Powerpoint for Peter Singer

I've not read Singer's new book, but from his work on famine, I wouldn't guess that he would have a problem with this assessment. In his essay on famine relief he observes that 1) Obviously Westerners should be giving a lot more than do they; 2) Westerners do not give nearly as much as they should; so 3) we simply are not nearly as moral as we might like to think we are. Even the most giving and charitable among us (tithers, say) really aren't giving nearly as much as they should. Now, I don't see why Singer couldn't be persuaded that, instead of giving money, we ought to just open up our borders, and conclude that, well, we're not that moral, honestly, so we won't--so, what's second best? Live Aid, or something like that. Basically, it's improbable that Americans will ever spend a lot more perhaps on foreign aid, but even less probable is the idea that we'll just open up our borders for L'autre. And if we're bad, the Europeans are even worse.

Have you seen this video? Do you have a response?

Immigration Gumballs (5 min version): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pgz6ZCqhtg

The clip is popular among the anti-immigration crowd and the red and green population projections may be flawed, but the general point he makes with the gumballs is valid.

It makes a flawed point because it doesn't account for the larger changes that come with opening the labour market. When you allow people to move in an out of the western world easily, you create a few salutary effects.

1. Cultural fluency. People who move to the west, work and train there, then move back home bring back with them massive stores of useful knowledge which can help local economies grow, by communicating the practices which have made the west successful, but with the understanding of someone from their place of origin.

2. Market efficiency. Having the best people be able to find the best jobs regardless of location makes the world economy grow more. This growth has immensely positive impact even for people who don't move.

3. Exit potential. Having the potential for their best and brightest to exit causes national governments to be more responsive and effective. Even if the exit doesn't happen, that it could happen can prod governments to better practices. For example, see the "brain drain" doctor shortages in the UK during the 80s, when the wage gap between the US and UK was big enough to cause doctors to emigrate, forcing the government to be more responsive to doctors' needs.

You are right. There are many good reasons to support immigration. The glass jar thing just shows that immigration to the West can never be the MAIN driving force for Third World poverty reduction.

I posted that particular clip because his way of presenting it was effective and funny, not because I agree with him on other points.

Pritchett: "If I get 3,000 Bangladeshi workers into the US, do I get a Nobel Peace Prize?"

What about the 150 million people who have to stay in Bangladesh? Muhammad Yunus, his bank and his ideas have helped millions of people. So, no, you don't get a Nobel Peace Prize for helping a lucky handful.

You don't know how to read a graph?

I don't get it.

Micro-finance lifts millions of people above the poverty line, reduces infant mortality, helps them get education etc. It affects more people than immigration does. Individuals gain massively from migrating, I understand that part, but it helps only a handful of people. The rest have to stay in poverty. So he sums up the gains of 3,000 Bangladeshi migrants and then uses that to mock Grameen?

Basically the question is whether microfinance is more scalable than migration. At first blush the answer would seem to be yes, although I'll admit to knowing little about the scalability of microfinance.

The graph Will refers to appears to compare "gains per person" from migration vs. from microfinance. But as H. says, the key question is scalability.

One way to make immigration more "scalable" would be to institute a guest worker program. If the gains are really so humongous from even 6 months in the U.S., you could probably cycle 1 million immigrants through every year or so, send them back to their home countries with fat wallets, and help everybody involved.

This graph should probably have some log based scale. The last dollar in a 10,000 dollar increase in someones wage is several orders of magnitude less important than the first.

But I do agree with the general argument. Liberalized immigration is an ideal situation.

This is all very true, but spacetime has four dimensions and intertemporal justice is not addressed here. To the extent that current developed world levels of compensation/consumption are depriving future generations of access to sustainable stocks of natural resources, expanding such consumption is simply a time shifting of injustice in much the same way that immigration policy (and lets not forget capital mobility!) represents a spatial ordering of social injustice.

Of course that's probably just crazy talk, but not the good kind of crazy talk that you and Pritchett so value. After all, everyone knows that there's no "true power" behind the idea that growth is both necessary for human welfare and, conveniently enough, indefinitely sustainable.

One tricky point here is that proving a short-term effect is much easier than proving a long-term effect, because there is more uncertainty in long-term prediction.

So, showing there is an injustice due to migration controls (short-term phenomenon) is easier than showing there is an injustice because of sustainability problems (long-term prediction).

Of course there is always a risk that what looks good in the short term (relaxing migration restrictions, putting $$$ in people's wallet to increase world consumption) may have bad long term effects. But it's harder to show.

The seeming fishiness of limitless exponential growth given finite resources should give people pause, however. Certainly there is no iron law that says that has to go on forever.

One tricky point here is that proving a short-term effect is much easier than proving a long-term effect, because there is more uncertainty in long-term prediction.

Very true, but the corollary here is that greater certainty may arrive only after optimal inflection points for action. Accepting lower returns for the sake of hedging risk is common practice in finance but it's apparently heresy to apply the same logic to these kinds of questions.

To be clear, I'm all for improving the plight of the global poor right now because all evidence indicates that desperate people make decisions strictly weighted, understandably, toward short term results. The negative correlation between wealth/education and population growth speaks to this. The accelerated depletion rates that raising the living standards of the poor implies, however, could be substantially mitigated through redistribution, but, y'know, crazy talk and all that.

Unskilled immigration lowers wages for unskilled natives, and drains government resources, because unskilled immigrants tend to consume more in government resources than they pay in taxes. Remittances from unskilled immigrants to their home countries have also had dysfunctional effects -- creating a culture of dependency, stifling local economic growth, etc.

Poverty and poor living conditions in the developing world are due mainly to bad government. If, for example, the tens of millions of Mexican nationals living in the U.S. illegally had stayed in Mexico, they might have exerted some political pressure on their government to improve the economic situation there.

Many parts of the world have a government so poor and corrupt that it's pretty much impossible for the politically disadvantage to exert any effective political pressure at all. Why not let them vote with their feet?

How about the findings of Robert Putnam regarding social capital and trust? Does this affect the benefits that may be gained by allowing more immigration (i.e. more immigration/diversity results in less social capital and trust in commuities)? Is there some level of immigration that would be detrimental to the communities they are migrating into, resulting in a lower standard of living for the current members of the community, in effect killing the golden goose that prompted the immigration in the first place?

Yeah, but that's only detrimental to the native population. Who give a fuck about them? The most important blank spot exists now in deconstructing the majority so thoroughly that it can never be called the majority again...

This is all a line of PURE BS.

If the idiot in Harvard figures what he has, then WHY HASN'T HE donated his ENTIRE salary to the effort which he so ~loftily~ says the rest of us should engage?

He hasn't and neither should we.

POINT: Precisely ~WHAT~ is 'poverty?'

That question needs to be answered before =ANY= money is spent, anywhere.

If I possess just one penny, yet everyone else around me possesses NOT A THING, then I am wealthy.

Should I toss my penny to the rest? And for what reason, and with for what good cause should I?

Amen to Highlander....not only should I not give my penny away, but why do I have to pay for those who live in la la land and feel that the earth has unlimited resources, and further, curbs on population growth are not important when resources are dwindling?

WHERE DOES THIS NOTION OF PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY COME INTO THE PICTURE WHEN IT COMES TO BIRTH CONTROL....or am I too just go along with the idea that anyone and everyone can have as many kids as they want whether they can afford them or not. I THINK NOT.

As long as all the village idiots believe that we must accept chronic world population growth, i.e. Roman catholic church, then the future is really bleak. I for one, feel that we have achieved a new point in history, where quality is far more important that quantity.

Speaking as a woman, I find the answer simple...it is women who carry only around 400 eggs in their bodies, whereas men have zillions of sperm, thereby making those zillions rather redundant. As well, we know that when quantity prevails, then quality suffers, so take a clue from women's bodies you profs, monks and other nonthinking neanderthals. Further, any thinking individual knows in their deepest heart of hearts, giving birth to oneself is far more important than filling the earth with creatures never having the ability to improve their lot in life.

If I possess just one penny, yet everyone else around me possesses NOT A THING, then I am wealthy.

Actually, in this situation the family with the fat kids is the wealthiest.

Just sayin'. Pennies are hard t' chew. But fat kids is good eatin'!

So. . . the job market sucks, unemployment is way up, and people want more immigrants to take what jobs there are. . . wow, a more idiotic idea I haven't heard since. . . the War on Drugs. . .

At least until we get our stuff together, we need to lock down the borders, not open them up. . . it's almost impossible to count jellybeans when someone is dumping another truckload on top of the those you are counting - and you can't fix the unemployment problem by dumping truckloads of new people into the job market to compete for jobs that don't exist. Do you people ever actually spend a few minutes to actually *think*?