DISQUS

If these jobs paid millions of dollars per year (like jobs at Wall Street investment banks), then highly skilled workers would leave other occupations and develop the skills necessary to work in high tech occupations.

Funny, Wall Street is one of the industries trying to get more "fehrners" in, moving ops to the UK because of lack of skilled rocket scientists here.

Curious how foreign workers lucky enough to have an H1B, and who should thus be interested in more protectionism, are amongst the ones most in favor of lowering the barriers, even at the cost of lower personal affluence. An evil plan to take over the country? You got us! (Yep, I'm one of 'em.) Solidarity? Perhaps. But I would suspect it's simpler, that we are, as a group, skewed towards libertarian ideas; after all, we did leave our countries to pursue the "American dream", which, whatever else it might mean, rings of some loose mapping from personal responsibility to effort to reward.

I thought reason was closer to the red line... Would that make it the fifth column of the orange-line evildoers?

"Once one realizes that emigration is a principal route out of poverty for people from many countries, as we demonstrate"

Did that really require demonstration? Is there any substantial number of people (in either side of the immigration-reform debate) who don't believe that?

And will that affect the immigration debate? The core opposition to more open immigration laws does not stem from disbelief about the welfare-improvement characteristics of migration for the immigrants, but from (populist) non-sequiturs about how it harms the welfare of the current residents.

(Full disclosure: I'm in the US under a work visa and all for opening up the labor markets to more competition.)

But how would those "low-cost investments" be financed? Perhaps through a carbon tax? If we know that there is a negative externality of small expected effect, shouldn't a small Pigouvian tax improve efficiency? Doubly so by reducing labor/income taxes? Or if not, then to finance that "smart insurance policy"?

At least the way the quote explains it, that measure already exists: Gross National Product (as opposed to Gross Domestic Product). I'm not sure why they authors claim that Gross National Income does not get to this, but I hope it's for more than the differences between income and product in national accounts.

As a measure of development and welfare, it's iffy at best. Emigration is rarely, if ever, an intended result of a country's policies, it rather tends to be the result of institutional failures. Is Zimbabwe a more developed country if all it's nationals flee and get better jobs in SA? What if migrants get the new nationality? If changes in the immigration rules in the country migrated to affect the measured product of the country migrated from, can this be an useful development/welfare measure?

And if we want to reduce economic nationalism, then where a person is born should matter less than where that person chooses to live. Voting with one feet should be more relevant than the accident of birth location when evaluating the institutions of a country.

Finally, while "this isn’t an argument open to some kind of refutation", the rest of that last paragraph is. Just saying! :-)

Will,
Nice piece on Marketplace! But I do have two issues about it:

1) Wall Street's behavior is not a good starting point to exempt Greenspan (whether he needs an exemption or not is a different issue). WS follows its own goals and, more to the point, its own incentives, which are likely at the heart of recurring pops. There's herd behavior, there's risk-underpricing, etc. NO evil, just the goal to make a profit and the incentives to push the system until it breaks. Part of the Fed's job involves taking the info coming out of WS as an input for its own decisions (for whatever its own goals); processing it should incorporate knowledge of WS biases; and failure to do so is just that. So while I agree that criticizing Greenspan COULD be next-day quarterbacking, Wall Street inflating a bubble within his watch could either be damning (if he could have identified it as such) or neutral (otherwise) evidence, but not a basis for exemption.
2) Bernanke might prove a genius maverick or a total failure, but he CAN be evaluated on the fly GIVEN our current knowledge of econ and finance (which might need re-writing or not after the fact). It's not fair to compare the ongoing commentary to next-day quarterbacking carried out on Sunday night if it's based on "what we know."

Now, having said all that. I *loved* your comparison of a central banker to a central planner. What's your view of the Fed? I'd wager you think rate-targeting is bad. So a monetary rule plus the role of lender of last resort (under very fixed rules)? Or even less than that? No Fed at all?

Thanks!