November 13, 2005
"We are Galt's Gulch"
Hypothesis: As a consequence of so severely limiting the number of immigrants to the US, the US is keeping the world's economy afloat.
In other words: who are the people that want to emigrate to the US? The really high-productivity people, who want to create their own businesses and make a lot of money--something very easy to do in the US, but very hard to do elsewhere (due to government regulation inhibiting commerce and starting businesses and hiring and firing people, bribery and corruption, cultures where you have to "know people" to get anything done, etc). Many of these people come to the US but many can't reasonably do so--the US severely limits the number of Argentines who can move here permanently, for example. As a consequence, these people stay in their respective countries and become high productivity citizens--as much as they can--in their local economies, keeping their local economies much more afloat than they would be without them. For any economy to flourish, it is deeply dependent on these people; and the US attracts them away; so the difficulty getting work visas here is really a huge gift America is giving to these countries. We should be thanked for it!
(The subject line is Luke's boil-down of a conversation that he, Alex and I were having the other day, where we discussed this hypothesis and it was first formulated so directly.)
Posted by Morgan at 01:14 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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Comments
congratulations, you've discovered the wheel.
It's called the 'brain drain'
Posted by: hickster at November 19, 2005 09:32 PM
The point is something like the converse of the brain drain: that, as a consequence of limits the US has placed on immigration (and therefore the limits on the brain drain), we have given a boon to the economies of the rest of the world, by keeping the brains in the other countries.
Posted by: Morgan at November 20, 2005 12:42 PM
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