If you live in a secular nation with generally good work ethics and administration, that is the reason you live in a developed nation.
There was a time when pro-immigrationists rhapsodized about "assimilation."
Then one day it become "multi-culturalism."
Even if I liked the culture I was born into, knew it had provided me with high living standards, and was one that I loved in many ways, I was supposed to embrace "multi-culturalism" or be labeled a nativist bigot.
But what if the other cultures do not respect individual rights, or revere separation of church and state? Or regard correct religion and instruction as more important than economic progress? Or bring rank prejudices with them towards other religions and ethnic groups?
"History is full of elites brought down by the purblind stupidity of arrogance."
I think we might be in one of those historical moments when the bill is falling due for arrogant – and, more to the point, incompetent – elites, Lorenzo. So please keep kicking those smug PMC experts while they are vulnerable.
But as you know, there are several naturalized US citizens who are or were congress persons or state governors; and cabinet level officers. Only the president has to be a "native born" citizen.
Perhaps we should amend our constitution to add a position of "Dot Connector In Chief"! You are very well qualified for that slot.
Check out the work of Angus Deaton. He is a Nobel Prize winning Economist who has reconsidered many of the mainstream dogmas in mainstream Economic Theory, including immigration. He had similar insights as yourself:
"inequality was high when America was open, was much lower when the borders were closed, and rose again post Hart-Celler (the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965) as the fraction of foreign-born people rose back to its levels in the Gilded Age."
Another important point that I think goes missing as far as the language used to justify policies of increasing immigration I write about here
"this is one of those things where the mainstream economic narrative is really just pissing down people’s backs and telling them it’s raining: In case you are not aware, a “skills shortage” is euphemism for “wages are too low”. In a free market, enduring long term shortages are impossible. "
Deaton's criticisms are much more muted than as you present them here and they come down to the old quandary of reducing inequality vs reducing poverty (or more precisely increasing all incomes but in an unequal way). For whatever reason Deaton has switched to "team inequality is more important". If you still believe that reducing poverty and increasing all incomes (even if some go up more than others) then his change of mind becomes irrelevant.
"Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century"
giving a solid empirical description of the despair seen in the American working classes, which is a critical piece of evidence for the conversation.
Of course, ultimately immigration is one head of a multi-headed hydra, of a Leninist cadre taking control of the Professional Managerial Class, gaining dominance over policy and the cultural economy, and exploiting the working class both financially, as far as their stagnating wages, and, as is emphasized by Lorenzo in this article, biologically, by crushing the biological desire of a working class man to make big and/or neat things with his bands and provide for a family within a tribe enjoying a coherent and harmonious set of myths.
When you have people who define spending as the "driver of the economy", it's natural that they're going to conclude that migrants "boost the economy" precisely BECAUSE they cost society money.
There's spending, then there's splurging. Then there's splending, and sperging too. Many years ago I proposed different colors of money. Blue money had to spent by Friday. Green money could last forever. I could have won a Nobel Prize but I had a hard time putting my ideas on paper. Also, I couldn't spell too well either.
No, they boost the economy by producing more. And that is how economists define “driving the economy”, not some delusional strawman you dreamed up in your head
In which case there should not be any non-employed migrants. The argument against migrants pushing down wages is that their demand (i.e. spending) more than compensates for their increased labour supply effect.
The argument that migrants cut wages is, indeed, very thin. The argument that they suppress wages is much stronger.
During the pandemic migration pause, low end wages shot up in the UK and the US but not in Australia, despite us having a much higher rate of migration. That is because our migrants have a slightly higher level of education (human capital) than the residents, so migration in Australia makes labour slightly more scarce than capital. Migration in the US and UK does the reverse. This means that Australian migration does not suppress the Baumol effect. Hence the failure of low end wages to shift in Australia despite the pause in migration.
One of the practical signs is that car washes in Australia are all mechanised. We don’t import the low-end peons that provide folk in US and UK with cheap nannies, gardeners, car-washers etc.
Between making capital more scarce compared to labour, suppressing the Baumol effect, remittances (i.e. not spending where they are but where they come from), breaking up local social capital, and rising rents, it is quite clear that much migration in the US, UK and Western Europe makes local workers worse off. This without considering the increased fiscal stress and social cohesion issues.
This has absolutely nothing to do with “Keynesianism”. You're just trying to use fancy economic terms you saw somewhere on the internet even when they're completely irrelevant
Whose economy? The "NGO" workers who get paid handsomely to shift taxpayer money to illegal aliens? The hotel owners who charge the government more than full freight for blocks of rooms to house them long term in midtown Manhattan? Or how about American low skilled laborers who will be forced to compete with them in the labor pool, as they receive free or subsidized housing, healthcare, food, cell phone service etc and thus can afford to work for less wages? What about the rest of us who will pay more for everything? The problem with social scientists like economists is that they can find evidence to support anything their paymasters want. That's how we end up with "But GDP will grow!" Without ever hearing about real GDP/capita declining.
A brilliant article, but a futile argument. The open-borders fanatics resist all evidence, all logic, nothing can convince them of the errors of their ways, not even full scale social breakdown.
My Dad was a government Economist in Treasury, Finance and Primary Industry (the very aptly named DOPIE) advising government. I was an Engineer working in private industry, building machines. I had to deal with the realities of the physical world for my entire career while he usually seemed to deal in what I would charitably describe as bullshit childish fantasies.
Focussing on the technical GDP advantages of mass immigration from third world countries, while ignoring the innumerable negatives is one such bullshit fantasy.
Economics in its current form is worse than useless, it is actively harmful to society. It deserves nothing but a good squirt of Mortein so that it drops to the floor, buzzes in circles for a while and then dies.
Also, I very rarely run across a word that is new to me. "Consilient" is once such word, and I savour it. Thanks also for that small education. :-)
“adherents of the first discourse” That is Open Borders- aren’t oblivious nor immune to facts.
They are malicious and deceitful.
Don’t make this so hard.
Managed Decline and a General and well noted antipathy to the West and Western Civilization have given way to malicious destruction and feral hatred.
They want us dead, our children raped and they still in secret find it highly satisfying.
Apparently malice is as difficult to understand in Australia as it is in America. Well now we know, we’re admitting this is who they are and we’re acting accordingly.
A lot of economists who push the mainstream view actually believe that migration is beneficial to the recipient society. Yes, the Social Alchemy zealots—“burn away the oppressions and the transformative future will emerge, like lead from gold—are motivated by “destruction is better” notions and they certainly find the mainstream Economics view useful, but there are plenty who just think their Theory is correct.
The open borders economists do not seem to recognise any operative constraints on the effects of migration at all, but that is a form of Libertarian blank slate nonsense that is even more lost in Theory.
Not disagreeing (malice is relevant), but Lorenzo is scratching an essential itch. Australia is different from America in that economics is downstream from Bentham (the only thinker who has had an appreciable impact on anything here), while America's self-understanding is caught up with a more varied, more complex, range of influences (the Puritans, Cavaliers, the Founders). The US constitution is Polybian and a masterpiece of Enlightenment statecraft, ours is a technical manual. The centrality of economics as a discipline to our political life simply cannot be exaggerated.
And we Australians are way behind Americans in fighting back or defending ourselves. The frontier here was always actively managed by Colonial Office (in the person of ex-Army and Navy officers at the local level). Nothing remotely like Jacksonian politics ever developed Down Under.
Don’t follow the American Official line on internal governance, Civil Rights etc - Civil Rights is Religion. So too “The Founders” et al, about the only thing Americans can agree on is;
“Constitution Rights.”
We can’t of course agree on what those 2 words mean, nor “Constitution.” <
That won’t work for any other country or people. Only works here because most of the time we stay out of each other’s way.
Never mind the Jonestown American Left - and it is Jonestown. Mind you everyone else drinks the KoolAide.
Don’t follow our Constitution- benevolent enough only for us - nor drink the KoolAide.
The problem is too many American Protectorates are still pouring and drinking the KoolAide.
Now SERCO are paying landlords over the going rate to house and maintain 'new Britons' and the Government is looking into blocking the sun to save the world, I think we have reached the Tipping Point.
I now see it as part of the eternal civilisation cycle and the Extractors now completely outweigh and out power the Builders.
History shows this plays out, until eventually there's nothing more to Extract.
There's a lot going on here, beyond just the naivety of academic economics and economists. As obvious from their fiscal policies, the political classes have given up listening to mainstream economists, so it is doubtful that they listen to them on anything else either. Mass immigration may be justified by the mainstream of academic economics, but it is mostly being driven by business interests wanting to maintain and grow a base of effective demand for their stuff, as well as wanting to intensify wage competition, while politicians are interested in maintaining and lifting asset prices (esp. property and housing).
Given the bovine and ovine stupidity and gullibility of most of the electorate, these elites are likely to win any fight over policy. The result will be the sort of mass replacement of native populations with immigrants witnessed in the Roman Empire, particularly in France, Italy and Spain.
To bring the discussion back to the economists, it is possible to frame all of the problems with mass immigration as costs. One can then put the argument purely and concisely in economic terms, and charge the mainstream with ignoring a significant swathe of the cost side of the discussion.
As for WHY they ignore these costs, I really don't know. Perhaps most academic economists really are as stupid and blinkered as people charge them with being.
They reroute them to others (besides the asset-owning & prof-mgmt classes), ie the working class. To use the economic term - they externalise costs while internalising gains.
Its actually not THEY (economists) that do this but the entrenched political class - economists merely provide the rationalisations that give a nod to these policies as "economically rationalist". They are not stupid either - they are actually operating within a "market for rationalisations" as described by Dan Williams.
I agree with you that worshipping efficiency is absurd. (Efficiency should instead be considered one virtue among many.) But I think your statement that “Any social science that is not consilient with [my pet ideas from history and anthropology] is wrong” is too strong. While I also like to think my own pet ideas from history are true in some way, no interpretation of history or anthropology can or will ever be proven to be the one reliable truth. Debate will continue and that is part of the fun.
Duh! This is so easy to solve. Just investigate anybody who dies, and see if they have a replacement. After all, if some tenured professor of economics happens to die, how is he replaced? By allowing hordes of unemployed PhD's to flood into his office? No! The lucky bastard who gets the job is HANDPICKED. All we have to do is use the internet. The internet and AI. Let's use them, people!
You don't really have to "commit" to suicide to do the suicide. All you have to do is keep doing the same useless exercise that doesn't exercise anything, and keep stuffing yourself the same crap.
The trajectory of economic policy outlined here runs parallel to the distortion between rewarding productive work/investment vs speculative ones and asset price inflation. They are both obviously favourable to asset owners over wage earners, but I wonder if this is merely coincidental or there is an inherent causative relation. IE does the return to rent-extraction model inherently need the mechanism of wage suppression and artificial demand boost that mass immigration provides.
What is eerie is the complete alignment of developed economies on this, its almost like all of this was planned at Davos...
Immigration, at least in US, increases the real incomes of the middle class (high school degree and college graduates) and reduces, by a small amount, the incomes of high school dropouts and those with PhDs and tertiary degrees. So this isn't at all about wage earners vs. asset owners.
The Borjas effect is that the economic benefits of migration overwhelmingly go to the migrants, while the overwhelming majority of the remaining benefit goes to holders of capital. So, there is some of that asset-holders benefit going on.
Of course it depends on a particular country. Generally immigrant workers lower the wages of those who most directly compete with them (which is actually mostly previous migrants) and boost the wages of those who's skill are complimentary (whether through direct effects or by making certain goods cheaper). Most migrants to us are either low skilled (no high school diploma) or very skilled (tertiary education). So they lower wages of native born workers without high school diploma, lower the salaries for, well academics (native born economists face quiet robust competition from foreign born economists). And they boost the incomes of everyone in between. Which is the middle class.
Do you think computers running AI and writers are substitutes or complements? What about all this noise about robots and automation? Clearly your statement isn’t in the least bit true.
The economic migration literature under-estimates costs to working class folk. But, for various reasons, the US generally does better out of migration than does Western Europe. This due to such things as a long history of migration, more flexible labour markets, less problematic migrants, more mobile inhabitants, less crowded society.
I sometimes have to explain to people that migration in particular—and the world in general—looks different to the inhabitants of six Anglosphere societies (UK, Ireland; US, Canada; Australia, New Zealand) protected by oceanic “moats”, and approaching 500m people, than it does to, say around 10m Hungarians on a very flat plain in the middle of Europe. Or even 40m Poles in the same situation.
Sure, its different according to particular circumstances. But that's kind of the point. Economics - either theory or empirics - doesnt make ANY presumption as to whether immigration has positive or negative effects on native worker economic outcomes. Whatever economists conclude in that respect comes not from assumptions but from data and evidence. Which is the opposite of "dogma" as you, and some of your more ironically rabid commentators, believe.
There speaks a man soaked in Theory. Sure, economics properly conducted makes no assumptions about the effects of immigration; but <i>economists</i> do make such assumptions, all the time, because they are limited and fallible.
The simplifying assumption here is easily identified if you're at all familiar with basic economic textbooks - it's <i>homo economicus</i>, the idea that humans just are producing and consuming entities, so one worker is very much like another with the same skills, no matter where he came from. In real life this is quite similar to the old joke about a physics professor who gave an impeccable solution to a problem in cattle raising that assumed cows are spherical.
Except that any physics professor who says "assuming a spherical cow" is referring to that joke, as a reminder that the forces he's left out may not actually be small enough to ignore. Mainstream economics professors don't seem to know that there <i>are</i> parts of human nature their theory hasn't accounted for.
No. The economic case for immigration is based on data. Empirics and evidence. Like I said - not sure why it’s necessary to repeat the same thing twice, you’re just incapable of listening through your ideological fog I guess - economic theory is ambiguous on effects of immigration.
And for someone throwing around accusations about others being “soaked in theory” you sure seem to reference it a lot. Incorrectly and ignorantly too since economics most certainly does not assume that “one worker is just like another”. In fact, that’s the whole point, it’s why theory is ambiguous and why the question needs to be settled based on data. Except, the data doesn’t come out the way you want it to. So sorry.
With apologies, you really don’t know much about economics except maybe some nonsense you picked up on social media and such. In such a case maybe it’s better not to make overtly confident pronouncements? There’s absolutely nothing wrong with not having a vocal opinion about something you know less than nothing of.
Our host has presented data that supports his position. You have presented nothing but confident assertion that he is wrong. You would be better off taking your own advice.
Oh, and the state of my knowledge? I follow the Austrian School; I've studied the original works of those authors. I'm familiar with the papers of Ronald Coase. I am not familiar with the specialized literature of migration economics, but our host is, and his judgement agrees with what I have seen of mainstream economics generally.
I will not presume to judge your knowledge of economics based on what you have said here; I say only that you haven't shown any understanding of the subject beyond merely repeating what you've heard others say about it. It's possible, though not evident, that you do know what you're talking about. But you've certainly mastered the self-righteous knowing scoff.
If a bunch of ceteris paribus assumptions were to hold in real life, then this could be worth disproving. In reality the middle class pay the taxes that support the migrants, employed and dependent alike. So the middle class does not benefit either.
What does “ceteris paribus” have to do with anything? Again, I think you’re just using economics related terms you heard somewhere to make it seem like you’re knowledgeable but these terms are actually completely irrelevant.
And no, the middle class does not pay most of the taxes (the rich do, with the top 10% earners accounting for almost 3/4 of the revenue). And no, the taxpayers do not support immigrants, but rather the other way around. Immigrants pay significantly more in taxes than they consume in services.
I’ve been around long enough to know that in these discussions it’s almost impossible to get through to people because the deep seated primal ideological objections are so rigid, so I doubt actual data and evidence will convince. But I guess it’s worth another try, because like the man said, facts don’t care about your feelings.
Kudos.
If you live in a secular nation with generally good work ethics and administration, that is the reason you live in a developed nation.
There was a time when pro-immigrationists rhapsodized about "assimilation."
Then one day it become "multi-culturalism."
Even if I liked the culture I was born into, knew it had provided me with high living standards, and was one that I loved in many ways, I was supposed to embrace "multi-culturalism" or be labeled a nativist bigot.
But what if the other cultures do not respect individual rights, or revere separation of church and state? Or regard correct religion and instruction as more important than economic progress? Or bring rank prejudices with them towards other religions and ethnic groups?
"History is full of elites brought down by the purblind stupidity of arrogance."
I think we might be in one of those historical moments when the bill is falling due for arrogant – and, more to the point, incompetent – elites, Lorenzo. So please keep kicking those smug PMC experts while they are vulnerable.
But who will play the revolutionary? Both wings of politics are in on the racket this time round.
I'm mulling over launching a 'Draft Lorenzo' campaign, similarly to the Draft Eisenhower movement.
Not an American. Not eligible, even if I was both able and willing.
I knew there would be a catch!
But as you know, there are several naturalized US citizens who are or were congress persons or state governors; and cabinet level officers. Only the president has to be a "native born" citizen.
Perhaps we should amend our constitution to add a position of "Dot Connector In Chief"! You are very well qualified for that slot.
Check out the work of Angus Deaton. He is a Nobel Prize winning Economist who has reconsidered many of the mainstream dogmas in mainstream Economic Theory, including immigration. He had similar insights as yourself:
https://www.businessinsider.com/nobel-prize-economist-angus-deaton-rethinks-unions-free-trade-immigration-2024-4
"inequality was high when America was open, was much lower when the borders were closed, and rose again post Hart-Celler (the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965) as the fraction of foreign-born people rose back to its levels in the Gilded Age."
Another important point that I think goes missing as far as the language used to justify policies of increasing immigration I write about here
https://philomaticalgorhythms.substack.com/p/on-inequality
"this is one of those things where the mainstream economic narrative is really just pissing down people’s backs and telling them it’s raining: In case you are not aware, a “skills shortage” is euphemism for “wages are too low”. In a free market, enduring long term shortages are impossible. "
Thank you, will read with interest, ta.
https://archive.md/0PRWS (Archived version of Business Insider piece.)
Deaton's criticisms are much more muted than as you present them here and they come down to the old quandary of reducing inequality vs reducing poverty (or more precisely increasing all incomes but in an unequal way). For whatever reason Deaton has switched to "team inequality is more important". If you still believe that reducing poverty and increasing all incomes (even if some go up more than others) then his change of mind becomes irrelevant.
Thanks for the clarification!
Regardless of his ultimate policy, his contribution:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.1518393112
"Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century"
giving a solid empirical description of the despair seen in the American working classes, which is a critical piece of evidence for the conversation.
Of course, ultimately immigration is one head of a multi-headed hydra, of a Leninist cadre taking control of the Professional Managerial Class, gaining dominance over policy and the cultural economy, and exploiting the working class both financially, as far as their stagnating wages, and, as is emphasized by Lorenzo in this article, biologically, by crushing the biological desire of a working class man to make big and/or neat things with his bands and provide for a family within a tribe enjoying a coherent and harmonious set of myths.
When you have people who define spending as the "driver of the economy", it's natural that they're going to conclude that migrants "boost the economy" precisely BECAUSE they cost society money.
There's spending, then there's splurging. Then there's splending, and sperging too. Many years ago I proposed different colors of money. Blue money had to spent by Friday. Green money could last forever. I could have won a Nobel Prize but I had a hard time putting my ideas on paper. Also, I couldn't spell too well either.
No, they boost the economy by producing more. And that is how economists define “driving the economy”, not some delusional strawman you dreamed up in your head
In which case there should not be any non-employed migrants. The argument against migrants pushing down wages is that their demand (i.e. spending) more than compensates for their increased labour supply effect.
The argument that migrants cut wages is, indeed, very thin. The argument that they suppress wages is much stronger.
During the pandemic migration pause, low end wages shot up in the UK and the US but not in Australia, despite us having a much higher rate of migration. That is because our migrants have a slightly higher level of education (human capital) than the residents, so migration in Australia makes labour slightly more scarce than capital. Migration in the US and UK does the reverse. This means that Australian migration does not suppress the Baumol effect. Hence the failure of low end wages to shift in Australia despite the pause in migration.
One of the practical signs is that car washes in Australia are all mechanised. We don’t import the low-end peons that provide folk in US and UK with cheap nannies, gardeners, car-washers etc.
Between making capital more scarce compared to labour, suppressing the Baumol effect, remittances (i.e. not spending where they are but where they come from), breaking up local social capital, and rising rents, it is quite clear that much migration in the US, UK and Western Europe makes local workers worse off. This without considering the increased fiscal stress and social cohesion issues.
“Delusional straw man” here meaning Keynesianism.
This has absolutely nothing to do with “Keynesianism”. You're just trying to use fancy economic terms you saw somewhere on the internet even when they're completely irrelevant
Whose economy? The "NGO" workers who get paid handsomely to shift taxpayer money to illegal aliens? The hotel owners who charge the government more than full freight for blocks of rooms to house them long term in midtown Manhattan? Or how about American low skilled laborers who will be forced to compete with them in the labor pool, as they receive free or subsidized housing, healthcare, food, cell phone service etc and thus can afford to work for less wages? What about the rest of us who will pay more for everything? The problem with social scientists like economists is that they can find evidence to support anything their paymasters want. That's how we end up with "But GDP will grow!" Without ever hearing about real GDP/capita declining.
The lack of interest in distributional effects is notable.
A brilliant article, but a futile argument. The open-borders fanatics resist all evidence, all logic, nothing can convince them of the errors of their ways, not even full scale social breakdown.
Hopefully, there are more sensible folk who can be brought to see things differently.
Another fine piece Sir. Chapeau!
My Dad was a government Economist in Treasury, Finance and Primary Industry (the very aptly named DOPIE) advising government. I was an Engineer working in private industry, building machines. I had to deal with the realities of the physical world for my entire career while he usually seemed to deal in what I would charitably describe as bullshit childish fantasies.
Focussing on the technical GDP advantages of mass immigration from third world countries, while ignoring the innumerable negatives is one such bullshit fantasy.
Economics in its current form is worse than useless, it is actively harmful to society. It deserves nothing but a good squirt of Mortein so that it drops to the floor, buzzes in circles for a while and then dies.
Also, I very rarely run across a word that is new to me. "Consilient" is once such word, and I savour it. Thanks also for that small education. :-)
Excellent cogent speech from Glenn Lowry.
“adherents of the first discourse” That is Open Borders- aren’t oblivious nor immune to facts.
They are malicious and deceitful.
Don’t make this so hard.
Managed Decline and a General and well noted antipathy to the West and Western Civilization have given way to malicious destruction and feral hatred.
They want us dead, our children raped and they still in secret find it highly satisfying.
Apparently malice is as difficult to understand in Australia as it is in America. Well now we know, we’re admitting this is who they are and we’re acting accordingly.
Perhaps you should defend yourselves as well.
A lot of economists who push the mainstream view actually believe that migration is beneficial to the recipient society. Yes, the Social Alchemy zealots—“burn away the oppressions and the transformative future will emerge, like lead from gold—are motivated by “destruction is better” notions and they certainly find the mainstream Economics view useful, but there are plenty who just think their Theory is correct.
The open borders economists do not seem to recognise any operative constraints on the effects of migration at all, but that is a form of Libertarian blank slate nonsense that is even more lost in Theory.
We must address what was done, what is done not their sincerity.
Not disagreeing (malice is relevant), but Lorenzo is scratching an essential itch. Australia is different from America in that economics is downstream from Bentham (the only thinker who has had an appreciable impact on anything here), while America's self-understanding is caught up with a more varied, more complex, range of influences (the Puritans, Cavaliers, the Founders). The US constitution is Polybian and a masterpiece of Enlightenment statecraft, ours is a technical manual. The centrality of economics as a discipline to our political life simply cannot be exaggerated.
And we Australians are way behind Americans in fighting back or defending ourselves. The frontier here was always actively managed by Colonial Office (in the person of ex-Army and Navy officers at the local level). Nothing remotely like Jacksonian politics ever developed Down Under.
Very insightful.
My only addition;
Don’t follow the American Official line on internal governance, Civil Rights etc - Civil Rights is Religion. So too “The Founders” et al, about the only thing Americans can agree on is;
“Constitution Rights.”
We can’t of course agree on what those 2 words mean, nor “Constitution.” <
That won’t work for any other country or people. Only works here because most of the time we stay out of each other’s way.
Never mind the Jonestown American Left - and it is Jonestown. Mind you everyone else drinks the KoolAide.
Don’t follow our Constitution- benevolent enough only for us - nor drink the KoolAide.
The problem is too many American Protectorates are still pouring and drinking the KoolAide.
Don’t make this so hard.
Now SERCO are paying landlords over the going rate to house and maintain 'new Britons' and the Government is looking into blocking the sun to save the world, I think we have reached the Tipping Point.
I now see it as part of the eternal civilisation cycle and the Extractors now completely outweigh and out power the Builders.
History shows this plays out, until eventually there's nothing more to Extract.
There's a lot going on here, beyond just the naivety of academic economics and economists. As obvious from their fiscal policies, the political classes have given up listening to mainstream economists, so it is doubtful that they listen to them on anything else either. Mass immigration may be justified by the mainstream of academic economics, but it is mostly being driven by business interests wanting to maintain and grow a base of effective demand for their stuff, as well as wanting to intensify wage competition, while politicians are interested in maintaining and lifting asset prices (esp. property and housing).
Given the bovine and ovine stupidity and gullibility of most of the electorate, these elites are likely to win any fight over policy. The result will be the sort of mass replacement of native populations with immigrants witnessed in the Roman Empire, particularly in France, Italy and Spain.
To bring the discussion back to the economists, it is possible to frame all of the problems with mass immigration as costs. One can then put the argument purely and concisely in economic terms, and charge the mainstream with ignoring a significant swathe of the cost side of the discussion.
As for WHY they ignore these costs, I really don't know. Perhaps most academic economists really are as stupid and blinkered as people charge them with being.
They don't ignore the costs...
They reroute them to others (besides the asset-owning & prof-mgmt classes), ie the working class. To use the economic term - they externalise costs while internalising gains.
Its actually not THEY (economists) that do this but the entrenched political class - economists merely provide the rationalisations that give a nod to these policies as "economically rationalist". They are not stupid either - they are actually operating within a "market for rationalisations" as described by Dan Williams.
well, this nurse knows VIROLOGY is on its DEATHBED
I agree with you that worshipping efficiency is absurd. (Efficiency should instead be considered one virtue among many.) But I think your statement that “Any social science that is not consilient with [my pet ideas from history and anthropology] is wrong” is too strong. While I also like to think my own pet ideas from history are true in some way, no interpretation of history or anthropology can or will ever be proven to be the one reliable truth. Debate will continue and that is part of the fun.
Duh! This is so easy to solve. Just investigate anybody who dies, and see if they have a replacement. After all, if some tenured professor of economics happens to die, how is he replaced? By allowing hordes of unemployed PhD's to flood into his office? No! The lucky bastard who gets the job is HANDPICKED. All we have to do is use the internet. The internet and AI. Let's use them, people!
“This research contradicts my own personal prejudices. Therefore the discipline is commiting suicide”
Lol, no.
You don't really have to "commit" to suicide to do the suicide. All you have to do is keep doing the same useless exercise that doesn't exercise anything, and keep stuffing yourself the same crap.
Same response. Lol, no.
The trajectory of economic policy outlined here runs parallel to the distortion between rewarding productive work/investment vs speculative ones and asset price inflation. They are both obviously favourable to asset owners over wage earners, but I wonder if this is merely coincidental or there is an inherent causative relation. IE does the return to rent-extraction model inherently need the mechanism of wage suppression and artificial demand boost that mass immigration provides.
What is eerie is the complete alignment of developed economies on this, its almost like all of this was planned at Davos...
Immigration, at least in US, increases the real incomes of the middle class (high school degree and college graduates) and reduces, by a small amount, the incomes of high school dropouts and those with PhDs and tertiary degrees. So this isn't at all about wage earners vs. asset owners.
The Borjas effect is that the economic benefits of migration overwhelmingly go to the migrants, while the overwhelming majority of the remaining benefit goes to holders of capital. So, there is some of that asset-holders benefit going on.
Of course it depends on a particular country. Generally immigrant workers lower the wages of those who most directly compete with them (which is actually mostly previous migrants) and boost the wages of those who's skill are complimentary (whether through direct effects or by making certain goods cheaper). Most migrants to us are either low skilled (no high school diploma) or very skilled (tertiary education). So they lower wages of native born workers without high school diploma, lower the salaries for, well academics (native born economists face quiet robust competition from foreign born economists). And they boost the incomes of everyone in between. Which is the middle class.
To capital owners, all labor and every type of skill are complementary goods.
Do you think computers running AI and writers are substitutes or complements? What about all this noise about robots and automation? Clearly your statement isn’t in the least bit true.
The economic migration literature under-estimates costs to working class folk. But, for various reasons, the US generally does better out of migration than does Western Europe. This due to such things as a long history of migration, more flexible labour markets, less problematic migrants, more mobile inhabitants, less crowded society.
I sometimes have to explain to people that migration in particular—and the world in general—looks different to the inhabitants of six Anglosphere societies (UK, Ireland; US, Canada; Australia, New Zealand) protected by oceanic “moats”, and approaching 500m people, than it does to, say around 10m Hungarians on a very flat plain in the middle of Europe. Or even 40m Poles in the same situation.
Sure, its different according to particular circumstances. But that's kind of the point. Economics - either theory or empirics - doesnt make ANY presumption as to whether immigration has positive or negative effects on native worker economic outcomes. Whatever economists conclude in that respect comes not from assumptions but from data and evidence. Which is the opposite of "dogma" as you, and some of your more ironically rabid commentators, believe.
There speaks a man soaked in Theory. Sure, economics properly conducted makes no assumptions about the effects of immigration; but <i>economists</i> do make such assumptions, all the time, because they are limited and fallible.
The simplifying assumption here is easily identified if you're at all familiar with basic economic textbooks - it's <i>homo economicus</i>, the idea that humans just are producing and consuming entities, so one worker is very much like another with the same skills, no matter where he came from. In real life this is quite similar to the old joke about a physics professor who gave an impeccable solution to a problem in cattle raising that assumed cows are spherical.
Except that any physics professor who says "assuming a spherical cow" is referring to that joke, as a reminder that the forces he's left out may not actually be small enough to ignore. Mainstream economics professors don't seem to know that there <i>are</i> parts of human nature their theory hasn't accounted for.
No. The economic case for immigration is based on data. Empirics and evidence. Like I said - not sure why it’s necessary to repeat the same thing twice, you’re just incapable of listening through your ideological fog I guess - economic theory is ambiguous on effects of immigration.
And for someone throwing around accusations about others being “soaked in theory” you sure seem to reference it a lot. Incorrectly and ignorantly too since economics most certainly does not assume that “one worker is just like another”. In fact, that’s the whole point, it’s why theory is ambiguous and why the question needs to be settled based on data. Except, the data doesn’t come out the way you want it to. So sorry.
With apologies, you really don’t know much about economics except maybe some nonsense you picked up on social media and such. In such a case maybe it’s better not to make overtly confident pronouncements? There’s absolutely nothing wrong with not having a vocal opinion about something you know less than nothing of.
Our host has presented data that supports his position. You have presented nothing but confident assertion that he is wrong. You would be better off taking your own advice.
Oh, and the state of my knowledge? I follow the Austrian School; I've studied the original works of those authors. I'm familiar with the papers of Ronald Coase. I am not familiar with the specialized literature of migration economics, but our host is, and his judgement agrees with what I have seen of mainstream economics generally.
I will not presume to judge your knowledge of economics based on what you have said here; I say only that you haven't shown any understanding of the subject beyond merely repeating what you've heard others say about it. It's possible, though not evident, that you do know what you're talking about. But you've certainly mastered the self-righteous knowing scoff.
If a bunch of ceteris paribus assumptions were to hold in real life, then this could be worth disproving. In reality the middle class pay the taxes that support the migrants, employed and dependent alike. So the middle class does not benefit either.
What does “ceteris paribus” have to do with anything? Again, I think you’re just using economics related terms you heard somewhere to make it seem like you’re knowledgeable but these terms are actually completely irrelevant.
And no, the middle class does not pay most of the taxes (the rich do, with the top 10% earners accounting for almost 3/4 of the revenue). And no, the taxpayers do not support immigrants, but rather the other way around. Immigrants pay significantly more in taxes than they consume in services.
I’ve been around long enough to know that in these discussions it’s almost impossible to get through to people because the deep seated primal ideological objections are so rigid, so I doubt actual data and evidence will convince. But I guess it’s worth another try, because like the man said, facts don’t care about your feelings.
https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2016/1/27/the-effects-of-immigration-on-the-united-states-economy
(5th paragraph)