5 thoughts on “Monday Message Board”

  1. I’ve just started reading Gregg Easterbrook’s ‘The Progress Paradox’. One interesting factoid in the first few chapters is that the US has more legal immigration than every other state in the world combined.

    He also says that the degree of inequality in the US looks much better if you exclude immigrants and look only at the US born population, which isn’t that surprising when you think about it.

    Should measurements of changes in economic inequality within a state somehow take into account the circumstances of immigrants *before* they immigrated? That is, if a person immigrates from a poor country and ‘starts at the bottom’ in a rich one — still better off than in their home country — equality in the rich country may have declined, but global equality may have increased?

  2. Tom, Easterbrook’s claims about immigration and inequality have been generally discredited, and I think he has admitted them to be in error. Here’s a piece from Virginia Postrel that’s relevant.

    He may have revised and updated his arguments, of course – the material I saw was a year or so ago.

  3. The book is not the only place Easterbrook makes his claim about immigration and inequality. In the Wahington Monthly he wrote:
    “Factor out the low incomes of the newly arrived foreign-born, and the gap between rich and poor Americans is shrinking”.

    http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0211.easterbrook.html

    But according to a piece by David Leonhardt in the NYT Easterbrook now acknowledges that: “Even if there were not that increase in immigration, there would certainly be a rise in inequality”.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/business/yourmoney/25view.html?ex=1084852800&en=640066eda2b67979&ei=5070

  4. Free immigration policies worsen the functional distribution of income. Wages fall but these are offset in a market economy by gains to property owners, capital and other assets become more valuable.

    Indeed one can go further than this and say that (in the absence of poorly-motivated economies of scale arguments) immigration MUST worsen the functional distribution of income if it is to provide conventional bonuses in terms of the ‘gains from trade’.

    I haven’t read Easterbrook’ds stuff but this is an important point. The efficiency gains from liberalising labour migration laws are huge relative to gains we could expect from reducing tariffs and other barriers to trade.

    But the catch is that these gains are at the expense of immiserising labour and no self-respecting social democrat could live with this. (Unless you tax away the gains from freer immigration and redistribute them back to labour).

  5. Has anyone used the Reason!Able Argument Mapping software described at http://www.austhing.org in anger? Would a collabarative argument map, like a wiki be useful tool against the proponents of “Sound Science”?

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