This was just beautiful. I'm stuck in Trinidad where severe corruption, a bloated public service and plenty bureaucracy are preventing me from being as productive as I can be and want to be. There are people abroad who want to hire me and for whom I want to work, but we keep bumping into immigration bureaucracy that is stopping my migration. A temporary, but unsustainable (in my view) virtual solution has been implemented for now. It's very frustrating.
Richard Lynn's 'IQ and the Wealth of Nations' and Garett Jones' 'The Culture Transplant' are persuasive to me. The societal benefits of higher IQ appear to surpass individual benefits, suggesting that widespread low IQ immigration could generate significant negative externalities. There may be a tipping point in immigration, where an excessive influx of low IQ individuals (lowering the national average below a threshold) threatens the maintenance of 'good' economic institutions, potentially transforming host nations into mirrors of the third world.
"The remittances, knowledge transfers, and return migration all counteract that potential cost."
I don't think there's much justification for this in the article.
You focus a lot on the reduced global productivity, and the reduced opportunity for productivity from those would-be emigrants, but not so much on the overall productivity reduction in the nation being emigrated from. The small correlation found between emigration, and GDP growth could be confounded by one of a thousand different factors, most of all the countries with the highest levels of proportional emigration (Eastern Europe) happened to also be transitioning from Communism to Capitalism in the same period they experienced that emigration, which could easily translate to improved productivity mitigated the effects of emigration.
"...the prosperity of people matters more than the prosperity of an arbitrary geographical location."
This is the core thesis of this post. That national borders are not especially important, and that the overall prosperity of the world is the important metric we should be looking at. I am not sure this can be justified though. Politicians and governments are explicitly created to further the interests of "arbitrary geographical locations", and any government that doesn't explicitly pursue a policy that is for the benefit of their arbitrary geography is not going to be able to maintain power for long.
If you're already a wealthy citizen of the developed world, sharing ideas instantly to anyone across the planet, with the cost of travel anywhere being a relatively insignificant amount relative to your income, the world may seem a lot more global than it is for the average person.
This was just beautiful. I'm stuck in Trinidad where severe corruption, a bloated public service and plenty bureaucracy are preventing me from being as productive as I can be and want to be. There are people abroad who want to hire me and for whom I want to work, but we keep bumping into immigration bureaucracy that is stopping my migration. A temporary, but unsustainable (in my view) virtual solution has been implemented for now. It's very frustrating.
This is extremely convincing!
Thank you.
Richard Lynn's 'IQ and the Wealth of Nations' and Garett Jones' 'The Culture Transplant' are persuasive to me. The societal benefits of higher IQ appear to surpass individual benefits, suggesting that widespread low IQ immigration could generate significant negative externalities. There may be a tipping point in immigration, where an excessive influx of low IQ individuals (lowering the national average below a threshold) threatens the maintenance of 'good' economic institutions, potentially transforming host nations into mirrors of the third world.
"The remittances, knowledge transfers, and return migration all counteract that potential cost."
I don't think there's much justification for this in the article.
You focus a lot on the reduced global productivity, and the reduced opportunity for productivity from those would-be emigrants, but not so much on the overall productivity reduction in the nation being emigrated from. The small correlation found between emigration, and GDP growth could be confounded by one of a thousand different factors, most of all the countries with the highest levels of proportional emigration (Eastern Europe) happened to also be transitioning from Communism to Capitalism in the same period they experienced that emigration, which could easily translate to improved productivity mitigated the effects of emigration.
"...the prosperity of people matters more than the prosperity of an arbitrary geographical location."
This is the core thesis of this post. That national borders are not especially important, and that the overall prosperity of the world is the important metric we should be looking at. I am not sure this can be justified though. Politicians and governments are explicitly created to further the interests of "arbitrary geographical locations", and any government that doesn't explicitly pursue a policy that is for the benefit of their arbitrary geography is not going to be able to maintain power for long.
If you're already a wealthy citizen of the developed world, sharing ideas instantly to anyone across the planet, with the cost of travel anywhere being a relatively insignificant amount relative to your income, the world may seem a lot more global than it is for the average person.