Monthly Archives: September 2007

Epistemic Public Service Announcement

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Ezra notes, with apparently incredulity, that

there’s no outlet in the world that publishes as many economists — and good ones, too, Nobel Prize winners — as The Wall Street Journal editorial page. We know, and many of those economists know, that that editorial page is mendacious, extremist, and intellectually sloppy. But they nevertheless publish there, lending their titles and credibility to an outlet that continually promotes a fundamentally poisonous and empirically laughable ideology.

Yes Ezra, we know you disagree with the politics of the WSJ editorial page. But I’m sure it seems to many intelligent people that the collected work of Robert Kuttner, the founder and editor of Ezra’s magazine, is extremist and intellectually sloppy (if not always mendacious) and “promotes a fundamentally poisonous and empirically laughable ideology.” Yet Ezra still chooses to write for The American Prospect. And so do many perfectly respectable academics. Why? Probably because its editorial vision is closer to their views than the relevant alternatives. And, just perhaps, the economic outlook of the Journal editorial page is closer to the views of many Nobel Prize-winning economist than the relevant alternatives, as inconvenient or annoying as that fact may be to some people. Opinion pages and magazines are not scholarly journals. It’s pretty tendentious to suggest that the Journal’s page is singular in its transgressions against academic evidential standards.

Of course, all this opinion-mongering continues ceaselessly because there are real, substantive empirical and moral disagreements, none of which may be settled simply by humbly claiming all virtue and forcefully declaring the other guys to be bad people indifferent to the truth.

Prebuttal on Immigration and Poverty

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One of the Economist‘s Free Exchange bloggers, with whom I mysteriously seldom disagree, last night presciently rebutted Robert Samuelson’s deplorable column today in the Post. Samuelson, like Robert Rector, who the Economist blogger was addressing, advises that we reduce the poverty rate by allowing fewer poor people to cross our borders—which is to say, by promoting poverty. As the Economist blogger put it:

It takes a special kind of brazenness to propose a reduction of the national poverty rate at the expense of ensuring that more people stay poor by denying them opportunity to set foot in the nation.

If Mr Rector cared about actual human poverty, as opposed to some statistic about the number of Americans beneath what he agrees is an arbitrary line, he’d favour an increase in legal immigration and some kind of guest-worker program. If these policies were to inflate American poverty rates, as they surely would, that would be something to be proud of. From a humanitarian perspective, if a wealthy nation’s poverty rate improves, then it isn’t letting enough poor people in.

Rector and Samuelson seem to be in the grip of what I like to call the Augusta National Golf Club model of the nation state. It’s our club, so we can keep women (or poor people, or anyone) out if we like.

Who's Afraid of Mexicans?

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People who never encounter them.

Kerry reports at Reason that state and local tough-on-immigration laws come primarily from places next to no one immigrates to.

In a report to be published by the American Immigration Law Foundation (AILF) in September, [San Diego State sociologist Jill] Esbenshade finds that almost 80 percent of the localities where ordinances have been discussed had below the national average of Latino population share in 2000.

I found this contrast especially illuminating:

Meanwhile, Missouri’s newly deputized immigration enforcers have claimed the right to detain even immigrants who would not otherwise be arrested. As Gov. Blunt fills the state’s detention centers, he might ponder the last time the state experienced an “unnatural influx” of migrants. In the first half of the 20th century, another politically unpopular group—Southern blacks—flooded into Missouri, bringing culture and identity, barbeque and blues. School kids learn to call that the “Great Migration”; politicians refer to today’s “immigration crisis.”

Yesterday’s cultural synthesis is today’s cultural amnesia, I guess. Which reminds me that I keep forgetting to visit Kansas City’s American Jazz Museum.