shaped by evolution to do so — which is exactly what makes zero-sum thinking a maladaptive vestige: not some arbitrary mistake, but an old, once-useful response firing faithfully in a world that has moved on. People who fall for populists in times of crisis are not necessarily evil, dumb or ignorant; they are just succumbing to an outdated instinct, that driven by fear basically bypasses their rational faculties towards ancient fight-or-flight scripts of xenophobia and tribalism. If the gut response to hard times is the very thing that makes hard times last, then protecting growth and open institutions like liberal democracy and the rule of law is not one nice goal among many or entitled virtue signaling but a guard-rail against a failure we are all wired for. And since you cannot argue human nature with its evolutionary flaws like zero-sum thinking away — the New Soviet Man never showed up — the only lever that works is smart institutional design: institutions that aim our competitive drive at making things rather than grabbing them; institutions like constitutions and courts that prevent us from dismantling the foundation of our prosperity in the heat of the moment. Or like capitalist markets, that channel competitive drives into productive entrepreneurship instead of destructive pillaging; making the megalomaniacs compete on making products cheaper for everyone instead of on who can slaughter and conquer more. And so on. When in times of crisis our archaic gut instincts tell us to burn down liberal democracy, we have to remind ourselves, that actually liberal democracy is the most likely way out. This also is the case for the crisis Europe finds itself in today. # The Way Out A possible future Europe that surrendered to its fears — that let populist hardliners take power and deport people for the colour of their skin — would not be protecting its prosperity but throwing it away. The cutting edge of the technology our economic recovery depends on rests on a tiny, highly mobile group of people: more than half of the world’s top AI researchers work in a country other than the one that trained them, and America’s lead — roughly sixty per cent of the very best — is built almost entirely on its power to attract them. Driving that talent away would slam shut the one door Europe most needs open. There is no surer way to lose a race than to send your own runners home. And even looking beyond the elite high skilled labour; in Germany alone foreign nationals contribute 13% of GDP; and policies like the remigration plans of the AfD would not only drive away those, but also destroy trust and every attractiveness for high skilled labour; it would wreck Germany’s economy into the state of a third world country, doomed to be vassalised by Russia and the USA. The way out of the current crisis will not be paved by succumbing to the most vile instincts. The way out of the crisis begins with naming zero-sum thinking for what it is and refusing to fall for it; and especially by embracing a positive-sum mindset. Overcoming the zero-sum-world means choosing, deliberately and often against the gut, to enlarge the pie rather than fight over the slices: keeping borders open for skilled labour and markets open for free trade instead of pulling up the drawbridge, welcoming talent instead of expelling it, rewarding those who build and invent rather than those who hoard and blame, backing investment and enterprise over scapegoats, taxation and seizure. It is hard to argue against the gut-instincts of a frightened electorate in times of crisis — but we can build the institutions, and tell the stories, that turn our competitive energy toward creation instead of extraction, and safeguard our institutions until economic recovery has had time to set in. Open societies have always climbed out of crisis the same way: by staying hopeful, by cooperating, by keeping their institutions open, and by doing the patient work of growing the pie rather than carving it up. Fear and hatred have only ever led to one place — ruin. Hard times are beaten with optimism and nerve. And I, for my part, am very optimistic that Europe can get its shit together rather than succumb to its most depraved and self-destructive temptations. In other words: cowardice and hatred are a dead end — not only morally, but empirically. Crises are overcome by courage and by doing what is right even in the face of fear and uncertainty — as in the life of an individual, so in the life of a society. --- # Sources Acemoglu, Daron; Robinson, James A. (2012): Why Nations Fail. The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Crown Business. Aliran (2022): Idi Amin’s expulsion of Asians in 1972 pummelled Uganda’s economy. 14 August 2022. Available online at [https://m.aliran.com/thinking-allowed-online/idi-amins-expulsion-of-asians-in-1972-devastated-ugandas-economy](https://m.aliran.com/thinking-allowed-online/idi-amins-expulsion-of-asians-in-1972-devastated-ugandas-economy), checked on 6/19/2026. Aremu, Johnson Olaosebikan; Ajayi, Adeyinka Theresa (2014): Expulsion of Nigerian Immigrant Community from Ghana in 1969. Causes and Impact. In Developing Country Studies 4 (10), pp. 176–186. Available online at [https://www.iiste.org/Journals/index.php/DCS/article/view/12874](https://www.iiste.org/Journals/index.php/DCS/article/view/12874), checked on 6/19/2026. Al Jazeera (2023): Uganda defiant after World Bank halts funding over anti-LGBTQ law. 10 August 2023. Available online at https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/8/10/uganda-defiant-after-world-bank-halts-funding-over-anti-lgbtq-law, checked on 6/17/2026. Atlantic Council (2026): To bridge the transatlantic productivity divide, Europe needs structural reforms — and AI. Econographics, 20 February 2026. Available online at https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/econographics/to-bridge-the-transatlantic-productivity-divide-europe-needs-structural-reforms-and-ai/, checked on 6/17/2026. Bergeron, Augustin; Carvalho, Jean-Paul; Henrich, Joseph; Nunn, Nathan; Weigel, Jonathan L. (2023): Zero-Sum Environments, the Evolution of Effort-Suppressing Beliefs, and Economic Development. NBER Working Paper 31663. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. DOI: 10.3386/w31663. Boyer, Pascal; Petersen, Michael Bang (2018): Folk-economic beliefs. An evolutionary cognitive model. In Behavioral and Brain Sciences 41. DOI: 10.1017/S0140525X17001960. Brookings Institution (2026): Not your grandfather’s factory. Why tariffs won’t help Midwest manufacturing. Washington, DC, 22 January 2026. Available online at https://www.brookings.edu/articles/not-your-grandfathers-factory-why-tariffs-wont-help-midwest-manufacturing/, checked on 6/17/2026. Chinoy, Sahil; Nunn, Nathan; Sequeira, Sandra; Stantcheva, Stefanie (2026): Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of U.S. Political Differences. In American Economic Review 116 (3), pp. 1052–1096. DOI: 10.1257/aer.20240692 . Christian Science Monitor (2025): Trump promised to bring jobs to the Rust Belt. The Sun Belt may get them instead. 3 June 2025. Available online at https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2025/0603/trump-manufacturing-jobs-rust-belt-south, checked on 6/17/2026. Draghi, Mario (2024): The Future of European Competitiveness. Brussels: European Commission. Available online at https://commission.europa.eu/topics/competitiveness/draghi-report_en, checked on 6/17/2026. European Commission (2026): Spring 2026 Economic Forecast. Slowdown in growth as energy shock drives up inflation. Brussels: Directorate-General for Economic and Financial Affairs. Available online at https://economy-finance.ec.europa.eu/economic-forecast-and-surveys/economic-forecasts/spring-2026-economic-forecast-slowdown-growth-energy-shock-drives-inflation_en, checked on 6/17/2026. Foster, George M. (1965): Peasant Society and the Image of Limited Good. In American Anthropologist 67 (2), pp. 293–315. DOI: 10.1525/aa.1965.67.2.02a00010. Friedman, Benjamin M. (2006): The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth. New York: Vintage Books. Funke, Manuel; Schularick, Moritz; Trebesch, Christoph (2016): Going to extremes. Politics after financial crises, 1870–2014. In European Economic Review 88, pp. 227–260. DOI: 10.1016/j.euroecorev.2016.03.006. Lee, J., Peri, G., & Yasenov, V. (2017). _The employment effects of Mexican repatriations: Evidence from the 1930’s_ (NBER Working Paper No. 23885). National Bureau of Economic Research. [https://www.nber.org/papers/w23885](https://www.nber.org/papers/w23885) Lee, J., Peri, G., & Yasenov, V. (2022). The labor market effects of Mexican repatriations: Longitudinal evidence from the 1930s. _Journal of Public Economics, 205._ (Also NBER Working Paper No. 26399; IZA Discussion Paper No. 12689.) [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047272721001948](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047272721001948) MacroPolo (2025): The Global AI Talent Tracker 3.0. Where the World’s Top AI Researchers Work. Chicago: Paulson Institute. Available online at https://archivemacropolo.org/interactive/digital-projects/the-global-ai-talent-tracker, checked on 6/17/2026. NBC News (2025): Far-right populists top polls in Germany, France and Britain for the first time. 13 August 2025. Available online at https://www.nbcnews.com/world/europe/far-right-populists-top-polls-germany-france-britain-first-time-rcna224706, checked on 6/17/2026. Rubin, Paul H. (2003): Folk Economics. In Southern Economic Journal 70 (1), pp. 157–171. DOI: 10.1002/j.2325-8012.2003.tb00561.x. Skrobisz, Nikodem Jan (2023): Die normative Bedeutung von ökonomischem Wachstum. Bachelor’s thesis. Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Skrobisz, Nikodem Jan (2024b): Can morals be maladaptive vestiges? Skrobisz, Nikodem Jan (2025): The Evolution of Morality and the Problem of AI Value Over-Alignment. Master’s thesis. Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.