>And while it is logically possible to be a model worker but a terrible citizen, this configuration is highly implausible. The burden of proof justly lies on the accuser.
Not only is this not implausible, Caplan's research shows that it's true of MOST people. Most people are terrible citizens! The average voter produces enormous negative externalities by voting!
This is confused. The average person provides negative voting value at the margin but positive market value at the margin, and the market value outweighs the voting value.
And I think he means crime and other cultural effects.
Your car(s), your house, your phone, your fridge, your medical service. Standard of living. Life expectancy. Sure, voting aka democracy must be the most terrible form of getting government - except all the others that have been tried.
People have all of those things in Singapore and Dubai.
Garett Jones has shown that your country's average IQ affects your income more than your own personal IQ affects your income, which is consistent with the negative political externality of voting being larger than the positive contribution of labor value, for most people.
If you are basing your argument on Papa John’s losing a court case with this evidence then your argument fails. They were sincerely trying to have a better pizza and were spending more to get it. That a court thinks slowly fermented non frozen dough is the “same” as frozen instant dough with raising agents and sinister chemistry is crazy. As with the rest of the case.
Globally most citizens want the democratic right to choose levels of immigration and for the state to exist to protect and support primarily the citizens of that country. The numerous court cases that contradict this (ECHR) - can’t deport terrorist because son only like English chicken nuggets etc - don’t win the argument there either.
"And while it is logically possible to be a model worker but a terrible citizen, this configuration is highly implausible. The burden of proof justly lies on the accuser."
There are two significant issues with this stance.
Firstly, "model worker" isn't the target here. Particularly for your illiterate Afghan goat herder example, said goat herder is working for relatives or close tribe/clan members in the restaurant; he didn't read about the job in the Wanted ads by construction. How people behave with regards to their family hierarchy is very different from how they behave with regards to strangers in society. More likely these bottom rung workers are barely sufficient by most standards, doing well because their uncle or cousin will smack them around if they don't behave at work.
Secondly, there is the huge matter of what those workers and employers consider proper behavior outside of work. Current events in MN, the UK and now France and the rest of Europe rather shifts the burden of proof I think. Clearly certain cultures think that defrauding the government of millions of dollars is fine (or even laudable), raping out group women is fine, and burning down historical buildings and looting cities is no big deal. All that on top of receiving government benefits and voting illegally.
"The best" is an informal way of describing it. Obviously Papa John's is not even close to the best pizza. But you can still have a quality-oriented strategy without selling a $200 pizza.
To pick a more practical example, if you talk to, say, the people running HR at a top tier tech company. You might have a rough goal like "When we open up the office in Brazil, in year one we want to hire 50 of the best local software engineers." But when you drill down more specifically, you're going to make practical decisions which could still be "best-oriented", like, our aim is to hire people at the 90th percentile in the market. Therefore we need to be prepared to pay what the 90th percentile is making in the market. Etc. You aren't literally targeting the very best 50 people because you don't even know who they are, the goal is too hard, etc.
You don't want to hire "everyone who is better than nothing" because you can't measure the intangible downsides of hiring too many people. How do you know at what point you've overhired and your company culture is going to degrade?
In particular one problem with low skilled immigration is that if it lowers support for immigration, you're going to end up with a backlash that causes lower net immigration. As a matter of common sense, it seems pretty clear to me that this does happen.
A much better principle is that you should admit immigrants that are "better than average" in some sense. Smart, hard-working. People who have proved their dedication via learning English. That sort of thing. Be intelligent about it and pick some procedure for admitting people that you expect to bring up the average "goodness per capita" of America.
“ At the meta-level: Even if American voters and politicians stubbornly insist on making otherwise productive people into net negatives, it is perverse to get angry at immigrants or their defenders.”
Given that the institutions allow very low productivity immigrants to become lifetime wards of the welfare state, you are right that I should be mad at those building said system, but I am also mad at those enabling and encouraging them (you).
No country providing $10k per year health care and various welfare programs can allow unlimited numbers of people to come into the country. This is the world we actually live in, and as such, if we allow in immigrants (I say yes) we should bring in the best, and certainly not bring in the worst.
Obviously there is a wide range of selection criteria. At one end we could screen for college educated English speakers with job offers. At the other end we could screen out serial rapists with hepatitis who want to kill infidels. We can argue how tight our guides should be, but I don’t see any good argument for not having any standards.
Hmm, does 'better' or 'best available' work then? Is the argument that every illiterate, monolingual Afghan goat herder that wishes to immigrate should be allowed into the country? Is any one of those 'good enough' for the Afghan restaurant? Or better than every other American or better than every other immigrant from elsewhere? (BTW, is it impossible to imagine that some degree of literacy or facility with English might prove useful in a restaurant's kitchen - say, for example, following written instructions, interacting with other staff or responding to an emergency?)
Does anybody seriously argue for the best people? It's simply impractical to identify them and verify their pedigree as 'the best' - whether they seek to enter the country or be hired by a business. Don't businesses usually hire the 'best' among their choices? And aren't those choices based on numerous tradeoffs that might involve subjective assessments? How likely is a high-IQ person to apply for a janitorial position or, in that unlikely case, to be hired for it?
If best is unachievable - and it is, some metrics or rules of thumb are needed. In the case of immigration, it seems worthwhile to have some feeling for the country's labor needs - over the full range of required capabilities: literacy, numeracy, knowledge, skills, experience, etc. (BTW, does the US oblige prospective immigrants to provide proof of their IQ?)
Although Prof. Caplan doesn't address it, there is also the controversial topic of whether or not 'the best people' are those with the highest intersectional vulnerability scores - assuming they also meet the minimum criteria for actually performing the job, of course.
Caplan is happy with "open borders for people hired". If that restaurant decides they want this goat herder (or someone in the US with a flock of goats): their choice is probably better informed than an outsider's opinion. Anyways: as we are far from "work visa for goat herders": first argue why not to include people with a legit work&rent contract+an IQ of 100+ intermediate English + clean police record + some college degree (which would open the doors to a few hundred million humans more than today's restrictions)?
Ok I'm going to say it. The pizza doesn't need the best ingredients and a mix of qualities is indeed good. But certain poisonous religious ingredients could definitely cause more harm than good and it's worth picking ingredients carefully for that specific reason if you ask me.
There is another kind of externality that you aren't discussing - the effect of not getting the job on the American who would have been hired but for the availability of the immigrant. Every time an immigrant takes a job that some American was willing to do, that makes the employer (presumably American) better off, the immigrant better off, and the world in aggregate better off, but the particular American who wanted that job worse off. And the role of the American government is to maximize the aggregate welfare of Americans, not the world. Whether the benefit to the employer outweighs the harm to the rejected American probably depends on specific facts about the specific job, as well as what aggregation method we think is appropriate. But this seems like a good argument for excluding at least some potential immigrants, and in particular for excluding low-skilled potential immigrants rather than high-skilled potential immigrants.
Mr. Caplan, you wrote: “No, because so much government spending in non-rival.” Did you mean “non-trivial?” This looks like a case of Apple Auto-incorrect at work. (It’s not made with the best ingredients.)
No. He meant non-rival. The whole term is "non-rival in consumption." So, for example, national defense is non-rival. Adding one million more people doesn't appreciably reduce the amount of defense I get. An example of a rival good is hamburger. If you eat a hamburger, I can't eat the same hamburger.
Thanks for the correction! Comments like mine are the price of allowing low IQ people to read and comment on one’s stack for free. Unfortunately, comments like mine are non-rival. (Which, I am happy to report, Apple Auto-incorrect did *not* try to change to “non-trivial.”)
>And while it is logically possible to be a model worker but a terrible citizen, this configuration is highly implausible. The burden of proof justly lies on the accuser.
Not only is this not implausible, Caplan's research shows that it's true of MOST people. Most people are terrible citizens! The average voter produces enormous negative externalities by voting!
I don't think the average voter produces enormous amounts of anything by voting. One vote just isn't that impactful.
This is confused. The average person provides negative voting value at the margin but positive market value at the margin, and the market value outweighs the voting value.
And I think he means crime and other cultural effects.
Where is the evidence that the market value outweighs the voting value?
Your car(s), your house, your phone, your fridge, your medical service. Standard of living. Life expectancy. Sure, voting aka democracy must be the most terrible form of getting government - except all the others that have been tried.
People have all of those things in Singapore and Dubai.
Garett Jones has shown that your country's average IQ affects your income more than your own personal IQ affects your income, which is consistent with the negative political externality of voting being larger than the positive contribution of labor value, for most people.
If you are basing your argument on Papa John’s losing a court case with this evidence then your argument fails. They were sincerely trying to have a better pizza and were spending more to get it. That a court thinks slowly fermented non frozen dough is the “same” as frozen instant dough with raising agents and sinister chemistry is crazy. As with the rest of the case.
Globally most citizens want the democratic right to choose levels of immigration and for the state to exist to protect and support primarily the citizens of that country. The numerous court cases that contradict this (ECHR) - can’t deport terrorist because son only like English chicken nuggets etc - don’t win the argument there either.
"And while it is logically possible to be a model worker but a terrible citizen, this configuration is highly implausible. The burden of proof justly lies on the accuser."
There are two significant issues with this stance.
Firstly, "model worker" isn't the target here. Particularly for your illiterate Afghan goat herder example, said goat herder is working for relatives or close tribe/clan members in the restaurant; he didn't read about the job in the Wanted ads by construction. How people behave with regards to their family hierarchy is very different from how they behave with regards to strangers in society. More likely these bottom rung workers are barely sufficient by most standards, doing well because their uncle or cousin will smack them around if they don't behave at work.
Secondly, there is the huge matter of what those workers and employers consider proper behavior outside of work. Current events in MN, the UK and now France and the rest of Europe rather shifts the burden of proof I think. Clearly certain cultures think that defrauding the government of millions of dollars is fine (or even laudable), raping out group women is fine, and burning down historical buildings and looting cities is no big deal. All that on top of receiving government benefits and voting illegally.
"The best" is an informal way of describing it. Obviously Papa John's is not even close to the best pizza. But you can still have a quality-oriented strategy without selling a $200 pizza.
To pick a more practical example, if you talk to, say, the people running HR at a top tier tech company. You might have a rough goal like "When we open up the office in Brazil, in year one we want to hire 50 of the best local software engineers." But when you drill down more specifically, you're going to make practical decisions which could still be "best-oriented", like, our aim is to hire people at the 90th percentile in the market. Therefore we need to be prepared to pay what the 90th percentile is making in the market. Etc. You aren't literally targeting the very best 50 people because you don't even know who they are, the goal is too hard, etc.
You don't want to hire "everyone who is better than nothing" because you can't measure the intangible downsides of hiring too many people. How do you know at what point you've overhired and your company culture is going to degrade?
In particular one problem with low skilled immigration is that if it lowers support for immigration, you're going to end up with a backlash that causes lower net immigration. As a matter of common sense, it seems pretty clear to me that this does happen.
A much better principle is that you should admit immigrants that are "better than average" in some sense. Smart, hard-working. People who have proved their dedication via learning English. That sort of thing. Be intelligent about it and pick some procedure for admitting people that you expect to bring up the average "goodness per capita" of America.
“ At the meta-level: Even if American voters and politicians stubbornly insist on making otherwise productive people into net negatives, it is perverse to get angry at immigrants or their defenders.”
Given that the institutions allow very low productivity immigrants to become lifetime wards of the welfare state, you are right that I should be mad at those building said system, but I am also mad at those enabling and encouraging them (you).
No country providing $10k per year health care and various welfare programs can allow unlimited numbers of people to come into the country. This is the world we actually live in, and as such, if we allow in immigrants (I say yes) we should bring in the best, and certainly not bring in the worst.
Obviously there is a wide range of selection criteria. At one end we could screen for college educated English speakers with job offers. At the other end we could screen out serial rapists with hepatitis who want to kill infidels. We can argue how tight our guides should be, but I don’t see any good argument for not having any standards.
Hmm, does 'better' or 'best available' work then? Is the argument that every illiterate, monolingual Afghan goat herder that wishes to immigrate should be allowed into the country? Is any one of those 'good enough' for the Afghan restaurant? Or better than every other American or better than every other immigrant from elsewhere? (BTW, is it impossible to imagine that some degree of literacy or facility with English might prove useful in a restaurant's kitchen - say, for example, following written instructions, interacting with other staff or responding to an emergency?)
Does anybody seriously argue for the best people? It's simply impractical to identify them and verify their pedigree as 'the best' - whether they seek to enter the country or be hired by a business. Don't businesses usually hire the 'best' among their choices? And aren't those choices based on numerous tradeoffs that might involve subjective assessments? How likely is a high-IQ person to apply for a janitorial position or, in that unlikely case, to be hired for it?
If best is unachievable - and it is, some metrics or rules of thumb are needed. In the case of immigration, it seems worthwhile to have some feeling for the country's labor needs - over the full range of required capabilities: literacy, numeracy, knowledge, skills, experience, etc. (BTW, does the US oblige prospective immigrants to provide proof of their IQ?)
Although Prof. Caplan doesn't address it, there is also the controversial topic of whether or not 'the best people' are those with the highest intersectional vulnerability scores - assuming they also meet the minimum criteria for actually performing the job, of course.
Caplan is happy with "open borders for people hired". If that restaurant decides they want this goat herder (or someone in the US with a flock of goats): their choice is probably better informed than an outsider's opinion. Anyways: as we are far from "work visa for goat herders": first argue why not to include people with a legit work&rent contract+an IQ of 100+ intermediate English + clean police record + some college degree (which would open the doors to a few hundred million humans more than today's restrictions)?
Ok I'm going to say it. The pizza doesn't need the best ingredients and a mix of qualities is indeed good. But certain poisonous religious ingredients could definitely cause more harm than good and it's worth picking ingredients carefully for that specific reason if you ask me.
Well I don't know if it is THE best, but Papa John's is pretty damm good, man. Certainly one of the best!
A subjective opinion?
There is another kind of externality that you aren't discussing - the effect of not getting the job on the American who would have been hired but for the availability of the immigrant. Every time an immigrant takes a job that some American was willing to do, that makes the employer (presumably American) better off, the immigrant better off, and the world in aggregate better off, but the particular American who wanted that job worse off. And the role of the American government is to maximize the aggregate welfare of Americans, not the world. Whether the benefit to the employer outweighs the harm to the rejected American probably depends on specific facts about the specific job, as well as what aggregation method we think is appropriate. But this seems like a good argument for excluding at least some potential immigrants, and in particular for excluding low-skilled potential immigrants rather than high-skilled potential immigrants.
Mr. Caplan, you wrote: “No, because so much government spending in non-rival.” Did you mean “non-trivial?” This looks like a case of Apple Auto-incorrect at work. (It’s not made with the best ingredients.)
No. He meant non-rival. The whole term is "non-rival in consumption." So, for example, national defense is non-rival. Adding one million more people doesn't appreciably reduce the amount of defense I get. An example of a rival good is hamburger. If you eat a hamburger, I can't eat the same hamburger.
Thanks for the correction! Comments like mine are the price of allowing low IQ people to read and comment on one’s stack for free. Unfortunately, comments like mine are non-rival. (Which, I am happy to report, Apple Auto-incorrect did *not* try to change to “non-trivial.”)
You're welcome.
You sell yourself short, though. Unless AI wrote your comment, I would bet that your IQ is substantially above 100.