Blunt Object has a post up that's awfully good. RTWT. However, in that post, he references a Bryan Caplan post 3 times, meanwhile saying nasty things about people who don't click through. Rather than being properly circumspect like Blunt Object...I'm going to just come out and say it:
Open Borders is the single political decision that would most benefit humankind of all feasible political actions. Full F'in Stop.
Average estimate of global GDP increase from full free trade:
~1.5% (8 estimates)
Average estimate of global GDP increase from open borders:
108% (4 estimates).
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7 comments:
Thanks for the link!
That said, I'm not sure "properly circumspect" is quite the right term for my approach....
Any estimate that comes up with a GDP gain on the order of 100+% strikes me as likely to be ignoring second-order effects.
The second-order effects from a hypothetical world of global open borders strike me as likely to be large.
And, a world of global open borders seems likely to be unobtainable without at least first crossing several intermediate worlds of (some) open borders - in which the 108% finding presumably would not apply.
P.S. I'm not making an argument against open borders here; just saying.
Key point I left on blunt's page;
rwcg is right.
GDP gains from displacing observably identical workers cannot be real. They're doing the same job, which means creating the same things, which means wealth is constant. If GDP is going up, GDP is in error.
At best, they create somewhat more due to capital investment, but moving them lowers the investment/worker ratio.
The real second order effect to worry about is how all those new Americans would vote. Do you think it likely that the flood of Mexicans, Nigerians, Egyptians, and Chinese would start voting Republican? Their existing co-ethnics currently here don't.
Steve Sailer points to polls showing 30% of Mexicans would move here if they could. Mexico is not particularly poor by world standards. If even, say, 20% of the third world immigrated to the open-border USA, we'd have roughly 1 billion new Democratic voters. They would rapidly create the conditions for a level Democratic dominance not seen since FDR. The Democrats would then proceed with the left's economic agenda, lots of redistribution from existing wealthholders (aka current citizens) to new immigrants. Result: the USA turns into... Brazil? South Africa? China? I don't know. I don't want to find out.
But hey, world GDP would have increased! At least for a while.
If you want to make policy based on those studies, we need to keep things out of your reach.
So much more is involved here:
)GDP doesn't measure the quality of life.
)Empirical evidence to date hasn't shown much greatness from population mobility. I suppose, like communism, we just haven't gotten the details right.
)Political conquest trumps economics. Some are more interested in expanding Ummah. All your nice arguments won't sway them.
1. GDP is a damn fine proxy for quality of life. Not perfect, but better than any other measure we have.
2. Contrarily, empirical evidence shows that immigration is insanely positive for the immigrants (+500-1500% standard of living) and at most minorly inconvenient for natives (-5% is the lowest estimate we've got).
3. So...if we abolish voting for immigrants you're ok? I'm down with that.
)Dividing GDP by population and then making policy on those numbers is problematic.
Borders and co-ethnics = more autonomy. Everyone wants more autonomy, and is willing to pay big for it, even an 108% GDP increase.
)The US has taken in more immigrants than the rest of the world combined. Yet our recent economic growth has lagged non-importers such as China and Germany. Where's the growth? From what can we extrapolate 108% growth? You tell me government is in the way. Looks to me like immigrants = net gain to Statism.
)Voting, blah. Go tell Israel to open their borders WFO. Get back to us.
The trend looks the other way: India split, Pakistan split, Syria split, Czechoslovakia split.
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