Tag Archives: immigration

One of the findings of the dynamic information equilibrium approach (see also my latest paper) is that nominal output ("GDP") has essentially the same structure as the size of the labor force. The major shocks to the path of NGDP roughly correspond to the major shocks to the Civilian Labor Force (CLF). Both are shown as vertical lines. The first is the demographic shock of women entering the workforce.... With the positive shock of women entering the labor force ending, immigration is a...

Here’s a graph from the UN’s 2017 International Migration : And here’s another:

The Guardian newspaper has a story about wages in England: A shortage of factory workers is starting to push up pay rates but wage rises in the services sector remain rooted at around 2%, according to the latest feedback from the Bank of England’s regional agents. The central bank said its agents, which are based in offices across the country, found that shortages this month across the manufacturing sector were leading to a “slight increase in pay growth”...

A presidential candidate like Donald Trump should not be viable. Candidates he supports should not be viable. The existence of Donald Trump should be a boon for the Democrats. And, in fact, it has been. But it hasn’t been enough. Perhaps four (or eight?) years worth of results will tip the balance for Democrats, but it is reasonable to ask: why have Democrats been coming up short against Trump, both in the Presidential election and in special elections...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]For the (Probably Not) Last Time, the DREAMers Are Not Taking Your Jobs: I believe that a lot of well meaning people genuinely think this, and they deserve an explanation as to why they are wrong rather than just getting yelled at on humanitarian grounds.

The Socialist Party of America existed between the 29th July 1901 and the 31st December 1972. Before the party was repressed for its opposition to World War I and suffered splits over the question of Communist Russia, it was probably the most successful and largest radical party of the socialist Left in America, at least down to the 1920s.The Socialist Party of America was made up of Marxists, anarchists, some members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) union, democratic socialists...

That is, what is the case against the actual theory presented by Karl Marx in volume 1 of Capital? This was the only volume of Capital that Marx published in his lifetime, and volume 3 contradicts volume 1 in important respects.First, we need to know what Marx actually argued in volume 1 of Capital.The essence of Marx’s theory and his conception of the historical tendency of capitalism is as follows:(1) Marx had an elaborate labour theory of value on which he founded volume 1 of Capital (see...

First of all, it requires some study and serious effort.Here is some direct and fascinating evidence from Vox Day, a former libertarian personality who is now an Alt Right blogger, about why he turned against libertarian ideology both on the issues of immigration and free trade:[embedded content][embedded content][embedded content]As we can see, it was the feeble libertarian responses to the problem of free movement of people, and gaping holes in the theory of free trade that did it for Vox...

George Borjas, perhaps the US’ pre-eminent immigration economist notes: Maybe it’s just me because I instinctively read in between the lines whenever I read anything about immigration, but I’m beginning to detect such a seismic shift in the immigration debate. We all know the party line by now: Immigrants do jobs that natives don’t want to do. As a result, natives do not lose jobs, and natives do not see their wages reduced. And anyone who claims otherwise is...

Economics is a simple field. Just about everything can be described in terms of supply and demand. If the supply of something is scarce but the demand for it is strong, its price rises. On the other hand, if there is a lot of supply but little demand, its price will go down. Now, buyers and sellers can engage in certain strategies to weight the scales. For example, sellers of a product can band together (perhaps by buying each other out) to achieve some...