Today is Open Borders Day. To celebrate, I’m pleased to announce that All Roads Lead to Open Borders, my graphic novel with Zach Weinersmith, will be published in 2019. For now, here’s a draft page.
Today is Open Borders Day. To celebrate, I’m pleased to announce that All Roads Lead to Open Borders, my graphic novel with Zach Weinersmith, will be published in 2019. For now, here’s a draft page.
Mar 16 2018
Most of all, I hope this puzzle will be fun, but I also hope it will somehow be a bit enlightening. It's a sort of "who am I?" puzzle, but with a twist: Back in the interwar period, a famous British economist modeled a problem that can occur at certain times and places. He then suggested what sort of public policie...
Mar 16 2018
I am too much of a Jennifer Lawrence's fan to actually hold a nuanced view of Red Sparrow. I thought the movie nice and fast-paced, and I thought she was glorious. I understand it is not Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy but I thought it was good entertainment with a good lead actress who happens to be the most beautiful Ho...
Mar 16 2018
Today is Open Borders Day. To celebrate, I'm pleased to announce that All Roads Lead to Open Borders, my graphic novel with Zach Weinersmith, will be published in 2019. For now, here's a draft page.(Click here for full-sized version).
READER COMMENTS
Quite Likely
Mar 16 2018 at 9:41am
This seems a bit disingenuous. Obviously the concern is that poor immigrants increase the labor supply and thus lower wages, which are of course the main factor in most people’s standard of living.
John Hare
Mar 16 2018 at 9:56am
Or if there is an agenda on inequality that uses statistics to attack the successful.
Richard
Mar 16 2018 at 10:29am
Quite Likely is correct, and John Hare’s point is the essential one. A steady influx of Third Worlders changes the culture and politics of a First World country. America will get the corrupt, collectivist government the migrants are fleeing. It’s happening already. The Democrats changed the immigration laws in 1965 with this as the explicit goal. That Bryan does not understand this, believe it, or sufficiently care about it baffles me.
Denver
Mar 16 2018 at 10:50am
It’s almost as if this is a single argument from a single page taken from an entire book. Saying Bryan’s argument is disingenuous is like criticizing a novel only after reading the first page.
Hazel Meade
Mar 16 2018 at 11:11am
A steady influx of Third Worlders changes the culture and politics of a First World country. …
The Democrats changed the immigration laws in 1965 with this as the explicit goal.
This is one of those things that I hear alt-righters repeating without a shred of evidence.
The immigration laws in 1965 actually made it significantly HARDER for unskilled immigrants to come into the US.
What it did to was abolish the quota system allocated immigration to certain parts of the world – specifically Europe. The new immigration policy allowed immigrants from everywhere more or less equally, but it did not make it easier for poor and unskilled laborers to enter the US.
Also there is zero evidence that the Democrats did this with the explicit intent to change the politics and culture of the US.
Nick
Mar 16 2018 at 12:21pm
FYI, the “Open Borders Day” link does not currently link to anything.
Arthur
Mar 16 2018 at 12:30pm
I generally support your position, but this argument is ridiculous – height and livings standards are in no way analogous, because your immediate surroundings don’t change your current height.
A better analogy would be if you were having a pillow fight with a group of friends, and then a new group of people entered the fight – but with guns instead of pillows.
A person might then reasonably say, “the safety standards of this fight have changed.”
I happen to think that immigrants bring pillows at about the same rate as natives, but that’s the real argument.
Benjamin R Kennedy
Mar 16 2018 at 12:35pm
This is not passing the ITT. The concern (valid or not) is that immigration has a real impact due to increased competetion, etc. Not a silly mathematical one.
Amy Willis
Mar 16 2018 at 12:55pm
Thanks, Nick! We’ve fixed the link.
Ahmed Fares
Mar 16 2018 at 5:27pm
The argument that immigrants increase the labor supply and lower wages is nonsensical because it doesn’t take into account the fact that immigrants are also consumers.
The same concern was raised in the 1970s when women started entering the workforce in large numbers. But that also meant that household incomes rose such that there was new demand for output that didn’t exist before.
Lump of Labor Fallacy…
Ahmed Fares
Mar 16 2018 at 5:37pm
Incidentally, I liked Bryan’s earlier metaphor using Danny DeVito better but then I suspect there may be a lot of younger people who don’t know who Danny DeVito is. Here is a quote:
Here is a link to the full article:
http://www.econlib.org/econlog/archives/2010/09/you_dont_have_t.html
Ben Kennedy
Mar 16 2018 at 8:35pm
I wouldn’t say “nonsensical”. Econ 101 teaches that all things being equal, an increase in supply will lead to a decrease in price. And it might be the case that the economy grows as a whole, but the gains are concentrated with workers that are not in direct competition with the influx of workers. Maybe someone should write a cartoon about how if averages wages rise, it doesn’t mean that is the case for 100% of the population (and could very much harm the marginally employable low-skill workers we already have…)
TMC
Mar 18 2018 at 10:36am
How about we use a different analogy. A process engineer has 10 gallons of water at 180* and his process works best at higher temperature. I add another gallon in that is at 110*. We have another gallon!, but that’s not what is important to the process.
Pre-schooler
Mar 18 2018 at 7:43pm
“Goddammit, who let all these preschoolers onto the court, how are we going to play now? This one is demanding equal representation in the NBA! This one wants half my pay in order to care for her seven dolls! And this one has just stolen my wallet and spent all the money on candy!”
noplaynomo
Mar 18 2018 at 9:50pm
What if the room is a place to play basket ball? What if the players are a team? Will the integration of the short people help raise the average score? Will the points that the tall people score need to be shared with the short people? Will the tall people be required to pass the ball to the short ones?
What if the short ones are more like gremlins than preschoolers? What if they refuse to play by the rules? What if they steal their teammate’s shoes, rape the cheerleaders and burn down the bleachers? Do we still buy the assertion that “everyone is better off?”
Bryan seems to be explaining his “dreaded arithmetic fallacy” with a false analogy.
Comments are closed.