Our most memorable Uber driver in Madrid was a young Pakistani man. We gave him twenty minutes; he gave us his odyssey. Too bad I failed to recorded the conversation, because this would have been a great interview to broadcast on Spanish radio.
Our driver’s story: Back in Pakistan, he lived in hunger, so he left home to seek his fortune. In popular parlance, he became part of the “European migrant crisis.” He traveled solo, journeying from Pakistan to Iran to Turkey. Then he zigzagged around the EU, passing through Greece, Romania, Germany, Italy, and France. Our driver gave few details, but each of these countries treated him badly. He had to hide from the authorities, and could not legally work.
After three months, however, he reached Spain – and his life turned around. My Spanish sources tell me that migrants must normally wait three years to receive work permission, but my driver somehow managed to get his work papers almost immediately.
Three years later, he speaks Spanish, has plenty to eat, and loves his new home. Indeed, he practically describes Spain as a libertarian paradise: work hard, don’t hurt people, don’t steal, and you’ll have a good life. Using his Spanish travel documents, he was even able to visit Britain. He liked it, but saw no hope of ever legally working there.
My Spanish is very poor, but I had no trouble understanding our driver when he gushed, “España es como una madre” – “Spain is like a mother.” He didn’t say a word about government benefits; he was overjoyed to live in a country where he could live in peace and get ahead by working hard. Though we didn’t even have a language in common, he was my kind of guy. The American Dream is also the Spanish Dream, because both are the World Dream.
READER COMMENTS
nobody.really
Jul 18 2019 at 12:24pm
A charming story. That said….
1: It’s always nice to see reporters interviewing the winners. And it’s always risky to generalize from such exchanges.
Did you also talk to former taxi drivers in Spain–those who have now lost their jobs and are unemployed–about their dreams? For that matter, have you talked to medallion owners in New York City? If their perspectives might be relevant to your analysis, you might want to talk to them quickly–before they all kill themselves out of despair.
Let us celebrate risk-takers. But if your imagination extends only to the risk-takers who win, you end up with a worldview as narrow as Ayn Rand’s.
2: It the American Dream universal? Depends on what you mean by “the American Dream.”
I suspect humans are prone to anticipate a future that looks a lot like the past, but with changes to whichever variable they are prone to focus on. (To cite a favorite example, some engineer recalled reading Popular Mechanics in his youth, and thus was perfectly prepared to accept a world in which we traveled around with jetpacks–but was utterly unprepared for a world in which a girl would be his boss. Somehow the prognosticators at Popular Mechanics people missed that variable.)
By virtue of not having starved to death in the past, I suspect most people anticipate a world in which they do not starve to death. In this sense, they may share the “dream” of the Pakistani Uber driver. But in other respects, I suspect most people see themselves largely living as their parents lived. Thus, while it is kind of romantic to imagine that your personal values are somehow a manifestation of the human condition, I suspect it is a mistake to believe that most people aspire to the life of the Pakistani Uber driver–even most people in Pakistan.
Matthias Görgens
Jul 19 2019 at 1:54pm
Well, it’s good that we have both economic theory and empiric data to tell us that eg eliminating taxi medallions produces net benefits for society.
So we don’t have to rely on who has the best anecdotes.
nobody.really
Jul 22 2019 at 2:36pm
I wasn’t making a statement about the merits of any specific public policy. I was making a statement about morality lessons. Caplan cited one example of a policy he favors turning out well, and invites us to generalize from that. It’s a famously troubled practice.
Frédéric Bastiat is celebrated for his economic essay “What is Seen and What is Unseen.” I simply ask economist Caplan to reflect not merely on what he’s seen, but also on the corresponding dynamics that have gone unseen. We might well conclude that, all things considered, immigration and Uber make the world better. But we can only reach that conclusion after all things are considered.
Mark Z
Jul 20 2019 at 11:54am
It is possible that Pakistani Uber drivers don’t view themselves as better off that their parents, but since in pretty much every measurable sense they almost certainly are, this just means they’re on a hedonic treadmill – something I think Bryan would agree with, and there’s not really anything to be done about it. I’m sure few people aspire to be Uber drivers. Many see it as an improvement over their status quo, which is star matters.
And even the invention of the polio vaccine put some people out of work. That policies (or really any economic behavior) harm someone at least in the short run is an unavoidable consequence of scarcity. So it seems like a rather trivial observation without much import on policy.
nobody.really
Jul 22 2019 at 3:06pm
Do my policy insights lend themselves to public policy? Perhaps.
First, there’s the insight that we should beware the temptation of projecting our preferences onto others, and moreso the temptation of imagining that our preferences are universal. Arguably there was a certain amount of this kind of wishful thinking underlying the decision to invade Iraq.
Second, there’s the insight that people judge their circumstances not by an absolute standard, but relative to their individual expectations. And this insight arguably lends itself to a variety of strategic decisions.
For example, if you want your kids to be ambitious and productive, give them high expectations. They will be more likely to strive to achieve them–whether or not they succeed. In contrast, if you want your kids to be happy, give them low expectations. Or, to cite the joke-that-is-not-a-joke, the secret to a happy marriage is low expectations.
Thus, when running for your first term as president, you want to raise the public’s expectations–and lead them to feel dissatisfied with the status quo. When running for your second term, you want to lower people’s expectations–and lead them to feel grateful for the status quo.
Likewise, a government that wants voters to be satisfied wants to help voters achieve their expectations. This generally means promoting growth while maintaining the social hierarchy. Helping minorities achieve similar status to whites (whether via meritocracy or affirmative action), or promoting innovation that leads to a lot of creative destruction–each policy might boost growth, but will likely provoke a backlash among the voters who end up with frustrated expectations. The US has observed public backlashes whenever it has experienced a surge of immigration, even as it experienced (long-run) growth.
I don’t ask anyone to like these insights; I ask people to believe them.
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