Books I read in 2019. I’m sure I’m forgetting one or two.
Novels and stories
Transit. This is a lovely short novel by the German communist Anna Seghers, which I stumbled across on my parents’ shelves. Set, and written, in World War II France, it tells the story of various refugees waiting in Marseilles to work through the interminable bureaucratic process of acquiring the exit and transit visas they need to leave the country. It’s a beautiful evocation of the mix of unsettledness and bureaucratic stasis that is the life of the refugee, but it’s also got the tight construction of a classic 19th century novel, where the plot unfolds with a retrospective inevitability. There was apparently (and coincidentally) a movie based on it that came out this year.
Jews without Money, by Mike Gold. The classic autobiographical novel of the early 20th century Lower East Side ghetto, which I was shamed into finally reading by my friend Ben. It is, obviously, a socialist realist novel, which walks through, with unconcealed anger, all the deprivations, petty and not-so-petty humiliations, pointless tragedies, and self-defeating compensations of being poor in a rich city. (“It’s better to be dead in this country than not to have money,” says the narrator/author’s father in his final defeat, when he fails even at selling bananas. “Promise me when you’ll be rich when you grow up, Mikey!”) But it’s also and even more a novel of the intense emotions and heightened contrasts of the world seen through a child’s eyes – what it reminded me of most was Bruno Schultz’s magical realist stories of his Polish childhood.
Overthrow. A novel of Occupy, or more precisely the period immediately after Occupy was shut down, by my Brooklyn neighbor Caleb Crain. It’s the very rare novel of graduate school and radical politics that takes its protagonists seriously. The plot revolves around a post-Occupy working group, and their frictions and collisions with each other and, eventually, with the security apparatus. The working group is focused on something like ESP or telepathy, whose status is never quite resolved – it appears variously as a metaphor for the alternative forms of collective action and decisionmaking that Zuccotti Park was an experiment in; or a metaphor for sociality itself (as in Ursula LeGuin’s story “Solitude,” where any kind of social relationship is understood as a form of magic); or as a literalization of hacking and surveillance and the various other intercepted signals of our world; or as the kind of shared imaginary object that holds together any community; or at face value, in which sense it functions as the McGuffin that keeps the story moving.
I am very much the target audience for this novel —8 years ago, a very pregnant Laura and I were running away from the cops after a brief reoccupation of Zuccotti Park, and a bit later our now-emerged son’s first political action was a rally in support of striking grocery workers organized by Occupy Kensington, a post Occupy working group not unlike the activists Crain writes about. So take my opinion with a grain of salt, but I liked this book very much.
Cloudburst, Tom McGuane. A greatest-hits collection of stories by the author of Gallatin Canyon and Crow Fair, both of which I liked very much. The stories are mostly set in Montana, among more or less downwardly mobile people. Not having spent any time in that part of the country, I can’t say how realistic they are, but to me they feel true to life.
Books I read for teaching (do these even count?)
Modern Macroeconomics: Its Origins, Development, and Current State, by Snowdon and Vane. Delivers what it says on the tin. Randy Wray used to use this to teach macroeconomics at UMKC.I tried it for the first time this year, and I thought it worked pretty well.
Data Visualization, by Kieran Healy, and Quantitative Social Science, by Kosuke Imai. I used these two for my research methods class in the John Jay MA program. They worked ok.
The Book of Why, by Judea Pearl. I would never have made it through this book if I hadn’t assigned it — the early chapters are full of over-the-top auto-hagiography, as if the author were the first person to ever think about how statistical evidence could be used to answer questions of cause and effect. But if you persevere, there’s actually quite a bit of interesting stuff in here on how to think rigorously about causality.
Books I read with Eli, age 7/8 (missing some for sure here)
What If and How To by Randall Munroe, the xkcd guy. These are genuinely good books about applying physics concepts and quantitative reasoning to interesting real-world problems. How To is the better one.
The Hobbit. I’d forgotten how charming and light-hearted and funny this book is. It was wonderful reading it with my son, but it didn’t leave me with any desire to move on to Lord of the Rings.
A Short History of the World, by Enrest Gombrich. This is really nicely done. I highly recommend it to anyone with kids aged six to 12 or so.
Peter Pan. This is a much weirder book than I had realized – Barrie did have some ideas about mothers. But it kept Eli riveted.
The Pushcart War. On of those wonderful New York books everybody should read.
How to Invent Everything. Another pop science book. The joke ratio is a little high for my tastes – I don’t see why you would write a book about science if you don’t think the science is interesting enough to carry it on its own. But there is a lot of good practical science mixed in with the jokes. before I read it, I didn’t know what coppicing was, or how charcoal is made. Now I do.
Crossing on Time. The latest from the prolific David Macaulay, author of City, Cathedral, How Things Work, etc. (We probably read some of those too this year, come to think of it.) This combines a history of passenger steamships with the story of the particular ship he and his family sailed on when they immigrated to the US in the 1950s.
Books read for professional reasons
Austerity: When It Works and When It Doesn’t. See review here.
Open Borders, by Bryan Caplan. Caplan is a right-wing libertarian who I don’t agree with about much. But I do agree with him that there is a clear economic and moral case for unrestricted immigration. I reviewed this book for the publisher, and while I did suggest some changes — some of which were incorporated into the final draft — I had no reservations about recommending it for publication.
Books by friends
Never a Lovely So Real. A biography of perhaps my favorite novelist, Nelson Algren, by my neighbor Colin Asher. (Our kids are in the same karate class. It’s Brooklyn!) It’s a beautifully constructed book — when I’d finished it, I wanted to start it over again, just to see better how the story fit together. I don’t know how much people read Algren today — I used to have the habit, when I went into a bookstore, of looking for Never Come Morning on the shelves, and seldom found it. But in my opinion he should be in the first tier of the American canon, ahead of Updike and Hemingway and whoever else people read in high school. “The son of a Polish baker and mulatto pigsticker crouched across the canvass,” begins the final chapter of Never Come Morning; that’s more of humanity than you’ll find in the collected works of Saul Bellow. The book gets that, and it gets his writing, which combines lyricism and social realism in a way I don’t think anyone else has managed.
It also gets his politics, and how those politics were essential to the art. Like his friend Richard Wright, or like Mike Gold, Algren is someone who never would have become a novelist if it hadn’t been for the Communist Party. A major contribution of the book is to document, based on FBI files among other evidence, how the inexplicable stalling-out of Algren’s career after The Man with a Golden Arm was the country’s best-selling book and a movie starring Frank Sinatra, is fully explained by McCarthyism. Algren’s friends may have thought he was falling into paranoia, but he really was being followed on the street, his house was being surveilled, his mailed opened, his calls listened into. The publishers who rejected his books, and the editors who spiked his essays, were doing so on the advice of the FBI. It’s a huge loss for humanity: As Laura says, the cost of McCarthyism “is not only those imprisoned or deprived of their livelihood: it is the unions never organized, the books never written, and the films never made.” Algren, who knows, might have had a whole shelf.
The People’s Republic of Wal Mart, by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski. The fact that production under capitalism is organized not by markets but by the conscious plans of corporations, is one of those facts that is completely obvious when you think about it, but still somehow radical and controversial. I don’t, to be clear, mean plans for for world domination, I mean the routine plans of getting input a from the warehouse here via a truck driven by this person, in time for that person to combine it with this other input using those tools. These tasks are all assigned by planners. A huge number of people cooperate in the production in all of the worldly goods around us, and essentially none of this cooperation is organized through markets. (Which doesn’t mean that markets are not an important feature of capitalism, they just don’t coordinate production.) Phillips and Rozworski make this case clearly and pointedly for the world’s largest corporation, and draw the natural conclusion that there’s nothing utopian about a planned economy – the raw materials are all around us. In large part it’s framed around the “calculation debate” of the 1920s. This is possibly not the most direct way of approaching the topic. But it does pass through some interesting territory, like Project Cybersyn, the precursor to the internet developed in Chile under Allende, which I had never heard of before.
Capital City. A short book on the politics of real estate and of urban planning by Sam Stein. Sam is a graduate student in geography at CUNY, and the book is very much written from that social position — animated by an expansive vision of the possibilities of urban planning, and by fresh anger at the ways it instead functions as an adjunct to the landlords’ lobby. Arguably the book’s strengths would have been better communicated if it were presented as a book about city planning, rather than a book about cities. (I don’t imagine it would have gotten nearly as many readers that way, so Sam and Verso probably made the right call.) One of those strengths is his perfect ear for the cant of really existing planning. Here’s Amanda Burden, Bloomberg’s planning director, describing black neighborhoods as effectively uninhabited: “We are making so many more areas of the city livable. Now young people are moving to neighborhoods like Crown Heights that 10 years ago wouldn’t have been part of the lexicon.” Here’s her successor in the de Blasio administration, Carl Weisbrod, explaining that what’s good for the landlords is good for New York: “There are very few industries where the self-interest of the industry and the fundamental interests of the citizens are so deeply intertwined as the real estate industry.” And here’s Mayor SUV himself, with one of his classic but-what-can-I-do? shrugs: “I think there’s a socialistic impulse, which I hear every day, in every kind of community, that they would like things to be planned in accordance to their needs. And I would, too. Unfortunately, what stands in the way of that is hundreds of years of history that have elevated property rights and wealth to the point that that’s the reality that calls the tune.” Sure, it would be nice to organize the city to meet human needs, says our progressive mayor, but landlord profits come first and that’s just the way it is. If quotes like this fill you with anger and you’d like to experience more of it, you should definitely pick up this book.
Other nonfiction books
The Racketeer’s Progress, by Andrew Wender Cohen. Nathan Newman has been telling me to read this book since forever and I finally did, mostly on a couple of long plane flights. The subject is the labor movement in Chicago in the early decades of the 20th century. It’s in the service of a very specific argument: that we misunderstand the historical labor movement if we think of it like today’s, as bargaining on behalf of employees of a specific employer. Rather, he argues that turn-of-the-last-century unions saw themselves — and were at least intermittently accepted — as sovereign governments of their crafts or industries. Membership as such didn’t matter, it was about establishing rules that everyone in an industry had to follow. Employers went along, at least sometimes, partly because the unions enjoyed broad popular legitimacy; partly because they had the power to make their rules stick; and partly because, at least in industries exposed to national competition, workers and businesses had a shared interest in excluding outsiders. There were, for instance, major and successful strikes to enforce the principle that only Illinois milk could be sold in Chicago, and only local electrical components could be installed in Chicago’s skyscrapers.
Why “racketeer”, tho? It’s true that Al Capone got his entree into Chicago labor thanks to this system of craft governance — not, as you might expect, as an enforcer of it, but rather as the publicly-announced guarantor of local employers defying union authority. (It was dry cleaners specifically who enlisted the mob to enforce their property rights against labor.) The term “racketeering” meanwhile, was coined specifically to describe union activities aimed at a form of sovereignty rather than at narrowly-defined economic interests. The term from its beginning, in other words, was intended not describe a legitimate activity corrupted by the presence of organized criminals, but to suggest that unions as they existed were inherently corrupt. The idea that unions historically represented the interests of an industry or occupation as a whole, and not of a particular employer, suggests that the historical model of American unionism may be more, not less, relevant, in the gig economy.
Turtles as Hopeful Monsters, by Olivier Rieppel. The best book I’ve ever read about evolution is Mary West-Eberhardt’s Developmental Plasticity and Evolution. This isn’t that, but it’s the best book I’ve read on evolution in a while. And it makes the same basic argument: Evolution, at the macro level, is more than natural selection. It isn’t just differential reproduction of randomly varying organisms, but rather depends on a set of specific mechanisms that generate useful variation in body plans, and that conversely ensures that the random genetic variation generally gives rise to a functional organism. The genes, in other words, are just one input to the developmental process; or to put it another way, the capacity for evolution on a more than bacterial scale is something that itself had to evolve. The specific issue with turtles, in this context, is not just their shell; it’s also the distinct but related fact that their shoulders are inside their ribcage, rather than outside it as in all other vertebrates. Like the double-jointed jaw in a handful of snakes — the original “hopeful monsters” — this is a feature that can’t have developed incrementally but had to arrive all at once. The question then is what it says about evolution that such leaps are possible, and what it says about the study of evolution that there’s been such reluctance to acknowledge them.
Warfare State, by James Sparrow. A nice history of domestic policy during World War II, or more precisely, how the scope of government in American life expanded during the war and how people reacted to it. The book draws heavily on reports from the Office of War Information, the 1940s-era propaganda and morale agency, and that shows in its choice of topics — there’s a bit more than strictly needed on the PR side of the war effort. But there’s also lots of interesting, well-organized material on policy around labor, housing and so on during the war, as well as on the more radical but unrealized proposals of people like Walter Reuther, which are arguably one of the great roads not traveled in US history. I read this in the course of putting together a Roosevelt paper on the war mobilization as a model for the Green New Deal, which should be coming out soon.
Previous editions:
I l0ve algren too
But as a plodding reader
Contempt fiction is now out
I only movie to the beat
Black lists try lyric souls like A’s
Nelson one way then another
buckled in the 50’s
Robeson was slipped LSD
In Moscow no less
And
Dubois migrated back to Africa
The arsenal of democracy
1940 to 1944
Uncle’s 5 year plan
Is a template for
The green new deal
Have you read Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education?
It’s a formidable argument for why the government should stop subsidizing higher education altogether: getting a college degree doesn’t meaningfully confer skills and human capital, it just signals a job applicant’s readiness to conform to the demands of professors and, by extension, employers. The only result is credential inflation that’s a systemic economic waste (and disadvantages good workers who are bad students).
Advocates of free universal higher education need to reckon with his argument.
How do you (or Bryan Caplan) distinguish between “real skills” and “being more appealing to employers”?
Serious question.
Because it seems to me that in a capitalist society, or perhaps a market society, the two cannot really be distinguished.
For example, suppose that someone spent a lot of years studying astrology, and therefore sells high priced high quality astrology services.
From my point of view, astrology is bunk, so regardless of the quality and quantity of his study his astrology has no real value.
But from the point of view of the market, as long as people are willing to pay for it his astrology has a value and his services are actually counted into GDP. In fact if he manages to have people pay him a lot he will actually result very productive, because the way we calculate “value” we basically assume that the quantity of money people are ok to pay for X represents the real value of X (there are a lot of complexity with this, cue last post).
It seems to me that people who make this kind of argument (generally about humanistic disciplines) for some reason dislike some disciplines, they see those disciplines somehow like astrology, and don’t want the government to subsidize them, although they have no problems with e. g. engineering.
But it seems to me this has more to do with their preconceptions than with an actual argument against higher education, since in reality one cannot distinguish real skills from other stuff the market wants.
MR2, I think it is possible to distinguish useful job skills from a general “being appealing to employers” by looking at the skills people actually deploy on the job.
For example, among the few really useful classes I took in high school and college were laboratory courses where I learned how to do things like grow bacteria in petri dishes and synthesize organic-chemical compounds. I later got jobs in research laboratories where I used those skills.
That’s why I do see a role for technical vocational courses and apprenticeships that give people practical skills doing complex tasks with expensive equipment.
Most college curricula do nothing of the kind–they are purely “academic,” meaning they have no practical value. And that applies not just to the humanities, but to academic math and science. Colleges are hell-bent on teaching students calculus, yet virtually no one, including people in technical fields like medicine and engineering, ever uses calculus on the job (or in any other context).
It’s (usually) not the skills that employers find “appealing” in college grads, but also not their chance alignment with the whims of the marketplace. (Astrologers are just clergymen with the usual priestly job skills of dramatic story-telling and psychotherapy, which can be quite valuable to troubled souls.) College degrees confer something that’s specific and prized by employers: the certification that students are willing to do whatever the boss–professor or employer–tells them to do, even when it’s manifestly useless, like studying calculus. (I love calculus but I never used it even when I was doing hard science for a living.)
Caplan argues that there are cheaper, more rational and more productive systems for signaling “appealing” characteristics to employers than college.
One is the old-fashioned expedient of simply getting a job after high school. Working diligently at a job signals to employers that you have the one characteristic they find most appealing–the readiness to work diligently at a job. Even better, instead of paying a college for the privilege of writing term papers no one reads, the worker actually gets paid to do a job that other people value.
Unfortunately, with the government subsidizing and pushing everyone to get a college degree, credential inflation has empowered and conditioned employers to demand college degrees as a marker of conformity, so says Caplan.
On Caplan’s “Open Borders,” do you see a tension between open borders and the expanded welfare entitlements the left is envisioning?
Bernie’s immigration platform is essentially open borders: he would decriminalize border-crossing, put an indefinite moratorium on deportations, break up the Border Patrol and ICE.
He would also give full social benefits to undocumented immigrants. They would get free Medicare for All and free college, TANF and SSI. Bernie endorses AOC’s Embrace Act, which says:
“an individual who is an alien (without regard to the immigration status of that alien) may not be denied any Federal public benefit solely on the basis of the individual’s immigration status….
.—For purposes of this section, the term ‘‘Federal public benefit’’ means— (1) any grant, contract, loan, professional license, or commercial license provided by an agency of the United States or by appropriated funds of the United States; and (2) any retirement, welfare, health, disability, public or assisted housing, postsecondary education, food assistance, unemployment benefit, or any other similar benefit for which payments or assistance are provided to an individual, household, or family eligibility unit by an agency of the United States or by appropriated funds of the United States.”
So Bernie and AOC would dismantle the entire apparatus of border enforcement, while offering literally everyone on the planet free health care, free college, social security, food stamps, public housing, you name it. It sounds like hundreds of millions of retirees from poor countries could just come to the US when they get sick and get on Medicare and social security.
That plan might go off the rails, and I think Caplan would have misgivings about combining open borders with Bernie’s program of vast social-welfare entitlements for all comers.
A lot fo people think there’s a tension, but I don’t. I think there are a lot of reasons to think that open borders are perfectly consistent with a robust welfare state.
If we look around the US, do we see a problem with the states with more generous welfare states on the coasts struggling with the problem of too much immigration from the rest of the country? No, obviously we don’t. First, empirically it isn’t the case that we see mass migration from the small-government areas to the big-government ones. On net, it’s the other way. Obviously, other factors dominate migration choices. This will be even more true internationally. The idea that there are hundreds of millions of old people around the world who have the money and social capital to relocate to the US — there are lots of barriers to this besides border controls — and are willing to give up family and social networks, find a home, adopt a new routine, learn a new language, is absurd. Even in Europe, where borders really are open, and differences in social provision are quite large, you don’t see this on any significant scale. And where you do see it, it’s more likely to be in the direction of lower prices – US retirees benefit more economically when they settle in Mexico than the reverse.
Second, even to the extnet you do get in-migration to New York or California, that’s a good thing. In a domestic context, it’s obvious to everyone that gaining population is a good thing and losing popualtion is a very bad one. Immigrants work and start businesses – you know how important Arab immigants have been to revitalizing Detroit. And they spend money. Governments are happy to subsidize big companies relocating to them, but I’m confident that paying the same dollars to immigrants would do more to revitalize the local economy. Certainly many more of those dollars are likely to be spent locally.
The idea that the world is full of brown people who will move at the drop of the hat to the US to live idly off social benefits is frankly, racist. And it’s dumb. Nothing we observe about how things actually work in the world supports the idea.
A point of comparison might be children. Children are much less likely to be employed or start businesses than immigrants are, and they are big consumers of public services. But almnost everyone agrees — and with reason — that a society which raises enough children to maintain or increase its popualtion is better off economically than one where very few chidlren are bing born.
Note also that by far the biggest parts of the US welfare state are aimed at old people. Immigrants are almost all working-age or younger, so to the extent you think these programs are threatened by an aging population, open borders are part of the solution, not the problem. In the book, by the way, Caplan explicitly says that Social Security and Medicare would be more sustainable with open borders.
Agree completely
Lady liberty is America
Job scarcity is a macro policy
not a law of markets
Good answer JW, but I still have some misgivings.
1. My scenario of retirees flocking to the US for Social Security and Medicare mischaracterizes AOC’s Embrace Act. Social Security and Medicare require you to work for ten years before you are eligible, and Medicare requires you to be a legal resident for 5 years. So new arrivals wouldn’t be eligible. The Embrace Act is aimed more at migrants who have worked here for decades but can’t get SS or Medicare because undocumented, a very different matter. (But, the current work requirements don’t always apply to things like SSI for disabled workers, so migrants might be able to get that upon arrival under the EA.)
But if Medicare for All goes through it would have to include new arrivals, no work or residency requirements. There wouldn’t be any other way for them to get health care, and Bernie is not going to kick them out. So the potential for retiree migrants coming for Medicare is there under Bernie’s plan. That could also happen under a UBI with no residency requirements.
So I think there is still some tension between open borders and the kind of really universal welfare system I would like to see, with MC4A and UBI.
In Caplan’s writings online he kind of acknowledges that tension. He’s always saying, well, if you’re worried about the welfare burden, just deny migrants welfare benefits—problem solved!
2. You’re skeptical that lavish welfare benefits would lure migrants, but I think here your arguments are weak.
We don’t see welfare tourism in the EU because, while it’s a common labor market, it’s not a common welfare market. There are still national barriers, residency and work-tenure requirements etc. for non-citizens. So the EU isn’t a model of what would happen in an open-borders-plus-welfare model.
As for between-state welfare migration in the US, we don’t see much of it because the bulk of the welfare system is federal and doesn’t vary much between states. There isn’t much differential to drive between-state migration, and it’s partly offset by higher costs of living in high-welfare states.
But there is one kind of welfare provisioning that does differ radically between different US locales, namely services for the homeless, and there we do see lop-sided preferences for high-welfare locales. 40 percent of homeless people reside in high-welfare California and New York. About two thirds of the chronic homeless reside in California, New York, Oregon and Washington State. Part of that is high rents and good weather, but a lot of it is that liberal cities in those state have lavish formal and informal welfare provisions that destitute people really need—shelters, soup kitchens, public clinics, cheap mass transit, public libraries, publically accessible bathrooms, begging opportunities, needle exchanges, etc.
Welfare is important to the poor, and they may migrate to get it when there are large geographic variations.
The gap in living standards and welfare provision between poor countries and the United States is vastly larger than the gap between, say, Mississipi and New York (or Poland and Britain). So there’s a much bigger payoff to migrating from Central America or Africa or India to the US, expecially if immigration enforcement is removed and there are welfare entitlements as a carrot.
3. “The idea that there are hundreds of millions of old people around the world who have the money and social capital to relocate to the US — there are lots of barriers to this besides border controls — and are willing to give up family and social networks, find a home, adopt a new routine, learn a new language, is absurd.”
I don’t think the non-enforcement barriers are very significant.
The US has large diaspora communities of every stripe—neighborhoods where people commonly speak Chinese, Russian, Arabic, Hindi etc, and of course Spanish-speaking neighborhoods everywhere. It’s not hard for elderly migrants to fit in if there are no legal barriers and they get handed a Medicare card, UBI check and section 8 voucher on arrival.
Even easier if they have a niece who’s already settled here or bring along a grandchild to do the legwork and then enroll in free college. You can fly from San Salvador to Houston for $99. A Salvadoran retiree going there to live with a relative in a state with millions of Spanish speakers, that’s no great leap. I imagine you would see lots of extended families transplanting themselves, portable social capital. (Last year the majority of undocumented border-crossers came as part of a family unit, a six-fold surge over 2017. The stereotype of the lone migrant youth is changing fast.)
Bernie and AOC have the explicit goal of making it easy for migrants to come here.
4. “Note also that by far the biggest parts of the US welfare state are aimed at old people. Immigrants are almost all working-age or younger, so to the extent you think these programs are threatened by an aging population, open borders are part of the solution, not the problem.”
Right, but that age profile is under the current system, where old migrants who can’t scrounge for work don’t get any welfare and are hassled by the authorities, so they stay home. If instead they are welcomed by the authorities and get UBI and Medicare and food stamps and housing aid on arrival then the calculus changes—suddenly it could make sense for old people to migrate here, and the welfare burden could rise.
5. “But almnost everyone agrees — and with reason — that a society which raises enough children to maintain or increase its popualtion is better off economically than one where very few chidlren are bing born….In a domestic context, it’s obvious to everyone that gaining population is a good thing and losing popualtion is a very bad one.”
Hmm. Yes, a birthrate below replacement spells doom in the very long term, but not an economic problem in the short to medium term.
Every wealthy country has a birthrate below replacement (and even poor-ish countries are trending that way fast). The money not spent on children gets spent on retirees—in Japan they are getting care-taking and family-member robots. China has gotten richer while strangling its birthrate. The region with the highest birthrates is Africa, and Africa is miserable.
I don’t think there’s any correlation between economic well-being and birthrates until you get to some far-off extreme of depopulation. Children of Men was total BS, Handmaid’s Tale too.
–You’re making a deeper argument that a bigger population is always better. I don’t buy that. Population size and density just don’t matter much to development. What makes a country rich are a high skill level and productivity, efficient business culture and good governance, not piling in more people.
Consider America, Canada and Australia, very similar in all respects except population numbers. Even though America has ten times the population and population density, Canada and Australia are comparably rich.
That argument cuts both ways—restricting immigration won’t hurt us, but neither will boosting it. Conceivably, though, bringing in tons of low-skill workers and retirees above some high threshold level might have a bad effect.
–Or maybe not. I guess to be consistent I should be optimistic about open borders, like everything else.
But can we agree not to give migrants free college, since we know from Caplan that higher education is economically a dead loss? Bringing in migrants, fine. Bringing in migrants to study Foucault, nope.
Just a reality check on the scale of migration that’s required for open borders to significantly alleviate underdevelopment—it’s huge, billions of people according to Caplan’s sources. And it will include retirees.
This article by Clemens, “Trillion-dollar bills….” https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1257/jep.25.3.83 is prominently cited by Caplan in his case for OB. The studies Clemens reviews show vast potential gains in world GDP of 50-150 percent with OB. But to get gains that large they envision migrations of roughly half the population of the underdeveloped world to the developed world, about 3 billion people. One study assumes 99 percent of people in poor countries moving to rich countries.
Where would they go? Europe and Japan are already crowded. Russia is an economically backward kleptocracy, no use going there. The only developed regions with room are North America and Australia.
So realistically, if we want OB to seriously address underdevelopment we’re looking at the United States, Canada and Australia each accepting hundreds of millions of migrants, maybe up to a billion apiece. In the U. S. immigration rates would have to rise from the current roughly 1.5-2 million per year (legal and illegal) to perhaps 10 to15 million per year or more. The logistics and politics of that could be a heavy lift.
And old people would have to come along. That’s because underdeveloped countries are facing their own looming crisis of birth dearth and an aging population. Latin America and the Caribbean taken together have a total fertility rate of 2.0 births per woman, below replacement and falling fast. Who will support retirees in the region when young workers head to North America? Realistically, elderly parents will relocate along with their children under OB, especially if there are substantial welfare provisions awaiting them, as Bernie intends.
JW, you seem skeptical of claims that there will be vast migrations, and maybe you’re right. But in that case we have to ask whether OB is worth the political effort.
Let’s say there is only a moderate rise in US immigration under OB, perhaps ticking up to 3 million per year. There’s still a strong moral and maybe economic case for doing that; it will help millions of people. But migration on that limited scale will do next to nothing to relieve global underdevelopment and poverty.
Unfortunately, just proposing open borders, especially if paired with welfare for migrants, is very politically divisive. Even the comparative trickle of migration now under restrictive rules has become a huge controversy, in the European social democracies as well as America. Investing a lot of political capital in open borders seems a dicey strategy that will further energize the far right. And if you’re only anticipating a modest increase in migration to result, maybe not worth it.
This isn’t an academic question anymore. Open borders with substantial welfare for migrants is the tacit position of leading Democratic candidates, and the Republicans will harp on that during the campaign. Time for OB advocates to think hard and quantitatively about exactly how much immigration we will and should have, what the population numbers should be, and what provisions we will need to accommodate migrants.
Let’s start with 5 million
Job ready
legal
In migrations per year
And see how that works
Combined with
Market mediated
employment max macro policy