Podcast appearances and mentions of Michael Clemens

I have been thinking about tariffs recently. No reason why, just interested. And while reading, I came across a series of interesting papers by economists Michael Clemens and Jeffrey Williamson. They explore what looks like an economic paradox. Up until World War I, the countries of Latin America were the most protectionist in the world, with some of its highest tariff rates. East Asia on the other hand - for reasons we will discuss later - had tariffs just a fraction as high. Yet during these decades, the Latin American countries grew faster than the Asian ones. Before World War I, one might argue that if you wanted faster economic growth, you needed high tariffs. Then things changed. In this video, high tariffs in Latin America. Low tariffs in Asia. One works the other doesn't, right? Time, context, and composition matter.

I have been thinking about tariffs recently. No reason why, just interested. And while reading, I came across a series of interesting papers by economists Michael Clemens and Jeffrey Williamson. They explore what looks like an economic paradox. Up until World War I, the countries of Latin America were the most protectionist in the world, with some of its highest tariff rates. East Asia on the other hand - for reasons we will discuss later - had tariffs just a fraction as high. Yet during these decades, the Latin American countries grew faster than the Asian ones. Before World War I, one might argue that if you wanted faster economic growth, you needed high tariffs. Then things changed. In this video, high tariffs in Latin America. Low tariffs in Asia. One works the other doesn't, right? Time, context, and composition matter.

Die Show vom 25.11. nun auch als Podcast verfügbar! Gäste: Mike Hanke, Conan Furlong, Andreas Ernst, Michael Clemens - und Matthias Ginter

Michael Clemens of George Mason University is an expert on the economics of migration, and a scholar of its history. With the newly elected President Trump promising to deport millions of immigrants, we thought it was the perfect time to talk about what illegal immigrants mean to the present economy and, more pressingly, what an economy without them might look like.If you want to learn more about The Economics Show with Soumaya Keynes, click here. New episodes available on Apple, Spotify, Pocket Casts or wherever you listen. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Michael Clemens of George Mason University is an expert on the economics of migration, and a scholar of its history. With the newly elected President Trump promising to deport millions of immigrants, we thought it was the perfect time to talk about what illegal immigrants mean to the present economy and, more pressingly, what an economy without them might look like.Soumaya Keynes writes a column each week for the Financial Times. You can find it hereSubscribe to Soumaya's show on Apple, Spotify, Pocket Casts or wherever you listen.Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Republicans want to label Kamala Harris as the border czar. And by just looking at a chart, you can see why. Border crossings were low when Donald Trump left office. But when President Biden is in the White House, they start shooting up and up — to numbers this country had never seen before, peaking in December 2023. Those numbers have fallen significantly since Biden issued tough new border policies. But that has still left Harris with a major vulnerability. Why didn't the administration do more sooner? And why did border crossings skyrocket in the first place?Harris was not the border czar; she had little power over policy. But to the extent that there is a border czar, it's the secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas. So I wanted to have him on the show to explain what's happened at the border the past few years — the record surge, the administration's record and what it has revealed about our immigration system.Book Recommendations:The Nickel Boys by Colson WhiteheadString Theory by David Foster WallaceThe DictionaryThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Elias Isquith, Kristin Lin and Aman Sahota. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Ariel G. Ruiz Soto, Dara Lind, David Frum, Jason De Léon, Michael Clemens, Natan Last and Steven Camarota.

In this week's episode, BPC Senior Advisor Theresa Cardinal Brown talks with Michael Clemens, professor of economics at George Mason University, who has studied the economic causes and effects of migration all over the world. His latest research, based on detailed examination of border crossing data, shows that offering more lawful pathways to immigrants reduces unlawful border crossings. We also talk about the importance of good data for examining immigration policy and how traditional understandings of the linkages between migration and development may not be correct.   Michael Clemens Bio: Economics | Faculty and Staff: Michael A Clemens (gmu.edu)  PIIE Article: Offering more lawful pathways for US border crossings reduces unlawful crossings | PIIE  Journal of Economic Perspectives Article: Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk? - American Economic Association (aeaweb.org) 

Michael Clemens, Chefporteføljemanager hos BankInvest, taler i denne episode om efficiens i aktiemarkedet, og hvordan investorer kan skelne mellem makro- og mikro efficiens. Michaels model viser på makroniveau, at S&P 500 har været ude af efficiens 13-31% af tiden siden 1963.Episoden er lavet i samarbejde med Euronext Securities Copenhagen: euronext.com/en/post-tradeArtikel:https://rsepconferences.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/3_CLEMENS.pdf Følg os på LinkedIn:André: www.linkedin.com/in/andréthormann/Benjamin: www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminzumofen/Henrik: www.linkedin.com/in/henrik-fr/Intro musik:Deadly Roulette by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3625-deadly-rouletteLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Welcome to the Ideas Untrapped podcast - and my guest today is Development Economist Lant Pritchett. He is one of the most incisive and insightful scholars in the field, and his influence at the frontier of development research cannot be overstated. His research mostly focuses on economic growth, its contributing factors, and the development implications for peoples and countries. It was a privilege for me to talk to Lant, and I took the chance to ask him questions about some of the big themes of his research like Migration, Education, and State Capability. This is a two-part conversation. In this episode, we discussed Migration and Education. Lant provides insights into how the demographic transition in many rich countries has now pushed the migration debate to the forefront, as opposed to when he was writing about it two decades ago. How the Solow model might explain the absence of migration on the development agenda, and why he thinks the ‘‘brain drain'' is ‘‘mostly a myth''. He also explained to me how we ended up with the wrong dashboard in education policies and the distinction between assessment and examination in measuring learning. I want to thank Lant for talking to me, and thank you all for always listening. I hope you enjoy it.TranscriptTobi;My guest really needs no introduction. There's nowhere in the world of development, global development, and development economics, where Lant Pritchett is not a household name. So I'll like to say welcome, and it's a pleasure to talk to you.Lant;Thanks for inviting me.Tobi;On a light note, let's start on a very light note. What have you been working on recently?Lant;So recently I've been doing two things. I've been wrapping up a large research project on basic education in the developing world, sort of K to twelve, and that had been an eight year research project that's just wrapping up. But more recently, I'm trying to ramp up my engagement on labour mobility. The world is facing a real demographic transition point, with the rich industrial world, particularly workforce age populations, just in constant decline while their aging population is increasing. And at the same time we have this massive youth bulge in parts of, not all of, but in parts of the developing world. And, you know, I'm an economist, whenever you see huge differences, you think, well, here's an opportunity for exchange. So the world's biggest opportunity for exchange right now is the West, as we call it, desperately needs workers, Africans definitely need the hide productivity income and jobs. And it's a great opportunity for exchange, but it's blocked by laws and policies that just make migration next to impossible. And I'm working to break that gridlock and get some sensible ways in which we can put willing workers into needed jobs.Tobi;I think that's a good launchpad to start the conversation on migration, which you've worked quite a lot on. I read your book Let Their People Come a couple of years ago. As a general question, what do you think we have learned from the time you wrote that book and you were compiling that research and now? Because definitely to me, it doesn't feel like much has changed in terms of the debate. And like you said, migration is such a big issue with economic and political consequences on both sides of the Atlantic. So what have we learned? And if nothing, why is that so? Why is there such a resistance to thinking differently about migration?Lant;What have we learned is a great question. Let's start with the demography of this. That book was written in 2006. One thing about demography is you can predict it very far into the future, right? Everybody who's going to be a 30 year old worker in 20 years is ten years old today. And so it's really not that hard to know what the future, the 20-, 30-year future of the labour force is going to look like, because everybody gets a year older. So on one level, we've learned nothing. But on another level, I think there's a current ongoing night and day shift in the urgency of the issue, because things were easily forecastable when I wrote the book - what is it, 2006? 2023 - 17 years ago. 17 years ago, I was saying, look, there's going to be this demographic crisis in the West and you're going to need these workers, but it was far away. So when you ask has anything been learned, it's like, no, but all of the projections for what was going to happen 17 years ago are now 17 years closer. And now, all of a sudden, the Prime Minister of Japan, I don't know if you've seen this, but the Prime Minister of Japan gave a speech a couple of days ago saying, “for the demographic future of Japan, it's now or never.” And it's like, no, it's never. The opportunity you might have had to address your labour force crisis through fertility was 30 years ago. It's over now.Now the only issue is how are you going to get workers to work in the Japanese economy to fill the jobs that you need, given that you have the demographic crisis you have, which you now can't fix? I wish I had a good word for this or a clever way to put it, but it's sort of like when a child touches a hot stove, do you say they learned something? Well, yeah, kind of. They learned that the stove is hot. But people had been telling the kid, the stove was hot, don't touch it for years. So, you know, did they learn something? Well, kind of. They know it in a different, more intense way than they maybe knew it before, but they didn't learn anything new. So my first response is, I was just way premature with Let Their People Come in 2006 because the problem was still too far away for politicians and policymakers really to focus on it. But now it's like, boom, it's in your face. labour shortages in the West aren't like this hypothetical going to come thing. They're here, they're now. They're everything I do, everything I look at, I think it's here now. And now, like I said, the prime ministers of countries are going, “we really need to worry about this demographic thing.” So on one level, nothing learned. On another level, radical change and attention to the issue because what was easily predictable and was predicted is now happening in a way you can't ignore it.Tobi;But even with that, you still hear many of the standard objections to more migration, whether it's in the wages of domestic workers in the host countries and things around cultural integration. So, just do a quick recap for me why these objections are false or untenable at best. Because a lot of people are still susceptible to the same arguments even with copious evidence and years of research debunking them, you still hear these things. And in the age of social media, where information travels very very fast, you know, and it's also easy to appeal to people who might be affected by this and politically weaponize their disaffection. So the standard arguments to migration, whether we're talking about the work of Borjas and people who are built on the back of that, why are they untenable?Lant;I mean, we can talk about why they're untenable or many of the factual claims are false, but I think we want to start a step before that. I think the biggest problem with conversation about migration is fundamentally, and I'm talking mainly about the rich industrial West, which West includes Australia and West includes Japan, the rich industrial world. Okay. The problem is, since the early 20th century, these countries have forced two questions to have the same answer. And they're radically different questions. One question is, who are we as a sovereign entity that control a border? Who are we going to allow to be physically present on our territory and perform labour services? That's a clear question. It's a policy question. It's a legal question. It's a regulatory question. You can have an answer to that question. Then there's the separate question which is, who is the future of we? Who are we going to allow to come to our country and on the premise that they're going to become a citizen, become a future one of us and determine the future of who is us? Right? And I feel that forcing these two questions to be the same, you get a complete distorted discussion of the first question. So I think nearly everybody who's arguing about the impact of migration or labour mobility, which is by the way, I try and use two different words…I try and always use the words labour mobility because when I use the word labour mobility it's clear I'm talking about the first question [which is] who are you going to allow under what terms and conditions to be physically present on your territory and what kinds of work are you going to allow them? What kinds of contracts and labour are you going to allow them to engage in? That's a question we can debate and have independently, in my view, of the question - who are the future citizens of the country? Right? But when you force those questions to be the same, I think nearly all the discussion of wage impacts is complete subterfuge b******t. Because the problem is if you say, oh, I don't want people coming to my country because I just don't feel they're going to fit in with us, boy, that sounds racist. That sounds exactly why whites in America had restrictive covenants that wouldn't allow African Americans to move into their neighborhoods because they're not like us. They'll change the nature of our way of life. And so most intellectuals in the West are reluctant to actually deploy cultural-based arguments for migration, but it's much more politically acceptable to say, “oh, well, I'm not saying that I am racist and that I don't want people of different races or ethnicities in my country, but it would be terrible for our workers. And therefore, that's why we're not going to do it.” And I think for the most part that's just b******t. It's just subterfuge. It's just substituting an argument that's politically acceptable but false for an argument that's true but not politically acceptable.So, I think the reason why these false arguments, quite untenable arguments persist is exactly that. It's that these arguments are factually untenable, but it's easier to justify action in terms of those rather than deal with the concrete issue. And the way in which I'm proposing countries can deal with a concrete issue is start to think about separating these questions. So we have legal mechanisms for people to come and work in the country that perhaps have some path to citizenship, but you don't have to decide the citizenship question immediately when any work authorization is granted.Tobi;Of course, there are also people on the other side of these arguments who advocate for more migration and letting more people travel and be able to work. And like you said, they often mix up these two arguments as you have delineated them. So my question then is, is it time for advocates of more migration to maybe swallow some bitter pills, especially on questions of rights? Because I think that is where some of the hot buttons lie. What rights would people have? What are the benefits they are entitled to in their host country? And some of the fiscal implications of that, you know, even though some of you may be a cover to hide larger cultural or behavioral argument. So is it time for advocates of migration to, I dunno, maybe, embrace more pragmatic arrangements, so that we can move this issue forward a bit, you know? What do you think?Lant; Absolutely. I think that's a very perceptive question because I feel in the space of people that are debating and talking about migration, refugees and labour mobility, those three kind of different channels, the kind of if we use the word migration just to mean the intent that somebody is going to move permanently from one country to the other country and acquire different citizenship, then there's refugees, and then there's labour mobility. I think there's this tension between more and better. And I'm advocating that the path to better runs through more. Whereas a lot of people in this space want better, but it's not at all obvious that they aren't willing to sacrifice more for better. So I'm an economist, so I believe that if the price price of something is higher, people will do less of it. So I feel if you go to countries and you say every person who you allow into your country to do labour services of any kind automatically has to be entitled to the following long list of entitlements. They'll say, “gee, no, we're not going to do that then, we're going to have robots or we'll do without.” No one really should be talking about abrogating fundamental human rights. I mean, I've never say, oh, people should be expected to in any way, shape or form sacrifice fundamental human rights in order to move to another country. But there's a huge space in between. I like that you use the word entitlements versus rights. I feel a lot of human rights are negative rights. These are things that you can't have done to you. It's just immoral, illegitimate to ask you to sacrifice the privileges against these negative things being done to you. Suppressing your freedom of speech, suppressing your freedom of association, forcing you to change your religion, et cetera. But citizens of the West enjoy this huge amount of entitlements which they're entitled to legally as citizens. But migrants don't necessarily need to become endowed with the full panoply of entitlements that citizens have just because they're in the country. And we accept that for students. If you go to study in the United States, no one says, oh, because he's in the United State as a student, he's entitled to every social program available to any citizen in the United States or a tourist. I guess it's the lack of imagination here and I love the title of Ideas Untapped. I think there's a lack of imagination here because we're not making the right analogy.It's like, look, we allow people to be in countries for all kinds o f reasons, like tourism, for students, for passage, to do high level business deals, and we don't expect that to come with this huge array of the complete entitlements of the citizens of the country they happen to be in. And, you know, there's kind of a fetishism about work. Like, if you happen to go to another country and work for three months, that needn't come with the full entitlements of every entitlement every citizen of that country has. And then we just need to have an open and untapped conversation about what is the right line between, for sure protection of rights, for sure limitation of reneging on contracts, of abusing migrants because they're in a difficult legal situation of not being in their home country, but the array of entitlements is a hard question to answer, and countries need to take that on. Okay, if we're going to let people come to our country, what does that entitle them to and in what sequence and how? It's a hard question that countries need to deal with but I don't think it's impossible question. But it is often made impossible by the insistence of like, no, it has to be perfection immediately. Because if you say that, you act as if you're advocating for better, but I feel you're not advocating for more, and lots and lots of people would love more.And second, it's not obvious that there is a path to better that doesn't go through more because a lot of the abuse that people suffer is that they're being trafficked to reach these labour opportunities in illegal and informal and undocumented ways, which puts them at even more risk of abuse. So the analogy I use is prohibition in the United States. At one point in the United States, we passed a constitutional amendment, we banned the sale and production and import and everything of alcohol. But then what did we end up with? We ended up with a whole bunch of alcohol being marketed illegally and everybody marketing alcohol was, by definition, breaking the law. And so we ended up with a really, really crappy regulation of alcohol. And the only path to better regulated alcohol was to end prohibition and have it be legal. And I feel we're in this prohibition mode, vis a vis labour mobility, and it just isn't viable.Tobi; Sometimes the context within which these debates happen is also ideological, especially in America the right, the left. There's a tiny section of the right that I would like you to respond to their argument, or I should say their sentiments. Maybe I'll fit someone like Tyler Cowen in this category, who are pro immigration but who largely favors high performing technical talent from other countries and not people that can work in the jobs that you argue are actually badly in need of workers in the industrial world, what you call the hard non-tradables. Right? So how would you respond to that? What would you say to them who favour more immigration, but what they want is basically the stem talents of other countries? You know, let them come. Perhaps, they argue, that, productivity is stalling in the United States and to keep pushing the technological frontier, it has to be a large absorption of technological talent from other countries.Lant;My first response is that's exactly the inevitable consequence of bundling the two questions. If you bundle the question who are future citizens? And the question, who's going to be allowed to work in our country? It inevitably leads to we should allocate the few scarce slots we're willing to allocate, that inevitably leads to global war for talent kind of migration policies where you're going to attract the best and the brightest out of Nigeria, out of India, out of other places to come to America. And that makes economic sense. My point is there shouldn't be two categories. There should be three categories. Currently the debate happens as if there's two categories. There's migrants and there's refugees. Those are the two kinds of people that move. Whereas my point is we need a third category. In part, we need a third category because as you point out, and as I point out, and this is something that is, I think, completely absent from the debate in the West so far is that the change in occupational demand with respect to some measure of underlying skills in those occupations, it's U-shaped. There's actually been more increase in demand for the low skill, physical, non routine activities and an increase in demand for the super high skill. So if you look at change in wages or change in occupations in Europe, in the US, there's more demand for things that aren't easily amenable to technology and aren't repetitive, like, just to use a prosaic example, like cleaning a hotel room.Cleaning a hotel room is a very hard, it's not an easily automatable thing because it's different every time, you walk in, things are in different places. And so the result of the technological changes in the West is that everybody's complaining about the falling wages because the middle of the wage distribution has been hit hard by technological changes. But we have a whole bunch of jobs that are needed at the low end that the domestic citizens don't want to fill, and in the US, there's going to be something like a million more needed people in home health care. It's not a job that any American middle class family is, oh, you need to grow up and be a home health care aid. It's not a super attractive job to the emerging youth, and we just don't have any youth coming into the labour market, so we need to fill those jobs. But if you say to a country, oh, you should determine who you are as a people and who you are as a nation and who your future citizens are, in order to meet your needs for home health care, they're like, no, we want computer scientists, we want data engineers, we want doctors. So what I'm saying is, Tyler's argument is inevitable if you accept the premise that what we're talking about is immediate and expected path to citizenship, labour mobility and the only form of labour mobility is migration.If you look at what's happened with Canada and Australia, who adopted points systems for their immigration, that's exactly the way it went. You gave points for higher levels of education. You gave points for speaking the language. You gave points for things that were cultural match. Canada has massively benefited from global war for talent kind of recruiting through a points-based system. But there's a whole bunch of other jobs in Canada that you also need to fill. And Canada is dealing with this. It's like, okay, how do we deal with all of these existing [jobs] native born Canadians don't necessarily want and so you're not taking them away from anybody by having more people in here working on those, but on the same type, it's a very difficult political discussion to say, we are going to, in some sense, put the future of who we are as a people at the hostage of the immediate needs of the labour force. So Tyler's arguments make a ton of sense if you accept the premise there's no temporary mobility. Once you allow for rotational or temporary or time limited mobility, which can include path to citizenship, then the whole conversation changes. A fundamental principle of economics that is often ignored is instruments to targets. If you have two different targets, you need two different instruments. And so if we've have multiple needs for immigration, we need multiple pathways. And I think Tyler is right about one pathway. I'm a big advocate of the other pathway. Because I am a development economist, if I say what would really benefit Africa, it's not Tyler Cohen having aggressive American policy to take the best and brightest out of Africa, it's creating multiple pathways for Africans.Tobi;On Africa, I don't want to draw into any particular comments on that, but let's move the debate closer. Which is, we also worry about migration in Africa, especially… Lant; Oh, within…Tobi;Yeah. For example, in Nigeria, there is always a huge debate about the number of Nigerian doctors that leave for the UK every year. Canada is also a big competitor now. Another industry that is causing quite a bit of domestic disruption in Nigeria is software talents, which is a new and burgeoning industry with lots of investments but the talents are moving in droves, which inevitably brings up the issue of the brain drain. Right. I usually cite Sandefur and Clemens work on the Philippines, but I encounter some resistance to that argument that no, no, no, don't tell us about Filipino nurses. So now, is the brain drain, is it a myth or reality? I know that's a bit of a vague question, but… [Laughs]Lant;Well, like, it's mostly a myth, but at the same time, most myths have some grounding in some deep aspect of human reality. Myths that persist are capturing something deep and important. Right. So let's start with the way that it's not a myth. The way that it's not a myth is that if a country is not yet in the position in which there's really rewarding ways for the high talent workers to use their skills, then people are going to leave the country and not come back. And then brain drain is, I think, a significant problem because a lot of the pathway of the the education of the people to become the superstars in software and medicine, capable of moving to Canada, Germany, and the US, was publicly funded. So there is a legitimate concern. The whole premise is we'll educate our people because we'll recoup our investment through taxes when they become more productive people. But if that productivity happens in another place, then, yes, there's a serious problem there. But I think what we've learned from lots of experiences with India, where I live and have been working on and off for over 30 years, eventually there's another rhyming thing that's never going to become as popular as brain drain, and I call it cortex vortex. I think one reason brain drain gets so much attention is the two words rhyme, which is not a good reason for an argument to have credibility. But I'm afraid it's like people [go] “brain drain, oh, yeah. Brain drain, oh, yeah. Rhymes. It must be true.” So I want to contrast that with cortex vortex, your brains moving back and forth. There's a vortex of movement, and I think India undoubtedly has benefited from the fact that the early migration out of India into America was permanent. These people left India. But then, as India changed its economic policies, became a more dynamic place, the rotational mobility that there were trained Indians in both places that you could establish the connections, that you could create essentially huge software firms that were essentially US firms based in India. Meaning. All of the revenue was in the US. All of the work was in the US. But the work was being done in India. That was a consequence of the previous establishment of connections.So I think, on net, the benefits of vortex cortex, when countries become sensible and viable places to do business, exceed the risks of brain drain. So, not that there can never be a brain drain situation, but the brain drain situation is often a much deeper problem with the country. And when the country changes, you can move from brain drain risks to cortex vortex benefits. And I think that as a country, in Nigeria, I would be saying, well, look, we really should be thinking about why software engineers aren't setting up businesses in Nigeria much more than worry about losing Nigerians to the US. And moreover, the more Nigerians we have going and working in the US, eventually it is going to benefit Nigeria in the long run by creating the possibility of connections. The third issue. I realize I'm giving long answers, but the third issue is an issue that Michael Clemens has raised and has documented is if there were viable, again, time limited pathways, then the net effect of investment in training in these things can far exceed the drain and hence you actually get more skilled people from the possibility of migration. So if you look at the Philippines as an extreme example, like if brain drain were true, Philippines should be desperately short of nurses because there's Filipino nurses all over the world. Exactly the opposite, because Philippine nursing schools train a whole bunch of people with the promise and premise that some of them are going to go work and get jobs as nurses in other places. But the net number of nurses trained versus the net number that actually go abroad is very small. So the opportunities for Filipino nurses to work abroad have dramatically increased the supply. And so there's way more nurses, we need to think of the long-run endogeneity of the number.So again, people's ability for counterfactual is often very limited. They see a Filipino nurse working in the Gulf and think that nurse could have been working in the Philippines, so therefore it's created less nurses in the Philippines. And they have a very difficult time imagining the more complex counterfactual of well, that nurse actually created five or six additional trained nurses who are in the Philippines because they got trained as nurses and went abroad for a while and then came back and worked in the Philippines. Or never got the opportunity to work abroad. So the net brain creation is a huge driver to the extent that these very high returns to possibility of going abroad increase the total creation of supply often gets completely ignored in the brain drain discussion. So I'm sure a lot of Nigerians are investing in their software skills in the hopes of working abroad. And the net effect of software skills available in Nigeria may well be hugely positive, even though you can point to lots of individuals who leave.Tobi;One evidence that you're having a conversation with Lant Pritchett is if his answers always lead you to your next question. Speaking about the cortex vortex now. There are people who argue, and sometimes they toy with a very horrible idea of limiting emigration in African countries, especially emigration of highly educated, highly skilled people because of the fear of brain drain. And one argument that I've heard is that there is less incentive for national development if your brightest and the best leaves. The political incentive is for the ruling class to keep looting. They have no incentive to fix anything. I mean, citizens get educated, they grow up, they leave. Nothing about the political dynamics of the country changes. How would you respond to such people? How would you tell me to respond to such people?Lant; I have to say there's two levels to this. First kind of this is getting beyond my pay grade, so to speak. It's like the true dynamics of how countries come to do national development in this fourfold transformation that I talk about, of the politics, the society, the economy, and the administration, it's a huge, complicated historical transformation. And I'm not at all convinced forcing your best and brightest to stay in the country because they'll be really unhappy, and therefore, by being unhappy, they're going to play a positive role in the political dynamics is a plausible story to first order at all? I don't know. Maybe. But it's hard to point to the cases where by not allowing these people to migrate, they instead of becoming a Nigerian doctor working in Canada, they became this path-breaking political transformational figure. And a very striking counterexample is Gandhi in India. Came back to India when he was in his 40s, having spent a significant amount of time in the UK and a significant amount of time in South Africa. You could have said, oh, man, if we had just forced Gandhi to stay in India, things would have been so much better. And there are a number of significant examples of people who went abroad for a period and then came back and made a positive difference, too. So that first one, it's like, kind of on first order sounds plausible, but I don't know of any either historical, or social or political or economic solid evidence that it's true.Part of my brand is skepticism. Just because it sounds plausible doesn't mean it's true. First of all, yeah, that sounds plausible, but I'm not sure it's true. Had Gandhi not been allowed to go study law in the UK, would India have in the long run historical trajectory, be in a better place? I don't know. The actual historical thing was, and I feel embarrassed as someone who has lived in India for a long time, but I think he was 44 years old before he came back and became a prominent and effective political advocate in India. And who's to know that that experience of living broad didn't radically increase his productivity as a transformational political leader? So that's the first thing I'd say. Second thing I'd say is I have these fundamental liberal tendencies that forcing people, even if it's good for the country, forcing people to do it, makes me nervous.Tobi;Yeah.Lant;Even if I did accept that it were true, that it would be marginally better for Nigeria if these people didn't go off and work in other countries, putting that burden in a coercive way on the individual makes me nervous. Just makes me nervous. Because how did the burden of Nigeria's national development transformation fall on this person just because they happen to be a good programmer? That's not at all an obvious thing. And then the last point I want to make is, you know, I sometimes want to promote the analogy that human capital is a lot like physical capital, right? And on this, both sides have been completely hypocritical in the sense that when Westerners make this argument, I go, hey, until you guys start refusing to take Nigerians physical capital, when Nigerians want to invest in Swiss banks or British banks and say, no, this physical capital should be forced to remain in Nigeria to promote the national development of Nigeria and so we should ban Nigerians from being able to put money in Switzerland because it would be better used there than in Switzerland. Until you're willing to make that same argument, I'm pretty sceptical that your argument a Nigerian should be forced to remain in Nigeria is really a principled argument. Because analytically, it's exactly the same. And yet the West is like, oh, yeah, yeah, all of the money that wants to roll out of Africa into Swiss, and British and other banks [we're] super happy to take it, even though exactly the analytically same argument can be made as, oh, this money should be better invested and if we force people to invest their money in Nigeria, they'd be more aggressive about creating a better investment climate. But the West is fully complicit in taking all the money that wants to come out of Africa, and yet when it's people, all of a sudden they acquire principles. And then, secondly, the same thing for the country, it's like, look, if you're losing physical capital, you might want to look at why people don't want to invest in Nigeria and create a better investment climate.Tobi; My final question on migration, before we move on to another baby of yours - education. So as a development economist, and also you've written about this, why isn't migration so much on the “development agenda”? I don't know any development organization or any communique or report that is so big on migration as a development policy. Policy that radically increases the welfare and the incomes of the people, like you said. Because sometimes development is usually framed more as a country thing than the people. So why is it missing on the agenda?Lant; I think there are lots of reasons. And let me start with the one that is less, I think, discussed and deserves more consideration. And the answer is the Solo model.Tobi;Okay.Lant;So let's talk economics first, right? The Solo model, which I don't know how many of the listeners are actually into economics, but it was the dominant model of economic growth. And it said that economic growth is a combination of this thing called investable stuff. We'll call it capital. And that includes human capital and infrastructure and all kinds of physical stuff. I'm taking human capital as a physical stuff. So there's capital and then there's the productivity with which capital is used, which we'll call A. And that was kind of the dominant model of economic growth when development organizations in the 1950s and 60s came into being. Now, in the Solo model, and I had the privilege of actually being taught by Bob Solo, so I can speak with some authority about how Bob Solo talked about it. A, was regarded as blueprints. This total factor productivity that interacted with capital was ideas that were in the air. It was regarded as technical. Now, if you think about, therefore, how the dynamics of growth were going to work, is A, this technical blueprints of how to do stuff was going to diffuse very fast, right? Because after all, if I have a blueprint for how to build a power plant or build a dam or build a highway or run a coffee processing plant, that blueprints can transfer across countries really fast. So if you scratch what was the intellectual kind of environment in which the bones and DNA of places like the World Bank were built? They were built on a model that ideas were going to diffuse fast. Well, if ideas diffuse fast, then the productivity of factors in the places that now have high A but have low human capital and low physical capital was going to be super high. And so the whole problem was how do we invest in this super high productivity, physical and human capital in these places with high A and low K? That was the whole model of development. Right? Now, what we have learned and this we really have learned in the sense that we didn't know it and now we know it, is what we have learned from five decades of research on economic growth is that model isn't exactly wrong. Exactly wrong. A, is what hasn't converged. If you ask why hasn't Nigeria had the gross prospects that we would have hoped and anticipated for Nigeria, it's because A stayed low. Not because Nigeria and we'll get to this when we get to education in two minutes, but not because Nigeria has necessarily had radically underinvestment in human capital or radically possibility for investment in physical capital. It's that A didn't diffuse, and it turns out A isn't blueprints. A is much deeper things about how you can make factor productivity in a country which go way beyond do you have the blueprint to build a power plant? Right. So the first reason why development wasn't originally part of the development agenda is that in the Solo model, we should have had human capital flowing to Nigeria because the return to factors should have been super high, because A should have been super high relative to the level of K and HK. So before we get into more cynical, and hence probably more realistic and true positive models of why it's not on the agenda, I think there was an intellectual flaw about economics itself and how it thought about growth that I don't think we've pointed out strongly enough, how completely, totally wrong it is, and how it leads to radically different assumptions with how important migration is going to be. And in the Solo model, there was no need for migration. Like, once A was there, the returns to HK were going to be phenomenally high, not low.So we really have learned from constructing data sets and just decades and decades of growth research, that A doesn't converge. And that is a huge, huge puzzle. Right. Because if A were, as Bob Solo thought it was, a set of blueprints, it should have diffused very fast, and instead it's been not diffused. So that's an economic-based argument for why it wasn't on the development agenda. And the problem is, like I say, the DNA and bones of the World Bank were built because if you ask, why does the World Bank focus on moving money? Well, again, in this model that A has converged and we need K and HK to catch up, what these countries need is money. Right. Anyway, and it's very hard to change an organization's DNA. Then there are the obvious, and I just want to point out, I'm not being completely silly and naive… it's also the case that most of the development organizations have their intellectual agendas dominated by the rich donors, and the rich donors never really wanted it. Since they never really wanted it, it was always easy to push it off the agenda. Now, on the plus side, the World Development part of the World Bank, which is often a very flagship document, is this year on migration. So for the very first time, the World Bank is going to solidly bring development issues and migration issues side by side. This is another way in which I think the overall environment for discussing migration is going to change radically, I think, in the next ten years. And I think this is a harbinger of that.Tobi; I look forward to reading the document.Lant;  I've seen drafts of it, and it will be good.Tobi;  Okay, moving to education now. Yeah, so I'll start this way. It's one of those things that is super sexy to talk about politically. We are in [an] election season now in Nigeria, and every candidate is saying, I'm going to invest in education. We need to fix basic education. We need to make our education work. If we make it work, then this and this and X and Y will not happen. There will be no crime. People will no longer kidnap. They can, you know, a lot of things. The benefits of education seems intuitive.  But what frustrates me, whether you're talking to policymakers or investors or even my friends who talk about education, is, other than researchers like yourself who are working in the field, almost nobody stops to look at the evidence. Nobody. And then we've ended up with this, to use one of your phrases, we ended up with the wrong dashboard for education, where we are basically measuring schooling and not learning. How did this happen? You can't talk about human capital without talking about education. So how come we are still measuring the wrong things? How come countries are putting in money, and there's basically nothing to show for it? Lant; Wow, okay, well, that was a long set-up. So I'm writing, like, one of these efforts where a variety of people are getting together, writing about different topics, people are writing about infrastructure and other things, and I'm writing about education. And I start by saying I feel that the field of education is the field in which more false things get set than any other domain. Just completely, totally, obviously false things. Perfect people are perfectly happy to repeat them again and again, year after year, decade after decade. So let me start with the most positive possible spin on it. The most positive spin on what's happened with schooling and education is that if you go back again to the origins of decolonialisation and these newly independent national governments come in and they have control of policies for the first time, it was obvious to everyone and completely accepted that the education level and if now by education we mean mastery of certain capabilities. If we define education in some sense as a vertical axis of, we want them to have skills and capabilities and values and dispositions that are going to contribute to national development, how many years of schooling are going to do, right? There's two ways to increase the stock of, kind of, skills and capabilities. One is more kids in school. One is more learning per year. Well, in the 1960s, it was obvious more kids in school was an easily available, doable, and viable way to do that. You could just push more kids through school, and as long as you push them through at roughly the same level of skills per year, you've got more of it. Right? And every time either national leaders or global leaders or people raised the quality issue, the response is, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. There was a lot of nervousness that a lot of the early pushback against excessive expansion in the education system was really elitist nonsense, right, that, oh, these people don't really need to be educated and we should reserve education for the elite. And so it was easy to create this debate where the people talking quality were hidebound traditionalists that were anti-egalitarian, and the only acceptable position was [to] expand schooling. And so to some extent, people kept saying, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.So the reason for starting with this positive thing is, hey, we're now at the bridge. Like, around the world, nearly every kid goes to school. Like, something like 3% of children don't go to any school ever in their life. And most kids are going to school for a very long time now. And we haven't ever really come back to say, by the way, in the 1960s, it was obvious more kids in school and at constant learning per year was okay. In 1980s, there was still a lot of kids not in school, girls were out of school, et cetera, poor kids were out of school, et cetera. But in 2020, it's like, hey, we're at the bridge. The scope for increasing a country's stock of human capital or the stock of learning and skills and capabilities by expanding the years of school is over. It's just over. It's just over. The additional marginal gain from pushing out on the quantity of schooling access just doesn't hold any promise in most countries of the world. So to some extent, the discourse has to change because the facts have radically changed. Like, I don't want to go back and say people in 1960 were wrong to radically and rapidly expand education or that free primary education in 1970s was a mistake, because there were still lots of kids not with the opportunity or access to school. But that world is gone. That world is gone. And our views and attitudes and discourse hasn't changed nearly as much as the facts on the ground have changed. And so we just have to recognize that, look, the only real viable possibility for substantial, sustained improvements in the level of skills and capabilities of youth is now from more learning per year. We have to radically change that.Tobi;So I mean, pivoting to learning, I get that. But I want to talk a bit about testing. Right.Lant;About who?Tobi;Tests.Lant;Oh, okay, let's not talk about tests.[Laughs]I'm being quite serious, because there's two radically different things.Tobi;Okay.Lant;One is assessment and one is examinations.And then tests, I'm not quite sure what you mean. I'm preempting you here because I was just literally writing about this two days ago.Tobi;Okay.Lant;Most education systems relied radically too much on high-stakes for-the-student-late-in-the-cycle examinations. But they relied radically too little on assessment of learning. And so when you say testing, I want to be clear, are we talking about grade ten school leaving high stakes for the student examinations, or are we talking about assessments of, in third grade, can kids read and how do we use assessment of learning? Because within the education community there's this huge negative stigma around testing, which then I think leads in radically unproductive directions, because assessment gets thrown into the bundle with high-stakes examinations. And everybody hates high-stakes examinations, particularly because they're often unbelievably crappy examinations, meaning they're examinations of how much can you memorize? And hence we're allocating future opportunities to go to college on the basis of a really crappy assessment of learning. So everybody hates examinations, but I think everybody should love assessment. Sorry, so I've answered a question you haven't asked yet. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ideasuntrapped.com/subscribe

This month, I talk to Bryan Caplan (George Mason University) about what a world without immigration restrictions could look like. The work discussed in this episode comes out of Bryan's incredible non-fiction graphic novel, Open Borders, which I highly recommend checking out. Don't let the comic-book-iness of it fool you; it is 100% accessible and entertaining, but it is also written at the level of detail you'd normally expect to see in a peer-reviewed research paper.One basic fact about the world today is that it's kind of a pain to move from country to country. You can maybe pull it off if you've already landed a fancy job where you want to move and if you're coming from a first-world country, but even then, there are more complications than you might think: work visas, sponsorships, visa renewal, permanent residency, possible eventual citizenship. Basically just a ton of red tape. And if you're coming from a third-world country, forget it: you typically either have to be a political refugee or enter a lottery that leaves you with a vanishingly small chance of getting in. So although it is technically possible to immigrate, assuming that planets are aligned, the fact remains that in most situations, there are strong legal pressures locking us into whatever country we live in right now. Bryan Caplan thinks that we should essentially just eliminate the bureaucratic machine that makes it so difficult to live wherever you please. Sure, there can still be customs, and nation states, and basic security checks—but other than that, make it as easy as possible for everyone to move around.Let's take the US as an example. One obvious benefit of opening up our borders is humanitarian: anyone living in poverty would be able to come here and with no difficulty whatsoever be able to start earning ten times as much money as they could back home. But far beyond that, there is a growing body of research within economics which suggests that having a large influx of formerly poor, newly productive people will lead to a boost in our economy. So everybody wins. And it isn't just any old boost; it's a massive boost. If these models are correct, everybody wins big time.Tune in to hear our guest run through some of the empirical evidence for this prediction and find out why, according to him, the supposed dangers of an open boders policy are greatly exaggerated!Further ReadingIf you're curious to learn more about the arguments discussed in this episode, you can do no better than to turn to the book:Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration, Bryan Caplan and Zach WeinersmithYou might also enjoy Bryan's blog post at Econlib running through the many topics the book covers.Finally, our distinguished guest recommends the following paper by Michael Clemens, which was part of the inspiration for his work on open borders:‘Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?', Michael A. ClemensHappy reading! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Our immigration system is broken. So is the way we talk about it.Most conversations about immigration come down to a yes-or-no debate. Two sides talking over each other with very little constructive and achievable propositions. That might be part of the reason that little effective reform has made its way through Congress in the past 20 years, despite calls from both Democrats and Republicans for an overhaul.In reality, immigration is a complicated system and there's no easy answer to the problems it entails. This week, Jane Coaston breaks down one group of approaches that could have a significant impact on individuals and families who want to enter the United States: temporary work programs.These programs allow migrants to come to the United States to work based on the labor needs of certain industries. And because their legal status is tied to employment, workers are beholden to their bosses and the companies that hire them. Oftentimes, the companies use that power to take advantage of workers.The guests today analyze these programs and debate whether they should be expanded without other changes or what reforms are necessary to ensure workers aren't exploited. Michael Clemens is an economist and the director of migration, displacement and humanitarian policy at the Center for Global Development. Daniel Costa is a human rights lawyer and the director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute.Mentioned in this episode:Daniel Costa's paper “Temporary Migrant Workers or Immigrants? The Question for U.S. Labor Migration”Michael Clemens's study on the Bracero program in a paper he co-wrote called “Immigration Restrictions as Active Labor Market Policy”“Making President Trump's Bed: A Housekeeper Without Papers” in The New York Times“The Fixer: Visa Lottery Chronicles” by Charles Piot with Kodjo Nicolas BatemaLove listening to New York Times podcasts? Help us test a new audio product in beta and give us your thoughts to shape what it becomes. Visit nytimes.com/audio to join the beta.

A largely unexplored counterargument to immigration liberalization is that immigrants who come from countries with worse institutions will make the institutions in their destination country worse. In Wretched Refuse? The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions, Alex Nowrasteh and Benjamin Powell respond to this argument and today we have Alex on the show to elaborate on their findings. Our conversation begins with a discussion on the foundational piece by Michael Clemens, ‘Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk'. This paper finds that the marginal immigrant to the United States from a developing country can expect a fourfold increase in their wages, and the result of a global, free migration policy would be to increase global GDP by about 50% to 150%. Alex then unpacks why immigrating would be the most efficient option for improving an immigrant's life. He responds to the arguments that immigrants should improve their home countries rather than immigrate and that the home countries of immigrants will worsen thanks to ‘brain drain'. Later in our conversation, Alex addresses the deep roots theory which proposes that the ancestry metrics of societies influence their GDP per capita. He then weighs in on whether culture impacts economic production. We hear about the central finding of Wretched Refuse, which is that immigrants don't worsen economic institutions in places where they go and in some cases improve them. Wrapping up, Alex shares his perspectives on changing immigration visa laws in the US and what the next ten years might hold in that respect. Tune in today!   Key Points From This Episode:  •  The argument that immigration does not destroy the institutions responsible for prosperity in the modern world to be found in Alex's book. •  Why immigrants from Yemen will 16X their salary after moving to the US. •  Alex's response to the ‘Why don't immigrants fix their home country rather?' argument. •  The question of brain drain when immigrants leave their home countries and why matters are more complex than this. •  Why the overall economic gains immigrants offer to the US outweigh the threat they pose to some salaries. •  Why Alex is a skeptic when it comes to the deep roots argument for prosperity. •  Perspectives on the many reasons for why economic status of a country can change. •  The impacts of culture and trust on economic growth and whether immigrants erode this. •  Examples of mass immigrations to countries with poor institutions that experienced massive economic reforms in a liberalizing direction as a result. •  Alex's thoughts on shifting H1B visa allocation from a lottery to a wage-based system. •  How the heartland visa system might encourage higher rates of legal immigration. •  What Alex thinks will happen around immigration liberalization in the next 10 years.   Links Mentioned in Today's Episode: https://www.chartercitiesinstitute.org/ (Charter Cities Institute) https://www.facebook.com/Charter-Cities-Institute-424204888015721/ (Charter Cities Institute on Facebook) https://twitter.com/CCIdotCity (Charter Cities Institute on Twitter) https://www.linkedin.com/company/charter-cities-institute/ (Charter Cities Institute on LinkedIn) https://www.chartercitiesinstitute.org/people/jeffrey-mason#:~:text=Prior%20to%20joining%20the%20Charter,and%20the%20Bipartisan%20Policy%20Center. (Jeffrey Mason) https://www.cato.org/people/alex-nowrasteh (Alex Nowrasteh) https://www.cato.org/ (CATO Institute Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity) https://www.amazon.com/Wretched-Refuse-Political-Immigration-Institutions/dp/1108477631 (Wretched Refuse? The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions) https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1257/jep.25.3.83 (‘Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk')... Support this podcast

Michael Clemens, Chefporteføljeforvalter hos BankInvest, taler om deflation og hvordan det påvirker aktiemarkedet. Link til artiklen: http://finansinvest.dk.esc-web.lib.cbs.dk/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/FI04_2019_Deflation-og-aktiemarkedet.pdf Følg os på LinkedIn: André: www.linkedin.com/in/andréthormann/ Benjamin: www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminzumofen/ Henrik: www.linkedin.com/in/henrik-fr/ Find vores intromusik herunder: Deadly Roulette by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3625-deadly-roulette License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Originally recorded on January 29th, 2021. Michael Clemens, Director of Migration, Displacement, and Humanitarian Policy, Center for Global Development and Thomas Ginn, Research Fellow, Center for Global Development continue their discussion after a virtual CID Speaker Series event held on January 29th, 2021, exploring their work further with CID Student Ambassador Sama Kubba. Countries restrict the overall extent of international travel and migration to balance the expected costs and benefits of mobility. Given the ever-present threat of new, future pandemics, how should permanent restrictions on mobility respond? A simple theoretical framework predicts that reduced exposure to pre-pandemic international mobility causes a slightly slower arrival of the pathogen. A standard epidemiological model predicts no decrease in the harm of the pathogen if travel ceases thereafter and only a slight decrease in the harm (for plausible parameters) if travel does not cease. Researchers at the Center for Global Development, including featured speakers Michael Clemens and Thomas Ginn, test these predictions across four global pandemics in three different centuries: the influenza pandemics that began in 1889, 1918, 1957, and 2009. They find that in all cases, even a draconian 50 percent reduction in pre-pandemic international mobility is associated with 1–2 weeks later arrival and no detectable reduction in final mortality. The case for permanent limits on international mobility to reduce the harm of future pandemics is weak.

Pre-COVID-19, we lived in a hyper-global world. There were 1.5 billion international tourism trips annually, nearly 40 million flights, and 272 million international migrants. This raises a provocative question: Does international mobility contribute to the spread of pandemics? In this episode, we speak with Michael Clemens and Thomas Ginn of the Center for Global Development. Drawing on their research of global pandemics dating as far back as 1889, they make the case that limits on cross-border mobility delay the arrival of pathogens by a matter of days at best. Instead, they argue that the greater success is achieved with domestic measures, not permanent limits on international mobility.

Pre-COVID-19, we lived in a hyper-global world. There were 1.5 billion international tourism trips annually, nearly 40 million flights, and 272 million international migrants. This raises a provocative question: Does international mobility contribute to the spread of pandemics? In this episode, we speak with Michael Clemens and Thomas Ginn of the Center for Global Development. Drawing on their research of global pandemics dating as far back as 1889, they make the case that limits on cross-border mobility delay the arrival of pathogens by a matter of days at best. Instead, they argue that the greater success is achieved with domestic measures, not permanent limits on international mobility.

It seems like, not long ago, arguments against immigration focused almost entirely on illegal immigrants. And then it became, “Actually, we’re also concerned about low-skilled immigration.” And then that concern started applying to higher-skilled immigrants replacing American workers in more advanced positions. And now, it seems like some people just don’t want any immigrants — […]Join the conversation and comment on this podcast episode: https://ricochet.com/podcast/political-economy-james-pethokoukis/michael-clemens-what-have-economists-learned-about-immigration/.Now become a Ricochet member for only $5.00 a month! Join and see what you’ve been missing: https://ricochet.com/membership/.Subscribe to Political Economy with James Pethokoukis in Apple Podcasts (and leave a 5-star review, please!), or by RSS feed. For all our podcasts in one place, subscribe to the Ricochet Audio Network Superfeed in Apple Podcasts or by RSS feed.

It seems like, not long ago, arguments against immigration focused almost entirely on illegal immigrants. And then it became, “Actually, we're also concerned about low-skilled immigration.” And then that concern started applying to higher-skilled immigrants replacing American workers in more advanced positions. And now, it seems like some people just don't want any immigrants — especially during this pandemic and maybe even after it's over — because they're stealing our secrets and taking college slots away from American students. But this perspective fails to recognize how much immigrants of all skill-levels contribute to America. I'll be discussing these contributions — and the economics of immigration more broadly — with Michael Clemens. Michael is a senior fellow and the director of migration, displacement, and humanitarian policy at the Center for Global Development, where he studies the economic effects of migration around the world. He is also a research fellow at the IZA Institute of Labor Economics.

On episode 11 of Noisy Balls, I had the extremely enjoyable opportunity of chatting with someone that is certainly much loved and well known locally, nationally and internationally. I am of course talking about the brilliant blind cricket umpire Michael Clemens.Michael has an impressive resume to his name, with some of his qualifications including Bachelor of Business (RMIT), Diploma of Financial Planning (Deakin University), Diploma of Education (LaTrobe University), Graduate Diploma of Accounting and Finance (Monash University), Graduate Diploma of University Teaching and Learning (RMIT), and Masters of Accounting and Finance (VUT).Michael's many current and past portfolios include being a member of CPA Australia, director of TrainEd Consulting Group Pty Ltd, a registered tax agent, authorised representative of Integrity Financial Planners Pty Ltd, life member of the Victorian Blind Cricket Association, life member of the Carrum/Bonbeach Cricket Club, Victorian Blind Cricket Association delegate to Blind Sports and Recreation Victoria, financial advisor to Blind Cricket Australia, financial advisor to Loch Sport Golf Club Inc., former director and treasurer to the Caroline Chisholm Pregnancy Support Agency, and former director and treasurer for the Airport Golf Club Inc. (formerly the Tullamarine Country Club).Michael shared with us his history in blind cricket, his days as a cricketer himself, as well as discussing how things were many years ago when he became a father to Damian Clemens, an exceedingly accomplished blind cricketer in his own right.Michael, I appreciate you coming on to this episode of Noisy Balls and for so graciously giving up some of your valuable time in order to enlighten our listeners with your pearls of wisdom and having you on the show definitely made for a very memorable episode.Noisy Balls is proudly sponsored by the Victorian Blind Cricket Association and we appreciate the VBCA's support as we bring in a new dawn in blind cricket podcasting.   To Get In Touch with Noisy Balls: Shoot us an email to feedback@noisyballs.com and we will always respond and read your messages up on an upcoming show. Why not be a part of the conversation on the Noisy Balls Facebook Group and you can always follow us on the Noisy Balls Twitter Feed, where we will regularly update you with the goings on in blind cricket locally, nationally and internationally. To find out more about my other podcasting endeavours, I invite you to check out the Blind Tech Guys.  Support the show (https://pod.fan/noisyballs)★ Support this podcast ★

After a controversial debate between President Trump and candidate Biden last week, Vice President Pence and candidate Kamala Harris are set to face off in Utah. Emily Means, a reporter with KUER Public Radio in Utah, tells us what to expect at the debate in Salt Lake City. Also in the programme, President Trump's administration has unveiled a tightening of rules for H-1B visas, which allow tens of thousands of high-skilled immigrants to work in the US. The President says this will protect US jobs but Michael Clemens, economist at the Centre for Global Development, says the evidence does not support this. Maelle Gavet, a Silicon Valley executive and author of “Trampled By Unicorns: Big Tech’s Empathy Problem and How to Fix it,” joins to talk about this week's congressional report into the monopoly powers of Amazon, Alphabet, Google and Facebook. And as global temperatures rise, we take a look at the impact on the workplace. All through the show we'll be joined by Andy Uhler of Marketplace in Texas, and Patrick Barta with the Wall Street Journal in Bangkok. (Picture credit: Getty Images.)

President Trump's administration has unveiled a tightening of rules for H-1B visas, which allow tens of thousands of high-skilled immigrants to work in the US. The President says this will protect US jobs but Michael Clemens, economist at the Centre for Global Development, says the evidence does not support this. Also in the programme, Emily Means, a reporter with KUER Public Radio in Utah, tells us what to expect at the debate in Salt Lake City between Vice President Pence and VP candidate Kamala Harris. Plus, we'll take a look at a rocky day on the US markets with Susan Schmidt of Aviva Investors in Chicago.

Historically, Australia has lacked a coherent policy to attract immigrants with less extensive formal training and education, despite the needs of its ageing population and labour market. The Center for Global Development has recently concluded a project with the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which has produced two papers. Michael Clemens outlines the findings of the first paper, which estimates the demand for vocational workers in Australia by 2050 will exceed native supply by over two million. While there will be ample skilled labour available within Pacific Island countries, facilitating this movement in a managed way that maximises the development potential of migration will be key. To that end, Satish Chand discusses the second paper, which proposes the development of a ‘Pacific Skills Partnership', a model that would facilitate skills creation across 14 low-income Pacific Island countries, with the greatest development potential lying in Papua New Guinea.Speakers:Michael Clemens is Director of Migration, Displacement, and Humanitarian Policy and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development, where he studies the economic effects and causes of migration around the world. >> Related paper:  Skill Development and Regional Mobility: Lessons from the Australia-Pacific Technical College – Working Paper 370Satish Chand is a Professor of Finance in the School of Business at the University of New South Wales and based at the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra. He is also an Adjunct Professor at the Crawford School of Public Policy at The Australian National University. His research interests include labour migration, fragile states, and the challenges of development.>> View presentation>> Related paper: A Pacific Skills Partnership: Improving the APTC to Meet Skills Needed in the RegionChair:Dr Ryan Edwards, Deputy Director, Development Policy Centre, The Australian National UniversityPhoto: Hohola Youth Development Centre, PNG (DFAT/Flickr CC BY 2.0)

Garett Jones is one of the smartest people I have ever talked to - and he is at his usual brilliant best in this conversation. We started by trying to see how his latest book fit into the context of less developed countries with weak rule of law. I have often remarked that Garett is underrated as a development economist. I still think so.You can listen or download to the podcast on any platform of your choice (some links here), and you can also rate us here.TranscriptTobi: WeIcome to Ideas Untrapped and today I am on with economist, Garett Jones. Garett Jones is a professor of economics at George Mason University and he has written two excellent books "Hive Mind" and "10% Less Democracy". Welcome, Garett.Garett: Thanks very much for having me, Tobi.Tobi: Thinking on the margin is something I admire so much which is what you did quite well in your latest book 10% Less Democracy. Are economists just better at this than everybody else, and if yes, why?Garett: You're right. I do try to do that a lot in the book. I agree with you, Economists, I think, are better at this than other social scientists because it's just so much a part of our training. It's so normal for us to think, do you want to buy two more peanut butter sandwiches or two fewer? Should this company hire three more workers or fire two workers? So that kind of marginalist thinking which is where... the Marginal Revolution of the 19th century embodies that. Yeah, that really helps us think about big social questions in a very productive way. When I applied this to democracy what I realised it was quickly, something that a lot of people know, which is that all of the things we call democracies are a blend of democracy with oligarchy of one form or another. So getting the balance right is more important than an all-or-nothing question. All or nothing is off the table, thank goodness, but getting the blend right between insiders and outsiders, between elite and the masses, that's something that can be evaluated and fortunately, my economist friends have evaluated it. For some people, they'll quite naturally assume that democracy means an independent judiciary, the rule of law, impartial, fairly uncorrupt government. And those things are not democracy. They are good things but they are not democracy. - GJTobi: So given all the trade-offs that are involved with social decisions and reforms, how can we be better at thinking on the margins? We live in an era of protest movement where people want sweeping changes and that's not really how society works, so how can people better train themselves to be marginalist thinkers?Garett: Yeah, you're right. There aren't that many questions where we have to go all or nothing. Most policy questions can be a question of incrementalism, so I think whenever possible we should just ask ourselves 'if I can dial this up a little bit or dial this down a little bit, which would be the better way to work? Which would be the better way to move?' Whether that's thinking about whether I want my judges to have a little bit longer terms, whether I want my voters to have a little bit more information before they walk into the voting booth, whether I want a healthcare program to be available for people who are 62 rather than 65? Just thinking about it in terms of small changes helps us better evaluate...it helps the mind better weigh the benefits versus the cost of the decision. Because when we talk about revolutionary change, there are often just too many things going on for our brains to even weigh them, to even weigh the benefits, and weigh the costs. So marginalism, I think, is better suited for human minds and fortunately most, but not all, political decisions are well suited to a little more vs a little less.Tobi: I read your book, great book by the way...Garett: Thank you very much.Tobi: The writing is fantastic, I'm a big fan. In the book, I know you are applied the 10% Less Democracy framework to rich countries...Garett: Yeah.Tobi: But I've been trying to extrapolate and apply it to developing countries, and one thing I noticed (you can shed more light on this) is, sometimes it feels like low-income and middle-income countries are torn in some kind of institutional paradox. You have multilateral institutions like [the] IMF who have these prescriptions that are bureaucratic but have long-term benefits - Central Bank independence, don't manipulate the exchange rate, keep inflation low, be responsible with your budget, and all that. And on the other side of that, you have think tanks, aid agencies and other foundations (who are also interested in development and give it advice) who seem to favour radical democratisation of everything, basically. So what do you think, as a policymaker, as a voter in a low and middle-income country, how best to approach this paradox on a mental level?Garett: I think a message that I bring up early on in the book is that most of the clear benefits of democracy come from a moderate level of democracy. As Amartya Sen, the Nobel laureate who showed that if you want to avoid famines, what you need is democracy. In modern times there's never been a famine as he defines it in a functioning democracy. But his measure for functioning democracy is a pretty basic one. It's competitive elections and a free press. And that's not too hard a standard for a lot of countries to meet and more countries are meeting it now than they were meeting it, of course, three decades ago though, perhaps, less than a couple of years ago. So if you're pushing for democratisation, I think we should draw on the best evidence we have for what it is, what kind of democracy we need to get the benefits of democracy, and that seems to be a moderate level. Also, there is a lot of lazy talk about democracy where people stuff all of the good things they like into the word democracy. For some people, they'll quite naturally assume that democracy means an independent judiciary, the rule of law, impartial, fairly uncorrupt government. And those things are not democracy. They are good things but they are not democracy. So I think just clearly speaking about what it is that you want is valuable because we realised quickly that the things we like out of modern so-called democracies are a blend of the rule of the people and the rule of insiders, with a third thing that I don't talk much about in the book directly but the rule of law - the impartial rule of law, a bureaucracy that just operates on its own according to [the] rules that have been around for a long time. That is undemocratic and it seems to be very useful. So simply talking clearly about what it is we want in a reform and is this valuable reform truly about the voice of the people or is it more about something like an independent bureaucracy? That would help us get away from this lazy jargon of calling everything good democratic.Tobi: You also discussed the relationship between democracy and growth in your book and you conclude that the evidence is a bit of a muddle. What I was thinking when I was reading that part, I thought about Chile...Garett: Uh-huhTobi: And one of the famous examples when economists and some other thinkers discuss Chile is to look at GDP growth from the Pinochet years and the democratic years, and then they conclude that, oh, GDP growth is higher after Pinochet and hence democracy is better. But again, if you look at that history a bit, you'll see that there were some things, though they weren't palatable and I'm not saying I prefer autocracies here or anything...there were some hard reforms that Pinochet pushed through that clearly had benefits even during the Chilean democracy. One such rule was the inability of the parliament to hike the budget. You either cut it low or you pass it as it is which introduced a lot of fiscal responsibility in the budgeting process. So what do you think is responsible for this muddle in the evidence in the relationship between democracy and growth? Why can't we get a really clear picture?Garett: A big problem is the real-life fact which is just that a lot of autocrats do a terrible job. They come into power and they make the place worse off. So some autocrats come to power and appear to make the country better off, or at least, it predicts better performance and other autocrats come into power and things get worse. So when we stop looking at individual anecdotes and when we pull them together and do something rigorous and statistical, the evidence that autocrats are more likely to create great reforms looked pretty weak. There are plenty of anecdotes, right? We can call them case studies where autocrats are associated with and may have put into place things that look like good pro-growth reforms. Pinochet gets a lot of credit for this kind of stories but also Park Chung-hee of South Korea. The problem is that (a) we don't have a great counterfactual (b) maybe they just got lucky. And that's why using rigorous cross-country comparisons is more useful than individual case studies and when we do that, it's very hard to find evidence that either democracy causes growth or that an autocrat taking over causes growth. It's too much of a coin flip to recommend any particular policy if our goal in choosing a government is economic growth. So this is why we should stick to the things where we have better evidence and so these big changes - autocrat in charge versus free press multi-party democracy, there there's a muddle. That's the reason why the framing in my book 10% Less Democracy is about smaller changes where we have better identified better causal stories with better testings like independent central banks, independent judges. We have more evidence for the small things than we do for the big things.Thinking in marginalist terms is important but also good public education really can improve policy if we teach true important economic ideas to people - GJTobi: Looking at this really well, is it really about voter control? Because I imagine the issues are different, for example, I think voters care a lot about Central Bank independence than, say, a national minimum wage for example. So isn't the case that in some situations or on some issues, again, sticking with Central Bank independence, politicians adjust ill-informed or ignorant and they're not necessarily responding to voter preference?Garett: That's a great point. It's always a good idea to wonder whether the politicians themselves are poorly informed and they don't have an incentive to be very well-informed on most policy issues. A friend of mine had a conversation with the prominent United States politician who I won't name and this person said...the elected official said 'my job isn't to understand all the details of the policy, that's what my staff job is. My job is to keep track of all of the other members of Congress and find out how to cut deals with them.' So their real specialty is deal-making, deal cutting. They don't know that much about the detail of policy. So you are right that basically part of the problem is that the politicians themselves don't know that much, but they need to know enough to be able to pick someone who's good to run some of these things. So running [knowing] someone who is competent to run an independent central bank, it's kind of a hard job but you can outsource that to some staff; and if you're worried about things working pretty well for a long time, then you'll task your staff with picking somebody who seems like a pretty good candidate who won't cause much trouble and who will make the economy look pretty good before the electorate. So this idea that elected officials don't know that much themselves but they do have an incentive to get some things right when they know they're going to be held accountable by the voters.Tobi: But again, wouldn't less democracy, at least, in some cases lead to populist backlash? I mean, we're seeing that with Brexit...Garett: Oh, yes.Tobi: Some part of the American polity is also in that mode. The EU is a very good example where some British voters say 'oh, we are not going to be subjected to Brussels' rule'. There's a case of Africa, also, where people respond quite negatively to what they perceive as external technocratic interventions. So wouldn't less democracy run a risk of populism in the long-term?Garett: Actually, that's a great point and it's the one that I literally never discussed in the book - it's the idea of a populist backlash. Because it's one of these things that is important and too hard to quantify. The risk of a populist backlash to 10% Less Democracy is a little bit like the risk of a doctor being reluctant to give someone tough advice about diet and exercise because the person just might not come to the doctor anymore. So this is an important question - when should informed people, when should people who are relative experts just not push that hard for the best solution because they are afraid the patient won't take the medicine? In a way that's part of the reason I stick to 10% Less Democracy. I just want people to think about a little bit longer term, a little bit more independent Central Bank because I think these things are less likely to provoke that kind of backlash. But, you're right. But know this, to the extent you're right, this should tell us something about the cost of democracy - if one of the costs of democracy is that voters don't want things that are actually good for the voters, this should be part of our understanding [of] what democracy really is. If the problem is that the voters don't want to take advice that's just some person's opinion, 'ok, well, who cares?' Voters shouldn't have to listen to some person's random opinion. But if voters don't want to take [a] medicine that's actually good for the voters themselves, that should be part of our understanding of one of the weaknesses of democracy and something we should try to find a solution to. Maybe it's the solutions I present in my book, maybe it should be something else, but understanding the weaknesses of modern democracy is important to improving it.Tobi: A good illustration of that point is trade policy. I was just reading Matthew Klein and Michael Pettis's book where they basically say that trade wars are class wars.Garett: Uh-huh.Tobi: It's a reaction. And also it's a tactic for politicians to whip up voter sentiments and possibly win votes. How can people, again, I'm quite interested especially on the key issues that matters like central banking, like trade policy... things that affect the welfare and long-term prosperity, how can voters be a lot more informed to know that taking the choices out of my hands does not really mean I'm being oppressed?Garett: Yeah. This is really an important question. Part of it is that there is some evidence that just education in schools really changes people's minds. So when my colleague Bryan Caplan - he wrote a great book Myth of the Rational Voter, and he wrote a follow-up article where he looked at whether education or IQ scores were better predictors of pro-market attitudes. And he found that particularly on free trade, there was evidence that education itself, years of education was a better predictor of pro-trade attitudes than IQ. This is a signal and it's a reminder of something that made a lot of us believe which is that one of the things you learn in school is that people in other countries are good and, sometimes, they are great people and you should care about them. Also, you might learn some complicated ideas like the benefits of free trade. So education that is focused on teaching true and important facts about public policy, I think, can be a big part of this. But there is another element, another solution is just that we should think like a marginalist and go up the marginal cost curve. Push for a little less populism on topics where the voters aren't going to resist as much. Voters around the world have been pretty cool comparatively speaking with independent central banks - letting neutral banks lend out money and respond to financial crisis, (and) I think people can kind of understand why that's better than having one political party trying to lend to its buddies all the time. So, yeah, thinking in marginalist terms is important but also good public education really can improve policy if we teach true important economic ideas to people.Tobi: Let's let's go of the cuff a bit. Why did East Asia converge faster than the rest of the developing world?Garett: This is a great question. I mean part of it you could say that they actually had pretty high levels of productivity before say about 1800. This is part of what the deep roots literature shows, of Putterman and Weil and Bill Easterly at NYU - that, like, before 1500, before the great age of exploration, East Asia was pretty close to the technological frontier for the planet as a whole and so what's happened in the last 50 years in a way is a return to trend. That's not an answer. That's just more of a reminder that sometimes the more things change the more they stay the same. But when I look for the proximate cause, something more like a proximate cause, then I turned back to my first book, Hive Mind, which is that as far back as we have data on test scores, East Asia with particular countries we had good tests on in the ’60s and early 70s - Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, and soon after that Singapore - these countries were doing pretty well on standardised tests no matter how we measure it. And I think that good cognitive skills are [a] really important ingredient of being able to jump to the technological frontier, and I think that good cognitive skills are an important part of running a good competent government. Those aren't the whole story, fortunately, China's decision to turn away from communism was one of the best decisions in all of human history; that mattered a lot for well over a billion people. But the fact that as far as we can tell, test scores, human capital as currently measured was pretty high in East Asia in the sixties and early seventies, that gave them a good solid launching pad for modern prosperity.Tobi: You've hinted I think on your Twitter feed, I'm not sure anymore, that economists know the causes of long-run prosperity. What's your explanation for that?Garett: We're really good at the proximate causes, the very nearest causes. These are simple things that come from the Solow growth model. Robert Solow, [the] Nobel Laureate, just helped us think about where do GDP come from and having a lot of machines per worker, having a way for people to use them productively is really crucial. Machines aren't your enemy, they are your friend. A lot of technology isn't your enemy, it's your friend. But when we try to look one step behind that, say, why do some nations wind up with a lot more productivity and lot more capital per worker than others, then there's more debate but a lot of people would jump just straight to something like institutions. Some places have great institutions, good competent governance, neutral rule of law, and that means the capital is willing to flow from around the world to good places. I would also add on human capital however measured - whether it's years of education or test scores are both very quite robust predictors. So economists know what works and the simplest version is one I said years ago which is, have pretty high test scores and don't be communist, and you're probably going to be rich. So if a country can find a way to raise its test scores through better run schools, through better public health, and it can avoid the massive mistake of totalitarian communism, then it's got a pretty good future ahead of it.Tobi: In your view why did you choose test scores, I mean, what's the best case for cognitive ability in human capital and long-run prosperity ahead of all these other proximate causes you mentioned like institutions or geography or industrial policy and all these other factors?Garett: The simplest version is just that it's what shows up in the data when I and others have run very serious horse races. So Eric Hanushek, professor at Stanford, leading education researcher, he's found that test scores whether you call them IQ or math and science scores are very astonishingly robust predictors of national prosperity and they really beat out years of education. There's a lot of emphasis on trying to raise measured use of education but the problem is that we know that there is schooling and then there's schooling. So if you just get a diploma but nobody ever taught you anything, the schooling didn't really make you more productive. Another reason though is because of the well-known finding from psychology research which is that skills predict kills. People who are above average in math tend to be above average in verbal stuff. People who are above average at vocabulary test tend to be better at solving three-dimensional puzzles, and so for reasons that are still poorly understood there is what I call a DaVinci effect and what others call a g-factor across mental skills. So running a modern economy at a high-level involves kind of a little bit of everything. It's a little bit of a smorgasbord, it's a little bit of a casserole. It's probably unlikely to be the case that there is going to be this one simple thing that solves all the problems. What you really want is something that is equivalent of a Swiss army knife, something that's a mediocre tool for everything rather than one tool for just one thing. And cognitive skills whether you called them IQ or g or whatever seem to be this version of sort of Swiss army knife where there's a little bit of everything. So people who do better on standardised tests tend to be a little bit more patient. Groups of folks who do better on standardised tests tend to be more cooperative, they're more likely to see the invincible hand and support market-friendly policies, they are more likely to be tolerant of others who are unlike them and these are all great things for a nation. So like I said, running a modern economy near the frontier of productivity involves a lot of little things - low corruption, competent governance, foresight, voters who understand the benefits of trade; the one thing that I can get us a lot of all those little things is higher cognitive skills.Tobi: You wrote a paper a few years ago which I like very much...Garett: Thank you.Tobi: O-ring sectors and Foolproof sectors. And if I understand your model correctly (and you're welcome to set me straight here)... so thinking about this paper and this model, if I am a high-skilled worker in Nigeria, for example, overall you're saying the returns to skill for my education and my skill level is marginal compared to a low-skilled worker. But if I move to the United States of America where obviously there are a lot more high-skilled workers than in Nigeria, the returns to my skill will still be marginal but then there's this huge gains at the national level between both countries that are pretty large, can you explain how that works?Garett: Yeah, so I'm building here on the work of Michael Kremer who just won the Nobel prize last year. He wrote a great paper about the O-ring theory of economic development. He said that a lot of economic tasks in modern economies, especially the richest economies, are kind of like building a space shuttle where if you make one mistake, even in a very complex process of launching a space shuttle, the space shuttle tend to blow up killing everyone on board. This is actually why the space shuttle challenger was destroyed because of the failure of an O-ring (basically a big piece of big rubber band) that was an important part of keeping the rocket safe. So one small failure can destroy the value of an entire product, of course, that's true with a lot of things that we value like smartphones, automobile transmissions, one broken link can destroy the whole thing. Thing is that economists without even realising it, we use another model, routinely, that's not O-ring often without thinking about it - we kind of assumed that workers of different skill levels can get to be mushed together and it's nice to have skilled workers, but maybe you can throw maybe two high-skilled workers and three low-skilled workers, maybe they are perfect substitutes for each other. You know, just throw more bodies at it and eventually the job will get done, there are certainly jobs like that. So part of what I did and really my contribution in this paper, the O-ring sector and the Foolproof sector, was to say 'what if some parts of the economy work like Michael Kremer's world where things like building a space shuttle or smartphone? Not if other things are like the way economists normally think about the world, the Foolproof sector - where if you throw enough people at it eventually the job will get done.' And I said 'what if workers have to decide which of these two sectors they are going to work in?' So let me think about you as an example... high-skilled worker, and you're trying to decide what sector you're going to work in. Well, one of the great ideas in economics is that you're going to go to where the pay is highest, ignoring all the other complications for your life, and so really the net message is that there's always going to be some combination of workers balancing between the two sectors. So if low-skilled workers are superabundant and high-skilled workers are scarce, just about all of us are going to be taking on these foolproof tasks where perfection, exact precision is not crucial. And if high-skilled workers are really abundant, most of us will be working on O-ring type tasks but there will always be some of us, sort of, in-between. This helps explain why the capital goods, hi-tech goods are made in just a few places in the world and in particular, they're usually made in places where the workers are really really expensive. You would think that firms will try to find the cheapest workers possible for any task but instead hi-tech manufacturing, especially cutting-edge hi-tech manufacturing, tends to happen in countries that are pretty high wage. The only thing that can explain this, if people are rational, is that it must be critical, it must be crucial to have high-skilled workers working on those tasks. So one of the lessons of this is that lower-skilled workers can find something really useful to do in a high wage country because if they come to a high wage country, they are competing against a lot of other high-skill workers, so all they have to do is be an okay substitute for that high-skilled worker in some tasks, maybe it's mowing lawns, maybe it's doing routine legal work and all of a sudden those workers can earn a lot more than they would in their home country. So the O-ring-Foolproof paper is in a way an important message for the value of low-skilled workers in high wage countries, but it also helps explain why cutting edge, frontier technology innovation only happens in the highest skilled countries where workers are super expensive.Tobi: The national returns to skill, how does it work with these two sectors?Garett: Well, there is an element of, sometimes, the real world is more complicated than the model, and that's, of course, true here. I have to say that I suspect there is a critical mass element to high-skilled workers. For instance, if I can bring a million of Japan's best engineers to a lower-skilled country, a million of them could run a lot of fantastic factories, be great workers and end up giving a lot of great employment opportunities to lower-skilled folks, so there is this element of...outside the model of... a critical mass element. But the O-ring-Foolproof story is a reminder that high-skilled workers who are in relatively low-skilled countries are often going to be, like, unable to make use of their full potential. Being able to have an O-ring sector of your own to go work in is really where the magic happens of economic prosperity. The greatest things that are happening and the way that economic frontiers are being built is in these O-ring sectors, and, to me, it's a reminder that this is a case for the brain drain. A case that the brain drain actually helps the world as a whole. Brain drain issues are complicated and there are lots of forces pushing both ways but I want to emphasise that there is this positive element to the brain drain which is getting high-skilled workers into countries that can make great use of high-skilled workers really helps the whole world. Has Michael Clemens has pointed out, one benefit of that is that migrants who go from low-skilled to high-skilled countries send back a lot of remittances and those remittances are super valuable. I'd like to emphasise another point, which is getting those high-skilled workers from low average-skilled countries to higher average-skilled countries means that they can contribute to the growth of ideas which makes the global pie bigger.Tobi: You sort of preempted where I was going with that. There was also this essay by Michael Clemens and I think Justin Sandefur about this brain drain issue where they sort of asserted that another element to the brain drain issue that the incentive to migrate and earn more in high wage countries leads to more production of high-skilled workers even in low-wage countries. So Nigeria exports a lot of doctors to the UK, it means a lot more students would want to be doctors so that they can migrate to the UK or wherever where they can earn a lot more than they would in their home countries. Now, here is my question: isn't there a sort of negative effect to this in that their home countries get stuck in the poverty trap... a lot of these high-growth sectors never gets built and some of these countries just depend on remittances which can be pretty tricky?Garett: Yeah. This is a hard problem. Another problem with the brain drain is that it means that the government which really needs a lot of high-skilled workers to basically run competent bureaucracies and manage difficult technical questions, a lot of those folks are gone. They've gone to move to other countries where they can earn a lot more. So I don't want to pretend that the brain drain issues are simple to resolve. But I think that the point you're making, I tend to think of it as less of a problem because people are very reluctant to move. There's a lot of evidence that people are reluctant to move from their home country and they need a really big wage premium. So if things were even sort of mediocre, if there were some moderately hi-tech positions in the home country, you would have very high rates of retention. I think that's pretty clear from the evidence from the fact that people are very reluctant to move. If they can find any excuse to stay, they stay. That's speaking a little informally but I think the data backs that up. Also though, there is this element of where the threat of exit does make home countries behave a little better. The fact that some people might leave does make a home country government say: well, we want to make ourselves more inviting. If we think about what's happened in China (to give an extreme example) over the last few decades, there's been a lot of brain drain from China as Chinese graduates, high-skilled workers often, have moved to many different countries across Asia and across Europe and North America, and one of the reasons that the Chinese government wants to be somewhat open, somewhat...wants to be unlike its totalitarian past and more like [its] authoritarian present is because they want to feel like they can come back. So the threat of exit does discipline national governments in an important way that we shouldn't forget. Brain drain means it's harder to build these hi-tech sectors that you're pointing out, but a brain drain also gives those home country governments a better incentive to behave well. I think of this as a sort of Tiebout voting with your feet story which economies should always be open to, that people voting with their feet sends a very powerful message to governments and informal and formal evidence, I think, backs up that. Tobi: Can national IQ be deliberately raised on a scale that matters? I know you talked about nutrition in hive mind. Also, I look at things like assortative mating and other things but can it really happen on a scale that moves the needle on national prosperity?Garett: This is a great question. I feel like one reason I wrote Hive Mind was to get more people thinking about the very question you asked. Like, my comparative advantage is what does IQ cause rather than what causes IQ? But I believe the Flynn Effect is real. I believe [it is], at least, substantially real. The Flynn Effect is as you know, but your listeners may not, is the longtime rise intelligence scores that's been documented around the world. Public health interventions, people getting healthier and living longer lives, I think that obviously is increasing people's cognitive skills (like, the public health element has just got to be real). I'm less confident but I'm still fairly confident that good education raises cognitive skills big enough to move the needle. And the third one is this broadly cultural story which is really Flynn, I want to attribute this to Flynn himself. My colleague Tyler Cowen and I talked about this in our podcast back in January when I was on Conversations with Tyler - IQs in East Germany rose at least five points, maybe much more, in the decade or so after the end of communism. I think there are these cultural influences on intelligence that are not just teaching to the tests, there is something about a modern open society that I think challenges the mind and makes it work better in a wide variety of settings. So I want to stick with those three right now that public health interventions are first order, good broad-based education is suggestively very important but I can't say conclusively, and then third; there is more evidence I have to say for this big cultural effect - that when your country becomes more like Popperian open society, more [a] mixture of capitalist and loosely democratic, people seem to use their brains in different ways on a regular basis that shows up on the IQ tests. Tobi: Why and I'm sure you must have experienced this maybe in discussing your work or maybe on social media and in other ways. Why is intelligence still a taboo subject so to speak? When I sit with my friends and we talk about development and I bring up Hive Mind...and people bellyache about 'oh, we can't do this or that' and you mildly suggest that 'hey guys, have you considered that our national IQ is pretty low and maybe, maybe that's why we can't get some of these things done.' There's a natural push back that you get. Why is intelligent still such a taboo subject?Garett: I think part of it is because people assume that when you're talking about intelligence you're talking about something that is supposedly a hundred percent or nearly a hundred percent genetic and something that is essential to a person in some very deep way. So I think it's very essentialist as an explanation. I think that's a mistake, I think the evidence does not support that position. And here's a test of it, because instead of using the word "intelligence", use the word "national test scores" and you talk about how education can raise test scores in an important way, then people get much less defensive about it. People are much more open to these very same ideas, the very same channels. So I think a big part of it is that intelligence sounds like something that is intrinsic to a person, unchangeable, nearly immutable and so any ascription of causation to that is personal. So I think discussing it in a Flynnian way, the way that James Flynn has, which is very evidence-based (and) where we think of intelligence as being something like an intermediate outcome... it's not the deep root cause of everything, it's an intermediate outcome that in turn is caused by other stuff. I think that opens people up to thinking about how people's minds create the economy we live in. I'd much rather talk about how our minds create the world around us than talk about what some deep, supposedly essential thing called an IQ score. Of course, the history of the misuse of IQ test is important. The mistakes and evils that have occurred in the name of intelligence research are important. But there are many other things that have been used in evil ways in the past and we cut them slack, and democracy will be, of course, one of those. But I think something about intelligence makes people think it's intrinsic, it's basically immutable and so you're telling people to despair. And if there's one thing to think about when thinking about human cognitive skills is we shouldn't think about despair, we should think about trying to find ways to improve all of the nations in the world not just the lucky few.Tobi: That's interesting. Tell us about what you're working on right now what's your next big project.Garett: I'm on sabbatical and finishing up right now and I'm writing my third book in what I call my Singapore trilogy. And that's going to be a book really about the deep roots literature which I'd mentioned earlier. I'm interested in why the past is prologue. Hive Mind is a book, in a way, about the short-run. About almost proximate causes. 10% Less Democracy is a book about the rich countries. My third book is going to be a book about the whole world and a book about persistence. A book about why the more things change, the more they stay the same. So, again, this is going to draw on the deep roots literature, it's going to draw on the late Alberto Alesina's work on cultural persistence - how migrants carry their attitudes from their home country to the country they move to to a large degree. It's been a lot of fun to write this book because it's so data-driven and it's based on a lot of research that is very influential within economics and not influential at all outside economics and my job is to change that.Tobi: You've been an advocate so speak of high-skilled migration.Garett: Uh-huh.Tobi: How does your argument square with people like Bryan Caplan and who call for open borders, I mean, just let them come?Garett: So Caplan's comic book where I make an appearance on open borders, that's a great fun read I think people should look at that and give his ideas careful attention. I like to remind people that institutions do not just create themselves ex nihilo. That they are actually created by people and I just really want people to think about that a lot. High-skilled immigration means bringing in more informed voters and low-skilled immigration means, 'well, we really need to put a lot of effort into educating those folks' and hope that they support great institutions that will keep the country rich for a very long time. Fortunately, there is a lot of evidence that even the most optimistic supporters of open borders tend to emphasise that high-skilled immigrants have a lot of positive externalities, it's easy to make that case, and less skilled immigrants have... they are more like a wash, there is probably a plus in the short to medium run but closer to a wash than with high-skilled immigration. So I want people to think hard about where good institutions come from and if people coming to your country are going to support better institutions, that should be great news. And if people [who] come to your country are likely to tear it down, you have a little bit more concern. Caplan addresses this in his book in a number of ways with his keyhole solutions. But I think the next 20 to 30 years of both academic research and historical experience will let us know which way low-skilled immigration is going to shape the government of rich countries. Tobi: Charter Cities. Are you optimistic, are you a fan? How best to think about it from a skill and immigration perspective?Garett: Yes, so, Charter Cities which is an idea that's often associated with the Nobel Laureate Paul Romer. The idea that countries should create small little areas within there that are governed by another country's rules. A country that's well-governed, frontier. So say a poor country could say 'hey, we're going to let Singapore run a small part of our country or let Singaporean legislation or Singaporean case law hold sway in this part of our country. I tend to think that the biggest barrier to charter cities as the revenge of democracy. It's very hard to avoid what voters want. I would like to believe that countries with great institutions could franchise their institutions to other poor countries, but the problem is that institutions are created by people and we need to figure out why the institutions are weak in the first country (the country that's starting the charter city). There's a pretty good chance you're going to get a revenge of democracy there and a reversion to the old ways. Some of my GMU colleagues and I have joked that Singapore should franchise it's government to a lot of countries the way McDonald's franchises it's operating model. It would be great if we could do this but it's hard to avoid the norms of democracy especially when, as I note in 10% Less Democracy, some degree of democracy is really important to have. So Charter Cities being in tension with democracy, that's the real problem we have in making Charter Cities durable. I think the solution is to have moderate Charter Cities. Countries where, say, Singaporean law or Japanese law or South Korean law is the default but the local voters can overrule it with a two-thirds vote. Something like that might be much more durable than a full charter city solution. Starting with the default of some rich country's rules but let the local voters overturn it piece by piece and build that change into the original set of rules so that people don't feel like this is out of their control. Tobi: I'm going to ask you a very specific question. So, say, I win the election in Nigeria and I ask you 'hey, Garett, my country is going to be 300 million people in 2050, what are the policies that we can embark upon right now that can get us to a middle-income country over that time period', what would be your advice?Garett: I think my biggest piece of advice would be: find a way to become a credible, attractive place for massive amounts of high-skill immigration. How do I get five million people from China, a million and [a] half people from South Korea, two million people from America to move to Nigeria? Some of those folks will, perhaps, be people of Nigerian descent, people whose ancestors are Nigerian and who want to come back. Some of those folks will be folks who just saw that there is going to be some great tax deals, some great tax incentives to move back. I think people are policy and becoming an attractive place for high-skilled immigration like Singapore is a great way to make your country richer.Tobi: Thank you very much. I've been speaking with Economist Garett Jones and it's wonderful to have you Garett.Garett: It's been great talking with you, Tobi. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.ideasuntrapped.com/subscribe

100% Ghost of Tsushima! Michael & Clemens sprechen über Entwickler Sucker Punch Productions und danach gibt es ein ausführliches und spoilerfreies Audio-Review zum neuen PlayStation 4 Blockbuster!

100% Ghost of Tsushima! Michael & Clemens sprechen über Entwickler Sucker Punch Productions und danach gibt es ein ausführliches und spoilerfreies Audio-Review zum neuen PlayStation 4 Blockbuster!

100% Ghost of Tsushima! Michael & Clemens sprechen über Entwickler Sucker Punch Productions und danach gibt es ein ausführliches und spoilerfreies Audio-Review zum neuen PlayStation 4 Blockbuster!

Folge 200 des SHOCK2 Podcast! 100% The Last of Us Part II! Michael & Clemens sprechen über Entwickler Naughty Dog und den ersten Teil des Franchise. Danach gibt es ein ausführliches und spoilerfreies Audio-Review zu The Last of Us Part II mit Alex Amon. Viel Spaß beim Hören wünscht euch das SHOCK2-Team!

Folge 200 des SHOCK2 Podcast! 100% The Last of Us Part II! Michael & Clemens sprechen über Entwickler Naughty Dog und den ersten Teil des Franchise. Danach gibt es ein ausführliches und spoilerfreies Audio-Review zu The Last of Us Part II mit Alex Amon. Viel Spaß beim Hören wünscht euch das SHOCK2-Team!

Folge 200 des SHOCK2 Podcast! 100% The Last of Us Part II! Michael & Clemens sprechen über Entwickler Naughty Dog und den ersten Teil des Franchise. Danach gibt es ein ausführliches und spoilerfreies Audio-Review zu The Last of Us Part II mit Alex Amon. Viel Spaß beim Hören wünscht euch das SHOCK2-Team!

The World Bank has warned global remittances, which is the money migrant workers send home, will fall by around 20% in 2020 because of coronavirus. The bank predicts this will affect the income of at least tens of millions of families. One such family is that of Smitha in Kerala, whose husband is stuck in Dubai unable to work due to lockdown. But it’s not just about subsistence. Michael Clemens at the Centre for Global Development says remittance flows are a crucial resource for helping families and communities pull themselves out of poverty, and the effects of this sharp fall in remittances will be felt for many years to come. Meanwhile, Yvonne Mhango, Sub-Saharan Africa at Renaissance Capital, explains how the impact felt in Africa will differ across regions. And Michael Kent, CEO of digital payments service Azimo, explains how services like his could fill the gap left by the shuttering of brick and mortar transfer shops. Producer: Frey Lindsay. (Picture: Smitha and her family. Picture credit: Smitha Girish.)

About 1% of the world's population today are refugees, internally displaced or stateless. They live difficult, dangerous lives, have few protections and often no voice. Meanwhile, globalisation has been lop-sided. Money and goods can move relatively easily across the world, but people rarely can. Ameya Naik returns to The Pragati Podcast to talk about refugees, distress migrants and the movement of people across the world. The Pragati Podcast is a weekly talk-show on public policy, economics and international relations hosted by Pavan Srinath. Ameya Naik is a Non-Resident Associate Fellow at the Takshashila Institution and a recurring guest on The Pragati Podcast. Listen to earlier episodes with Ameya below: 42 - Sovereignty: https://ivmpodcasts.com/the-pragati-podcast-episode-list/2018/5/3/ep-42-sovereignty-from-the-cholas-to-wakanda 51 - The Iran Nuclear Deal: https://ivmpodcasts.com/the-pragati-podcast-episode-list/2018/7/19/ep-51-a-tale-of-two-nukes-iran-part-1 52 - The North Korean Nuclear Deal: https://ivmpodcasts.com/the-pragati-podcast-episode-list/2018/7/26/ep-52-a-tale-of-two-nukes-north-korea-part-2 62 - The Syrian Civil War: https://ivmpodcasts.com/the-pragati-podcast-episode-list/2019/10/30/ep-62-rebroadcast-syria-and-the-ugliness-of-modern-warfare 103 - The United Nations: https://ivmpodcasts.com/the-pragati-podcast-episode-list/2019/7/11/ep-103-the-united-nations-explained For Further Reading:Home, by Warsan Shire: https://www.care.org/sites/default/files/lesson_1_-_home-poem-by-warsan-shire.pdf The Cliff at the Border, by Lant Pritchett: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8777/042b950ca0356fec9236d2214886cbacd083.pdf Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk? by Michael Clemens: https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.25.3.83 If you have any questions or comments, write in to podcast@thinkpragati.com. Follow The Pragati Podcast on Instagram: https://instagram.com/pragatipod Follow Pragati on Twitter: https://twitter.com/thinkpragati Follow Pragati on Facebook: https://facebook.com/thinkpragati Subscribe & listen to The Pragati Podcast on iTunes, Saavn , Spotify , Castbox , Google Podcasts , YouTube or any other podcast app. We are there everywhere. You can listen to this show and other awesome shows on the IVM Podcasts app on Android: https://ivm.today/android or iOS: https://ivm.today/ios, or any other podcast app. You can check out our website at http://www.ivmpodcasts.com/

100% Death Stranding! Michael & Clemens sprechen ausführlich und, soweit es möglich ist, spoilerfrei über Death Stranding, den Kult um Hideo Kojima und einiges mehr. Viel Spaß beim Hören wünscht euch das SHOCK2-Team!

100% Death Stranding! Michael & Clemens sprechen ausführlich und, soweit es möglich ist, spoilerfrei über Death Stranding, den Kult um Hideo Kojima und einiges mehr. Viel Spaß beim Hören wünscht euch das SHOCK2-Team!

100% Death Stranding! Michael & Clemens sprechen ausführlich und, soweit es möglich ist, spoilerfrei über Death Stranding, den Kult um Hideo Kojima und einiges mehr. Viel Spaß beim Hören wünscht euch das SHOCK2-Team!

Zum Thema: Der dritte Teil unserer Predigtreihe "Meine Welt" besteht zu aus 0% Predigt, zu 20% aus einem Text von Christoph über seine Welt und zu 80% aus einem Interview mit einem Mann, der eine weitreichende Entscheidung für sein Leben getroffen hat. An einer Stelle werdet ihr eine Pause warnehmen, in unser Gast seine Veränderung auch äußerlich mit einem Kleidungsstück verdeutlicht. Mehr wird hier nicht verraten. Hört es euch an: CityChuch featuring Michael Clemens. Hilfe! Wenn du gut findest, was wir machen, kannst du uns gern unterstützen. Wir freuen uns über Spenden und brauchen sie auch! Infos, wie wir uns finanzieren und wie du helfen kannst, findest du auf unserer Webseite unter 'Spenden'. Am schnellsten und einfachsten geht eine Spende per paypal.me/citychurch. Konto: CityChurch Würzburg IBAN: DE37452604750010857200 BIC: GENODEM1BFG Vielen Dank! Episoden-Details: Thema: Meine Welt 3) Zeitgeist PredigerIn: Christoph Schmitter Zeit & Ort: 27. Januar 2019, MannyGreen Dauer: 35:12 min Bild: Inzmam Khan / Quelle: pexels.com

The most reliable, best-documented way to lift someone in a poor country out of poverty? Let them come to the US (or another rich country). That’s the argument of Fabio Rojas, a self-described advocate of open borders. That idea is often used as a punching bag by immigration opponents, but Rojas argues it could dramatically reduce poverty without costing Americans jobs. ––– Further reading: Fabio Rojas’s “simplified argument” for open borders Rojas’s three-part series on how to achieve open borders Michael Clemens explains the debate over the Mariel boatlift from Cuba, which has become super-important in immigration economics The National Immigration Forum summarizes the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act of 2017, for which Leon Fresco is lobbying More of Vox’s effective altruism coverage ––– Discover more podcasts from Vox here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode of Real Life Economics focuses on immigration and the impacts it has on the U.S. as well as experiences from other countries. To properly understand its impacts, we explain the mechanics of labor market theory as well the mechanics of long term trend growth. With that primer, we discuss Professor George Borjas work on immigration economics which strongly suggests that there is a heavy redistribution effect when immigrants first join the workforce which drives prices down and increases profits for corporations. However, in an interview with Michael Clemens economist at the Center for Global Development highlights that a blue-ribbon panel of economics on this subject do not uniformly subscribe to that view. In fact, Clemens points out that it is not a zero-sum game. In fact, immigration has significant positive benefits that are often ignored in the basic research. Listen in to hear the full discussion.

CGD experts Michael Clemens and Gaurav Khanna look at high- and low-skilled workers from three countries across several decades. Different studies, different perspectives—but all pointing at the same thing: immigrants have an overwhelmingly net positive effect on the US economy.

For notes and references please visit: http://www.stevegerben.com/immigration/ Chapters 1. Introduction / Basketball Story 2. Jobs (Costs) - 3:30 3. Welfare (Costs) - 5:26 4. Benefits to Migrants - 10:50 5. Undocumented Immigrants - 15:45 6. Jobs (Solutions) - 20:53 7. Welfare (Solutions) - 25:51 8. Vaginas - 27:14 9. Closing Remarks - 28:40 ***I calculated this wrong. This was the only number I took the liberty of calculating and it blew it up in my big, dumb face. So let’s go to the data and see why I scored a 1030 on my SATs: During the talk I used the Brookings data, but for our discussion here let’s use Borjas’ Labor Economics textbook. (pg. 35 - http://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/gborjas...) Here he has a short run loss of wages to high school dropouts of 8.3% and a long run loss of 4.8%. This comes from data between 1980-2000. Where I got lost was in the quote, “…with the average wage of high school dropouts falling by about 5%...” (again I used the Brookings numbers in the talk, which had 4.7% fixed over sixteen years. Below I'll be ignoring the short run loss as described in the textbook so you can better understand how my liberal-arts-math lead to an error in calculation): I took minimum wage for a year ($15,080) and I assumed by “falling” he meant that at the end of twenty years we’d see a reduction in those wages by 4.8%, meaning our new salary would be $14, 356. And because I thought we reached this difference over twenty years I divided the difference ($723.84) by 20 and got my answer, which here would be $36.20. But as Prof. David Henderson was kind enough to point out to me over the phone, that’s wrong. (You can read his critique here: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2...) What we’re talking about are average wages. So you’d total all the yearly wages up, divide by 20 to get your average, and then multiply that by 4.8%. Now we’re left with $723.84. Had I calculated this correctly the first time, I would have instantly starting campaigning for Trump. Kidding. I certainly would have presented the correct information and also made more of an effort to highlight other economists like Card, Ottaviano, Peri (people I only mention in passing), who come to vastly different conclusions about the wage impact on high-school dropouts: http://www.nber.org/papers/w14188. It also wouldn’t change the premise of the talk: that increasing immigration would be the largest and most effective anti-poverty campaign in the world-- so where we do find costs we should work on finding solutions to those costs that does not involve slamming the clubhouse door closed. Nevertheless, I’m completely embarrassed by this error and I offer my full apologies to the viewer. -Steve ============================================ Disclaimer: I do not discuss Syrian refugees. This talk primarily addresses the economic concerns surrounding immigration that have existed before the Paris attacks, and that will continue to exist long after the Syrian crisis ends. A lot of questions in the Q&A revolved around the Brain Drain. Michael Clemens speaks to this concern more eloquently than I ever can, so please watch him here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKDQp... I'm generally an idiot, so everything I discuss comes from the work of people far more intelligent than myself. I tried, as best I could, to present their research and/or arguments as accurately as possible. Predominantly I pull from the work of Michael Clemens, Lant Pritchett, Bryan Caplan, Alex Nowrasteh, Philipee Legrain, William Easterly, and Gordon Hanson.

A person can make up to ten times more money in a rich country compared to if he/she was doing identical work in a lower-income country. This "location premium" reflects the gains to workers' income just from migration. But restrictions to labor mobility persist around the world, with reasons ranging from physical security to job protection of native workers. The economic literature is full of evidence suggesting massive gains to the migrant workers and their destination countries, but new arguments claim to show an efficiency case can be made for limiting labor mobility. Michael Clemens of the Center for Global Development talks with us on this episode about the economic arguments for and against migration restrictions.

Plenary speaker Michael Clemens provides a short overview of his presentation at the CSAE Conference 2015

In this podcast Devpolicy Director Stephen Howes sits down with Michael Clemens, a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Global Development and migration expert. The main topics covered were: - The US Seasonal Workers Program - Skilled vs. unskilled migration - Fostering skilled migration - The Australia Pacific Technical College

One of the biggest growth opportunities in the world economy lies not in the mobility of goods or capital, but in the mobility of labour. Many people born in low-income countries would like to leave those countries, but barriers prevent their emigration. Those barriers, according to economists’ best estimates to date, cost the world economy much more than all remaining barriers to the international movement of goods and capital combined. Yet economists spend a great time studying the movement of goods and capital, and when they study migration at all, they focus on the effects of immigration on nonmigrants in destination countries. Dr Michael Clemens investigated why this is the case and sketched a four-point research agenda on the effects of emigration. Barriers to emigration, Dr Clemens argued, deserve a research priority that is commensurate with their likely colossal economic effects. Michael Clemens is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development where he leads the Migration and Development initiative. His current research focuses on the effects of international migration on people from and in developing countries, and on rigorous impact evaluation for aid projects. He also serves as CGD’s Research Manager. Presentation slides are available from the Devpolicy events page: https://devpolicy.crawford.anu.edu.au/event-extra/past

October 2013 featuring Neal McCluskey, Emmett McGroarty, Jeffrey Miron, Michael Clemens, Tim Lynch, Doug Bandow, Robert McDonald See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Immigration reform will increase economic growth and productivity in the United States — but not uniformly. Most Americans and immigrants will reap rewards, while others could face increased competition in the labor market. Ethan Lewis will discuss how lower-skilled immigrant workers affect the labor market decisions of similarly skilled Americans. Madeline Zavodny will delve into the economic impact of highly skilled immigrants and how business cycles affect immigrant flows. Michael Clemens will assess the global economic impact of immigration reform and the enormous economic potential of removing most immigration restrictions. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Michael Clemens of the Center for Global Development talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the effects of aid and migration on world poverty. Clemens argues that the effects of aid are positive but small. But emigration has the potential to have a transformative effect on migrants from poor countries who emigrate to richer ones. The discussion concludes with the impact of migrants on the host country.

Michael Clemens of the Center for Global Development talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the effects of aid and migration on world poverty. Clemens argues that the effects of aid are positive but small. But emigration has the potential to have a transformative effect on migrants from poor countries who emigrate to richer ones. The discussion concludes with the impact of migrants on the host country.

Michael Clemens of the Center for Global Development talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the effects of aid and migration on world poverty. Clemens argues that the effects of aid are positive but small. But emigration has the potential to have a transformative effect on migrants from poor countries who emigrate to richer ones. The discussion concludes with the impact of migrants on the host country.

Michael Clemens of the Center for Global Development talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the effects of aid and migration on world poverty. Clemens argues that the effects of aid are positive but small. But emigration has the potential to have a transformative effect on migrants from poor countries who emigrate to richer ones. The discussion concludes with the impact of migrants on the host country.

In this podcast we meet Dr Michael Clemens from the Center for Global Development in Washington. Dr Clemens is a passionate advocate of greater migration flows due to the economic benefits such flows bring, be it in spillovers to education and technology, or via direct reductions in labour costs. Dr Clemens’ recent work exploited a […]

Michael Clemens from the Center for Global Development talks about the relationship between migration and development.

Michael Clemens from the Center for Global Development talks about the relationship between migration and development.