Most of this week’s NYT Magazine cover piece on Europe’s fertility decline is old news to me,  thanks to my household demographics specialist, but I did find the bits at the end about the efforts to shrink Dessau, Germany pretty fascinating.

The plan, therefore, calls for demolishing underused sections of the city and weaving the nature on the periphery into the center: to create “urban islands set in a landscaped zone,” as Sonja Beeck, a Bauhaus planner, told me. “That will make the remaining urban areas denser and more alive.” The city has lost 25 percent of its population in recent years. “That means it is 25 percent too big,” Gröger said. “So far we have erased 2,500 flats from the map, and we have 8,000 more to go.” Beeck and Gröger walked with me through an area where a whole street had been turned into a grassy sward. Many residents were dubious at first, they told me, but as we walked, a woman recognized the government official and marched up to chat about when promised trees and flowers would be planted in front of her building.

As far as I know, this kind of urban planner’s dream is a property owner’s nightmare. But every time I take the train up the east coast and see the sprawling, delapidated, half-abandoned, outer slums of Baltimore and Philadelphia, I realize that these cities are never going to be as big as they once were, and that good ideas about how to effectively shrink cities are in very short supply. This can be a problem even if the population isn’t shrinking, but is just moving around.

On Saturday, after several disastrous attempts, Kerry and I suceeded (sort of) in recording a new diavlog. We talk mainly about her latest Reason cover on fertility panics, but also about the tyranny of old people, and scrapbooking. Botched ending makes it special!

I’m insanely recording three this week. They are: Robin Hanson on Hansonism, Bruce Caldwell on Hayek, and Jim Holt on jokes. What would you like me to ask them?

If we continue on our current course – leaving fate to the markets, and leaving governments to compete with each other over scarce oil and food – global growth will slow under the pressures of resource constraints. But if the world cooperates on the research, development, demonstration, and diffusion of resource-saving technologies and renewable energy sources, we will be able to continue to achieve rapid economic progress. [emphasis added]

A good place to start would be the climate-change negotiations, now underway. The rich world should commit to financing a massive program of technology development – renewable energy, fuel-efficient cars, and green buildings – and to a program of technology transfer to developing countries.

Almost every Sachs book and op-ed contains something like this, which seems to me to amount to little more than hopeful exhortation. The cynical view is that Sachs is involved mostly in signaling. It’s worked well for him so far. But I think he really cares. So a somewhat less cynical view is that Sachs is a grim pessimist who sees catastrophic market failure everywhere and sees immensely improbable global collective action as the only possible solution. Because he is always so incredibly vague about the institutional mechanisms that would be needed to solve the assurance problems necessary to get this kind of enormous cooperative effort off the ground, we ought to infer that Sachs doesn’t know what those mechanisms are, and so he probably suspects that global cooperation at the necessary scale is impossible. That is Sachs’ esoteric doctrine: We are probably doomed. But Sachs, strangely for an economist, also believes strongly in the power of propaganda, especially the power of elevating rhetoric from high-status figures, to transform social norms. It’s a longshot that Bono and Angelina can really bring about a fundamental transformation of public sentiment in a way that makes the global coordination problem tractable, but since it’s the only hope we’ve got, exhortation must continue.

If Sachs straightforwardly said what he really thinks, people would panic, which would be bad. So he really is doing us all a favor.

From the Boston Globe:

WHILE DIFFERENCES IN talent explain at least some of the gap between haves and have-nots, two economists at MIT and Harvard think another factor is also at work. They theorize that the ability to dedicate yourself to work - and not worry about problems at home - has an amplified effect on your productivity and, thus, your income. This can happen simply because a higher income allows you to more easily accommodate or outsource many of the hassles of home life, which then sets up a virtuous cycle of more dedication to work, more productivity, more income, easier home life, more dedication to work, etc. Conversely, to the extent that you cannot dedicate yourself completely to work, you may find yourself in a poverty trap. This explains some of the nation’s income disparity, the authors say, but it can also explain some of the gap between the developed and developing world.

Banerjee, A. and Mullainathan, S., “Limited Attention and Income Distribution,” American Economic Review (May 2008).

I think that there are many, many different interrelated virtuous and vicious circles that help explain increasing wage dispersion. Consider the fashionable  “Getting Things Done” personal productivity system. Highly educated people with complex schedules and multiple responsibilities not only find these kinds of systems helpful in getting things done, but also  for maintaining a sense of control and self-efficacy, which diminishes stress. If productivity goes up while anxiety goes down, more can be done in a period of time, more happily. Increased productivity tends to increase wages. Higher wages create an extra incentive to work more hours. But if productivity and workflow management technologies and practices increase a sense of control and self-efficacy, the wage incentive will be amplified, and even more labor will be supplied. Of course, practice makes you better, so people who work more also tend to work better, which eventually gets reflected in wages. And so on.

In response to my claim that:

It is tyrannical for parents to attempt to reproduce their ideologies and prejudices in their children, especially when this requires social isolation and emotional coercion.

Robin Hanson replies:

So is the principle here that parents should go beyond their simple judgment when choosing to what to expose our kids?  For example, should we let polygamists argue for their way of life directly to our kids?  Should we let pedophiles argue their case directly to our kids?  Or is the principle here that we know we are right and those other parents are wrong, obligating us to make those parents give their kids what we judge best?

Yes. Parents morally ought go beyond their “simple judgment.” I’d be happy to have polygamists make their case to my kids. Pedophiles too, as long as they’re not philing my peds. The thing is, these will likely be bad arguments that appeal to dubious values and I intend to help my kids develop a sound sense of epistemic and moral judgment. If they can’t tell these are bad arguments (by a certain age), then I’ve probably failed. The principle here is that freedom is good, that psychological freedom is a kind of freedom, and that psychological freedom has some developmental preconditions — it requires the cultivation of certain moral and epistemic capacities. Part of that cultivation comes from practicing judgment in a complex world of moral diversity.

I don’t find the fact that people disagree about this any more interesting than the fact that people disagree over the wrongfulness of foot-binding or genital mutilation. Decent people  agree that there are minimal developmental conditions parents must provide their children. No one may raise their kid in total darkness, say, so that the child never develops sight–even if the kid is well-nourished, etc. You can’t lock your kid in a cage in the basement and teach it to be your personal slave. And, yes, the minimum is historically and culturally relative. It is simply not OK to intentionally raise an illiterate child, even though illiteracy is the natural human condition. So, yes, “we” just do decide that “we” are right and some other parents are wrong “obligating us to make those parents give their kids what we judge best?” Is this even controversial? Who thinks clitoridectomy or breast ironing ought to be legal in the U.S.?

Libertarians are touchy about this issue. They agree parents can’t raise their kids in a cage, but they also don’t want the state to be telling parents they can’t teach creationism, either. I agree! But it seems like lots of libertarians are so jealous of the right of parents to teach their kids about saddled dinosaurs, that they’re a bit too motivated to wave away the very real violence to freedom that comes from neglecting the conditions under which kids come to be able to meaningful exercise their freedom. If you don’t think it ought to be legal to raise malnourished kids, or blindfolded kids, or mute cage kids, then I think you’ve got to think harder about why not. And then you’ve got to think about whether some actually existing conditions are more like that than you might have thought.

This is the sort of thing that makes the vein in Krugman’s forehead throb:

When given a choice about how government should address the numerous economic difficulties facing today’s consumer, Americans overwhelmingly — by 84% to 13% — prefer that the government focus on improving overall economic conditions and the jobs situation in the United States as opposed to taking steps to distribute wealth more evenly among Americans.

Here’s the breakdown by income:

This is consistent with other polling data I have seen that shows that even as the percentage of Americans who claim to be concerned about income inequality has risen (as income inequality has risen), support for redistributive programs has been more or less constant. What you see instead is increased support for educational reform, suggesting a widespread belief that the problem worth worrying about is the ability of people toward the bottom to gain the skills they need to be successful, not the fact that some small percentage of people are becoming really fantastically rich.

People often wonder why income inequality is so much higher in the U.S. than in other rich liberal democracies. In a nutshell, the preferences of American voters is why.

Sorry for the silence. I was off giving a couple talks (one on happiness, one on inequality) at the IHS Social Change Workshop at Brown. I had the pleasure of hanging with Mike Munger, John Tomasi, Jason Brennan, John Nye, a number of other excellent faculty and about 125 really smart grad students. But now I’m back. With a vengeance!

Watch, listen, learn.

Link via Justin Wolfers, who asks a tangential question I would very much like to know the answer to:

(An aside: You will note that I referred to Betsey as my co-author, which she is, but that is only a partial description, as she is also my Wharton colleague, and also my longtime significant other. What is the right word for this? “Colleague plus?” I imagine that finding the right language for this is an increasingly common conundrum. Any suggestions?)

Why reply to McArdle, Douthat, and Poulos’ replies to my post about Kerry’s demography article when Kerry does it better than I could have? I think she’s exactly right that cultural change occurs on many margins at once and that individuals are not Zombie-like hosts of static, monolithic culture. And I especially like the conclusion:

Part of the reason we find it so difficult to think about demographic change is that we fail to notice the goalposts changing around us. It’s true that the people we call social conservatives in this country are reproducing faster than the people we call socials liberals. But what will it mean to be “conservative” in America a century from now? In 1908 being a social conservative meant something far less amenable to tolerance than “legal marriage is for straight people!” Yes, Utah’s birthrate is higher than that of Bangladesh. I don’t know how to worry about that particular factoid, because I have no idea what it will mean to be a socially conservative Mormon in 30 years. It certainly means something different today than it did 30 years back.

People constantly make the simple error of thinking categories of identity have stable content just because the labels don’t change. But you can have literally no one “converting” from one creed to another and still find the culture and world utterly changed. Indeed, the sect of Mormonism I grew up in, the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, is now deeply different than it was when I was baptized into it at the age of eight. Not only does it now have women in the priesthood and a non-Joseph Smith-descended Prophet-President, but it doesn’t even have the same name! If I had children I couldn’t raise them in the religion of my youth, because it doesn’t exist any more. Conservatives of all religions in the liberal world constantly complain about this. Though there is institutional continuity, neither ritual form not doctrinal content stay the same — not even in relatively conservative religious traditions.

Part of my whiggish conviction is the thought that, in these latter days, the transmission of culture from one generation to the next is increasingly low fidelity, because the culture parents grew up in does not last long enough to pass to their kids. There is fairly rapid cultural selection going on, and it has been very friendly to broad liberalization and very unfriendly to conservative norms. That’s why some religious folk think they have to raise their kids on isolated compounds. I had not-that-distant ancestors who spoke Norwegian, German, Lakota, et al, but I don’t really even know who they were, much less what they stood for. Maybe some natalist can convince the Taliban there is really no problem if they can just keep their birthrates up. But certain radical fundamentalist Muslims think they need to destroy liberal capitalist modernity for a very good reason. Unless they do, it really will destroy their creed and its culture.

Whoa:

Is there any similarity between “having an actual affair” and having sex with a prostitute while you’re married? I think most people would answer yes. Then consider: Is there any similarity between having sex with a prostitute while you’re married and paying to watch a prostitute perform sexual acts for your voyeuristic gratification? Again, I think a lot of people would say yes: There’s a distinction, obviously, but I don’t think all that many spouses would be inclined to forgive their husbands (or wives) if they explained that they only liked to watch the prostitute they’d hired. And hard-core porn, in turn, is nothing more than an indirect way of paying someone to fulfill the same sort of voyeuristic fantasies: It’s prostitution in all but name, filtered through middlemen, magazine editors, and high-speed internet connections. Is it as grave a betrayal as cheating on your spouse with a co-worker? Not at all. But is it on a moral continuum with adultery? I don’t think it’s insane to say yes.

That’s Ross Douthat. I think this only makes sense from the perspective of a once almost universal, now simply common, and in any case very silly assumption that sex with a spouse is the one permissible form of sex. So, any deviation from that one case of good sex is some grade of bad sex. This reminds me of Jimmy Carter’s admission that he had “committed adultery in his heart many times.” Simply thinking about touching yourself while thinking of someone not your wife is somewhere on the Douthat-Carter moral continuum. However, for most people whose minds have not been addled by religious dogma, the distinction between touching yourself and touching someone not your spouse or committed monogamous partner is well nigh categorical. One’s just wrong, one’s just not.

Also, pause to consider that similarity is not a transitive relationship. I am similar to a kitten in that we are both mammals. Kittens are similar to cotton balls in that they are both fluffy. I am not therefore similar to, or on some continuum with, a cotton ball.

Like a broken record, I repeat myself: A high level of income inequality means nothing in itself. If you think there is some unfairness or injustice involved then show the mechanism that produced the pattern, and then let’s consider whether there is something unjust or unfair about it. Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon’s new VoxEU op-ed is notable, and worthy of emulation, for pointing to a very possibly unjust mechanism behind the rapid rate of increase at the top of the top of the distribution.

While the demand and supply story of SBTC and Goldin and Katz can help explain the 90-10 ratio, increased skewness of incomes above the 90th percentile has been driven by a set of fundamentally different factors. To help understand the evolution of the highest incomes, we divide these workers into three categories. Superstars include the top members of any occupation that provides disproportionate rewards to the first-best as contrasted with the second-best. The superstar phenomenon has at its core the magnification of audiences, the fact that a single performance can be witnessed by an audience of one person or ten million people, depending on the perceived attraction and talent. The second category includes law partnerships, investment bankers, and hedge fund managers, where there is no obvious analogy to audience magnification but where there are steep wage premia for the very best in an occupational niche, and where it is apparent that incomes are highly market-driven.

The most contentious question regards the third category, top executives in public corporations. The core distinction is that CEO compensation is chosen by their peers in a system that gives CEOs and their hand-picked boards of directors, rather than the market, control over top incomes. The idea that managers, rather than stockholders, control directors goes back to Berle and Means (1932). This idea that the principal-agent control of stockholders should be reversed has been applied fruitfully by such authors as Bebchuk and Fried (2004). They argue that managerial power lies behind some of the outsized gains in CEO pay.

In general, we believe that better disclosure and better laws regarding corporate governance can help deal with high CEO pay. Precisely determining what counts as reasonable pay is beyond the government’s abilities. However, there is some evidence, reviewed by Dew-Becker (2008), showing that increases in mandatory disclosure lead to better corporate performance and better designed pay packages.

For some time now, I’ve seen overlapping directorates and reciprocal self-dealing by tightly socially connected corporate board members to be a plausible unjust mechanism behind the level of income inequality. Arnold Kling has a good post that outlines an alternative theory of CEO pay, but he also seems inclined to the view that there is some kind of malfeasance going on here.

Do notice, however, that the authors concede SBTC as a good explanation for much of the gap between the 10th and 90th percentiles. And, within the top 10 percent, superstar markets and the increasing value of talent in certain niches explains a lot of the gap between the 90th and 99th percentiles. It’s not clear just how much of the outsized income gains at the top of the top are due to CEO pay. So even were reforms put in place that would prevent collusive yachting buddies from making each other that much richer, the overall effect on income inequality might be small. Of those who benefit from pure market mechanisms, Dew-Becker and Gordon write,

Their earnings are an outcome of market forces, and the only policy measure available to achieve greater after-tax equality is an increase in tax rates at the top balanced by a decrease at the bottom.

That is to say, they identify nothing untoward about the institutional mechanisms that produce inequality in this way, so there is no reason to try to intervene with new policy to change them. But this of course raises the question of why, in this kind of case, greater after-tax equality is morally desirable at all, or why an equality-aiming increase in tax rates on those with justly-earned incomes would morally permissible.

Tim Lee continues to preach it over at TPMCafe

For reasons that aren’t clear to me, a lot of people seem to have a very different intuition when we’re talking about the distribution of dollars rather than eyeballs or Wikipedia edits. The mere existence of growing income inequality is treated as a prima facie evidence of serious flaws in the American economic system. People seem to assume that such a distribution cannot arise absent systematic distortions redistributing income upwards. Therefore, even if we can’t identify the specific mechanism that’s robbing from the poor and giving to the rich, we can infer its operation from the skewed distribution of income.

But in fact, the processes that give rise to income inequality are roughly the same as the processes that give rise to inequality online. We should expect that even in a perfectly just economic system, some people would earn a lot more money than others, and that the gap would grow over time as technological progress increases the size of the market and the potential for division of labor.

It’s not obvious to me that the mechanism that drives inequality in Wikipedia edits is the same as the one driving blog traffic inequality, but Tim’s right that both these mechanisms are in work in the broader economy. In Wikipedia, I think you see a sort of regular 80/20 effect; a minority does most of the work. But what do they get for that? Blogs seem like a pretty typical superstar market. The small minority dominating traffic don’t necessarily have a large productivity advantage. The highest traffic blogs are all high-volume, but lots of high-volume, high-quality blogs get very little traffic. People want to read what other people are reading, so the blogs that win the competition to become a focal point for attention reap most of the traffic.

This paper from the May 2008 edition of Kyklos [ungated] just may be the best paper ever written. It investigates the happiness of economics Nobel Prize winners, non-Nobel superstar economists, and prominent happiness researchers by showing their website photographs to people on the street in Melbourne Brisbane, Australia. Thus it contains winning lines such as:

[T]he advice for young academics is: if you seek happiness, become a macro-economist and research happiness; a Nobel Prize does not make you happier; if you want to be popular with the ladies, take lessons from Edmund Phelps, Bruno Frey and Richard Easterlin; if you are looking for the ability to age like a red wine, Joseph Stiglitz and Jean Tirole have the trick, but not Richard Easterlin.

Who, according to the good people of Melbourne Brisbane, is the happiest economist? Well, who do you think? [Click for full size.]

That’s right, Edmund Phelps. That man is clearly loving life.

Congratulations to the authors for this exemplary piece of social science!

Robin Hanson sez:

Our opinions are part of this dominance/submission signaling system.  The higher we feel in status the more we feel free to express distinctive opinions and expect others to agree, or at least not greatly disagree.  Which is why we are so reluctant to agree with others we compete with, even when they make good points.

I eagerly admit that this is a good point. But! I don’t think everybody plays this game. There is an opinion elite heterodoxy game and there is a hoi polloi orthodoxy game. In some groups, contrariness is an effective strategy of marginalization, not elevation. But this is a game I’m sure Robin and I, in our different ways, are playing. I guess that’s one reason why I sort of pity people who are rigidly doctrinaire or partisan: it’s so intellectually submissive. Unless, of course, you pioneered the doctrine.

Bryan Caplan’s argument in his post on “Parenthood as the Trump of All Past Regret” proves both too much and too little. The general form of the argument has nothing to do with children, but applies to anything contingent one has come to value highly. Bryan’s argument has the same form as this: “If I hadn’t murdered those six toddlers with a hacksaw, I never would have met my cherished wife, the public defender, so I don’t regret it.” But that’s just silly. If you think the unintelligibility of regret follows from the fact of a world in which there is both contingency and deeply-held values (i.e., follows from from the actual world), then you are probably making a mistake. I’d say the mistake is assuming that what you are doing when you regret having done X is wishing that all the events conditional on X hadn’t occurred. Regret is more forward-looking than that.

Over at TPMCafe Book Club, Internet guru Clay Shirky and tech policy wizard Tim Lee are discussing the old debate between Henry Farrell and me about the proliferation of status dimensions enabled by wealth and the development of new technology, and whether or not there is some kind of meta-ranking of status dimensions.

To Henry’s attempt at a sort of comic reductio in the example of a “level 75 Night Elf Rogue who Kicks Serious Ass!”, Clay responds:

Now this example is designed to be an absurd extreme, and Henry says as much, but even in its seemingly absurd form, I’m not on board with it. As I write this, Tiger Woods may be making some sort of golf history, burnishing further his already highly burnished reputation & c., and yet, given the choice, I’d much rather have dinner with the elf. I don’t care about golf, but I do care about Warcraft, and someone with that degree of expertise is a big deal in my book.

One obvious objection is that I am simply a pallid, pencil-necked geek who doesn’t understand the implicit meta-ranking of golf over WoW, but in fact, I am a pallid, pencil-necked geek who understands the implicit meta-ranking of golf over WoW perfectly well. The NY Times never puts serious Warcraft players on the front page of the sports section, much less the front page over all, so the general social importance of golf is hardly lost on me.

I simply don’t care. That most of my fellow citizens prefer golf to WoW doesn’t make me feel bad that I don’t, which I take to be Wilkinson’s point.

Yup.

Tim does an outstanding job of explaining why new technology makes the existence of a meta-ranking more and more unlikely.

What I think lends Farrell’s claim of “implicit meta-rankings” some plausibility is the fact that, until recently, the national media provided something like a uniform yardstick for status. In 1970, whoever appeared on national television and in national magazines on a regular basis was a celebrity by definition. And because there were only three television networks and a dozen or so national magazines, the top end of the status hierarchy really was close to zero-sum. If you appeared on Johnny Carson, you displaced somebody else.

But as the Internet removes the artificial scarcity of soapboxes, it is becoming increasingly implausible to suggest that everyone’s fighting for a spot on a fixed national pecking order. Case in point: I just got back home from a road trip with my fiancée, and she brought along her iPod stocked with knitting podcasts. I wasn’t aware of it until recently, but there is, apparently, a vibrant online community devoted to swapping knitting tips, complete with its own blogs, forums, podcasts, and minor celebrities. I’m sure there were a few famous authors in 1970 who wrote about knitting, but the national conversation around knitting is incomparably larger and more participatory than it was in 1970. The rise of an online knitting subculture has created a whole new status hierarchy for knitting enthusiasts to compete over.

Later, in an IM, Tim pointed out that because knitting is “done mostly by women it’s harder to place on the male-dominated Night-Elf to Football quarterback spectrum that seems to be what people have in mind when they’re positing a monolithic pecking order.” I think that’s a great observation.

The inestimable Kerry Howley’s outstanding Reason cover piece on fertility panics is now online. Like the typical Howley production, this is a super-readable combo of fascinating facts and trenchant analysis. Kerry’s great on why talk about “desired fertility” is silly, but I think she’s most insightful on the cultural aspects of fertility policy:

For those who, with good reason, worry about the solvency of transfer programs in an age of population decline, replacement immigration looks like a partial solution, and therefore xenophobia is part of the problem. But for many if not most of the people preoccupied by fertility rates, immigration is no solution at all. The question isn’t about whether the United States, Singapore, or France will be without people in 2100; it’s about what kind of people will populate those countries: what they will look like, what they will teach in their schools, what God they will bow before. Mark Steyn’s America Alone warns that within a few generations Europe will be a Muslim continent. When Pat Buchanan discusses depopulation in The Death of the West, he does not proceed to suggest we replace children of European descent with Mexican laborers. Pro-natalist policies in Quebec, Singapore, and until recently Israel implicitly target a preferred ethnic group, attempting to fill the future with the demographics desired by the current political class.

[...]

At the heart of any fertility incentive lies an attempt to encourage a particular group of women to orient their bodies in a traditional way. Every pro-fertility policy is an effort to slow cultural transformation, to stabilize a society’s ethnic composition, to ossify a current conception of a national culture by freezing the genetic makeup of a nation. From Poland to Singapore, swollen wombs are a bulwark against change.

There is a reason we speak of “Mother Russia” and “Mother India.” Feminist sociologists such as Nira Yuval-Davis refer to women as the “boundary markers” of a state or society. While men may leave, fight, and be compromised, women represent purity and continuity. Yuval-Davis points out in her book Gender and Nation that the Hitler Youth Movement had different mottos for girls and boys. The boys’ motto was: “Live faithfully; fight bravely; die laughing.” For girls: “Be faithful; be pure; be German.” Girls simply had to be. They were the collective.

In times of great social anxiety, we see new calls for women to return to home and hearth—calls alternately cast as a return to tradition and as a progressive leap forward, but efforts, nonetheless, to enlist women in a national project while defining the boundaries of national inclusion. Depopulation is not a given, but ideologically fraught and scientifically questionable debates about gender, race, and culture will be with us no matter which way the population swings. “To know what demography is, we need to know what a population is,” the French social scientist Herve Le Bras wrote in The Invention of Populations. “That is where the trouble begins.”

Spot on! The way I see it, those obsessed with fertility are people who think the culture they desire cannot possibly win the argument against competing cultures. So, they conclude, it’s down to brute baby-making force: the culture that wins the fertility war wins the culture war. In contrast, I think liberal market culture has such immense, salient rewards (wealth, longevity, happiness, etc.) that it is not only possible to win the argument, but that we are in fact winning it. Of course, part of the winning is dynamist cultural synthesis. So if you’ve got a conservative, zoological view of cultural preservation which fixes on the importance of high-fidelity copying of inessential aspects of a culture’s history (costumes, holidays, rites, cuisine, skin colors etc.), you’re going to have a hard time of it. But if you care about the essential core of liberal modernity, you should be delighted with how things are going. You’ll eat your szechuan taco pizza and you’ll love it.

This week on Free WIll, metaethicist par excellence Geoffrey Sayre-McCord returns to discuss the implications of Darwinian thinking for moral philosophy. As always, an excellent discussion ensues in the Bloggingheads TV forum.

Until my recent upsurge in interest in migration issues, thanks to Kerry, I had assumed that relocation was something people did for good and that people came to America to become Americans. I wasn’t aware of the large masses of Poles, Italians, Irish, etc., who came to the U.S. to work for a while, and then left again. And there’s a good reason for that: those people’s ancestors didn’t write American social studies textbooks. Anyway, most Mexicans don’t care that much to be Americans, either. But a lot of them would like to work here. And then, eventually, go home.

This story from Reuter’s about Polish immigrants to England moving back to Poland does a good job of illustrating the dynamic:

Four years after Polish graphic designer Chris Rychter headed to Britain to find work and study as a citizen of the European Union, he and his wife have returned home.

Part of a swelling tide of migration back east, they are having a house built in a suburb of the Polish capital.

“It took me just three days to find a job back in Warsaw,” Rychter, 27, told Reuters. “We never saw Britain as home… We went for the adventure and to get some professional experience.”

[...]

the Rychters show how Europe has shrunk and that — contrary to a popular view — migrant flows are not all one-way.

Economists now see a turnstile or pendulum effect of people moving between countries after quite short stints, in search of better conditions.

Statistics on migration within the 27-nation EU are not precise, but around half of an estimated one million people from eastern Europe who moved to Britain since 2004 have already returned home, according to a recent report by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), a British think-tank.

Increased labor market integration with Mexico would help improve the Mexican economy, making it relatively more attractive for Mexicans to stay or return, just like it’s doing for Poland.

Greg Clark’s NY Sun takedown of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation is ripping good fun. This response, by a sociologist, is entertaining for other reasons. For example, I like how it starts out strong by pointing out that Sun is a neocon rag. The commenters at Mark Thoma’s, from whence comes the link, are aghast at Clark’s lack of reverence for the wrong Polanyi. Anyway, I want more new reviews of sixty year-old books!

Speaking of citizenships, I just learned that had Canadian law been what it is now when my father immigrated, I would now also be a Canadian citizen, which would be awesome. But, as it was prior to 1977, my father lost his Canadian citizenship when he became a naturalized American citizen, and so I was thereby preemptively stripped of my ancestral Canadian rights. Why Canada? Why?

I have to say I was pretty surprised the first time I saw this OECD graph, which shows the foreign-born as a percentage of total population [Click for full size]:

Why was I surprised? Because it’s relatively hard to become a citizen of Switzerland. But that was me thinking a path to citizenship and residency and work rights were a kind of logical package deal. And that’s wrong. So maybe Switzerland’s lack of birthright citizenship and relatively arduous naturalization process help explain their receptivity to immigration. I don’t know. And I don’t know about Swiss welfare eligibility rules either. (Anyone?) But it now strikes me that my initial surprise was probably misplaced.

That said, it doesn’t seem all that tough to become a citizen of Australia, another America-shaming immigrant haven, although it does seem that getting born in Australia is no longer good enough.

Poking around looking for stuff about immigration and welfare, I found this 1997 Dallas Fed paper by Madeline Zavodny. Here’s her conclusion:

Much of the motivation for eliminating most immigrants’ access to federally funded public assistance benefits was concern that persons migrate to the United States because of the availability of welfare benefits. The 1996 welfare law makes noncitizens ineligible for food stamps and SSI payments and allows states to discontinue AFDC, Medicaid, and other public assistance benefits to noncitizens. Several states intend to continue extending benefits to noncitizens, whereas others are likely to cut off benefits, widening the already substantial differences in welfare benefits across states. These differences in policy create concern that immigrants will move in response to interstate differentials and that states that continue to allow immigrants to receive welfare payments will become welfare magnets.

In this article, I find little evidence to support the contention that new immigrants will choose their destinations based on welfare generosity. New immigrants are attracted to areas with large immigrant populations. Because earlier immigrants are disproportionately located in high-welfare states, it may appear that high welfare benefits attract immigrants. However, immigrants do not respond to interstate differentials in welfare generosity but rather to differences in the sizes of the foreign born populations. Immigrants are also attracted to a specific subset of states—namely California, New York, Florida, and Texas—and do not respond to changes in welfare benefits within states over time. The recent historical evidence gives little reason to be concerned that new immigrants will choose their destinations based on the welfare differentials created by the new welfare law.

This is notable for two reasons. First, it seems like most people don’t know that the 1996 welfare reform made most noncitizens ineligible for most federal benefits. I didn’t either, until fairly recently. Second, it supports the idea that welfare isn’t a significant factor in immigrants’ choices about where to go. Maybe this has changed in the last 10 years; I’d like to see a more recent study. But I’d guess this holds up.

Over at Psychology Today, Josh Knobe reports on a new experiment by Shaun Nichols (see me diavlog with Nichols here) and Chris Freiman (an IHS friend of mine and David Schmidtz advisee):

Subjects who had been assigned to receive an abstract question were asked:

Suppose that some people make more money than others solely because they have genetic advantages. Please tell us whether you agree with the following statement:

- It is fair that those genetically-advantaged people make more money than others.

Meanwhile, subjects who had been assigned to receive a concrete question were asked:

Suppose that Amy and Beth both want to be professional jazz singers. They both practice singing equally hard. Although jazz singing is the greatest natural talent of both Amy and Beth, Beth’s vocal range and articulation is naturally better than Amy’s because of differences in their genetics. Solely as a result of this genetic advantage, Beth’s singing is much more impressive. As a result, Beth attracts bigger audiences and hence gets more money than Amy. Please tell us whether you agree with the following statement:

- It is fair that Beth makes more money than Amy.

Surprisingly, subjects who were given the abstract question said that it was not fair, but subjects who were given the concrete question said that it actually was fair! In other words, it seems that each individual person is torn between left and right. People seem to have a kind of leftist intuition in the abstract but to move to the right when they turn to more concrete cases. Perhaps the differences we observe between the views of different individuals are due in part to the degree to which they hold on to this abstract principle.

I don’t actually think this is very surprising. Of course, the actual explanation of any pattern of holdings is always concrete. So repeat the Beth and Amy case a million times over, and you should still get “fair”. I’d guess this is why people with left-leaning ideologies tend not to unreflectively think that the relative success of friends and family is unfair. If pushed, they might retreat to higher level of abstraction and say they do think it’s unfair, but their revealed day-to-day talk and behavior tends not to reveal any serious suspicion of injustice in their own case.

Yesterday at Hit & Run, Kerry Howley put up a brilliant post on Milton Friedman’s most misused utterance (riffing off Bryan Caplan’s also outstanding post) which I thought was more or less dispositive.

But in the comments, MikeP (this man needs his own blog, if he doesn’t have one) points to this immensely useful post containing a partial transcript of a much more considered and representative discussion of immigration by Friedman from a lecture titled “What Is America.” It really puts the wall-builders’ favorite Friedman quotation in its proper context.

You had a flood of immigrants, millions of them, coming to this country. What brought them here? It was the hope for a better life for them and their children. And, in the main, they succeeded. It is hard to find any century in history, in which so large a number of people experience so great an improvement in the conditions of their life, in the opportunities open to them, as in the period of the 19th and early 20th century.

[...]

You will find that hardly a soul who will say that it was a bad thing. Almost everybody will say it was a good thing. ‘But what about today? Do you think we should have free immigration?’ ‘Oh, no,’ they’ll say, ‘We couldn’t possibly have free immigration today. Why, that would flood us with immigrants from India, and God knows where. We’d be driven down to a bare subsistence level.’”

“What’s the difference? How can people be so inconsistent? Why is it that free immigration was a good thing before 1914 and free immigration is a bad thing today? Well, there is a sense in which that answer is right. There’s a sense in which free immigration, in the same sense as we had it before 1914 is not possible today. Why not? “

Because it is one thing to have free immigration to jobs. It is another thing to have free immigration to welfare. And you cannot have both. If you have a welfare state, if you have a state in which every resident is promised a certain minimal level of income, or a minimum level of subsistence, regardless of whether he works or not, produces it or not. Then it really is an impossible thing.

Look, for example, at the obvious, immediate, practical example of illegal Mexican immigration. Now, that Mexican immigration, over the border, is a good thing. It’s a good thing for the illegal immigrants. It’s a good thing for the United States. It’s a good thing for the citizens of the country. But, it’s only good so long as its illegal.

That’s an interesting paradox to think about. Make it legal and it’s no good. Why? Because as long as it’s illegal the people who come in do not qualify for welfare, they don’t qualify for social security, they don’t qualify for the other myriad of benefits that we pour out from our left pocket to our right pocket. So long as they don’t qualify they migrate to jobs. They take jobs that most residents of this country are unwilling to take. They provide employers with the kind of workers that they cannot get. They’re hard workers, they’re good workers, and they are clearly better off.

Friedman’s point about free immigration and the welfare state, then, was simply that if the U.S. is going to offer welfare payments to anybody who legally migrates, then we’re going to have to put a limit on legal migration. But because free migration is such an unmitigated good, limits on legal migration make both the immigrants and the natives worse off. So, illegal migration, which severs the fact of residency from welfare eligibility, is therefore desirable in the context of a regime that guarantees welfare eligibility to all legal residents.

Friedman’s considered view is that free migration without a welfare state is first best. Welfare for all legal residents makes first-best free migration impossible. In that case, a high rate of illegal immigration is the second-best solution.

Now, Friedman’s discussion would have been much clearer had he recognized the logical and practical possibility of severing legal residency from welfare eligibility. It need not be the case that all legal residents are made eligible for welfare. Indeed, there are many actual effective restrictions on welfare eligibility based on legal immigration status. In the 1999 ISIL interview, Friedman says of this possibility: “I don’t think that it is desirable to have two classes of citizens in a society.” And then he admits that he had never thought about it before. Well, if he had, he would have grasped that illegal immigration — which, remember, he thinks is pretty great — ensures a very stark separation of classes. Because tight immigration restrictions hinder pareto-improving mobility, create underground economies that encourage corruption and abuse, and do much more to create invidious structural inequalities than would a formalized guest worker system, Friedman’s own logic clearly leads toward opening up labor markets while restricting welfare eligibility. It is no accident that Lant Pritchett, an economist very much in the Friedmanite mold, argues for precisely that.

But the important takeaway here is this: Friedman’s view is that a certain kind of unrestricted welfare state makes illegal immigration good, because it severs residency from welfare eligibility. Friedman is unequivocal about the desirability of free migration. Anyone really committed to Friedman’s stated view about welfare and immigration should by no means try to restrict immigration, but instead should try to enable illegal immigration. A devout Friedmanite should stand stoutly against every fence, every border cop, every increase in the INS budget, any proposed database check for a new workers’ legal status, etc. I think it makes more sense to argue first for a guest worker program. But if that is in fact impossible, then Friedman has it right: more illegal immigration is the best we can do.