DISQUS

Michael:

The "irrelevant" jab was aimed at Wilkinson's breathless hyperbole.

It appears to me that you've simply invented a new metric to show that people move from poor countries to rich ones. Your metric might be novel but the point it serves to illustrate is obvious - indeed, self-evident.

I'm sorry, at first glance I assumed your work a positivist economics paper, and criticized it thusly. After reading your comment, I see that it is in fact normative, and designed to reinforce a previously existing policy position. I mistakenly assumed objectivity, where I should have assumed subjectivity. My error, and I'll take a closer read with that in mind.

(BTW, as a migrant and as a libertarian, I happen to agree with your policy position, but that's neither here nor there.)

The reason I find your work shoddy is that I looked at your numbers for several Arab Gulf states (an area I am familiar with), and found your results to be laughably absurd, prima facie. I haven't read the whole thing, which I will do tonight. I'll then e-mail you if I have any constructive criticisms concerning methodology or conclusion.

Ram: the authors claim that this is different to GNP because GNP only applies to residents of a country who are overseas temporarily. They are talking about tracking the wealth of all people born in a certain place, regardless of where they choose to settle and become citizens.

Wilkinson's rhetoric is overblown and overheated. The statistic in question is not important, not meaningful, and not relevant to anything much.

The results reported are also horribly incorrect in many (probably most) cases, and are at best out of date.

This "paper" stands to validate what any thinking person already knew: people who are able to do so tend to migrate towards places that give them better wealth-generating opportunities. That's why I am in the US, not Canada (where I grew up) or the UK (where I was born.) These people are merely attempting (shoddily) to measure that well-known effect. It certainly isn't important or insightful.

Tracking the flow of remittances does a similar job, but probably better.