Which Side Are You On?
The point of economists talking about economics is to enrich the class of people who are like economists, and impoverish everyone else.
That was part of a post by an intelligent right wing poster on a forum I am active on. It reminded me of something I had quoted, nearly twenty years ago, in posts on my old blog.1
They say in Harlan County There are no neutrals there. You’ll either be a union man Or a thug for J. H. Blair. CHORUS: Which side are you on? Which side are you on? Which side are you on? Which side are you on? (from Which Side Are You On? by Florence Reece)
The song was from the labor union left, one of my posts on the same issue about a left wing anarchist at a conference we both spoke at, the quote I started with from a poster a little to the right of Trump. They all share the same underlying assumption, that political disagreement is not about what is true, that both sides correctly perceive what policy is in their interest. The point of political rhetoric is not to persuade, it is to rouse up your troops for battle. You may sometimes be able to bargain with your enemy but there is no point in trying to persuade him.
Sometimes that view is correct, most obviously when the conflict is about whether the government should give money to me and my friends or to you and yours. Quite often it is wrong, because one side (or both) is wrong about what policies will have what effect. The argument over the minimum wage is not about whether it is good for poor workers to make more money, it is about whether a minimum wage law helps them by raising their income or hurts them by pricing them out of the market. The argument over concealed carry is not about whether one is for crime or against it, it is about whether legalizing concealed carry increases crime or decreases it. Most arguments about economic policy are not about whether you are for workers or capitalists but about what policies have what effects.
The interesting question that the first quote raises, for me, is whether the claim is in part true, whether part of the political difference between me and the right wing poster is about different values, whether there are important issues where we disagree not about the consequences of alternative policies but about what consequences each of us wants. His claim is wrong about trade policy, which may have been what he was thinking of, but it might be right about immigration.
I am in favor of increased legal immigration, opposed to mass deportation of illegal immigrants. He holds the opposite view. Part of the reason may be that he believes things about immigrants, legal and illegal, that I do not believe. But part may be that he wants a different sort of country than I do.
I live in San Jose. The park two blocks from my house is filled on weekends with families picnicking, teams of kids competing. Most of them are speaking Spanish. Our side of Williams Road is single family houses occupied by families a large fraction of which are immigrants, Asian or European, the other side is apartment buildings, mostly, by casual observation, occupied by people who speak Spanish. Restaurants we go to are Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Iranian, Italian, Korean.2
I like traveling; most years a two week speaking trip to Europe, less often to other parts of the world. Having parts of foreign countries within walking distance is, for me, a positive feature of where I live.
I also enjoy interacting with people who are like me. Part of the pleasure of living with my wife and adult children is that they get my jokes, understand my ideas, share attitudes and interests with me. Every month or two we hold a meetup, originally for fellow readers of Slate Star Codex, now for a mixed population of rationalists, libertarians, techies, people who enjoy the conversations at our meetups. People who have enough in common with me and mine that we enjoy interacting with them.
Suppose I didn’t enjoy visiting exotic places, interacting with interestingly different people. Suppose my taste for interacting with people like me was stronger and focused more on characteristics shared with fellow Americans. For that revised version of me the same things that I see as positive features of my local environment might be negative features. I might very much prefer that the families in the park speak English, my neighbors look more like me, fewer of them have foreign accents.
Part of the difference between me and the poster may be our taste for diversity but at least part is what counts as diverse. I have lived all my life in America and like it but there are a lot of things I don’t share with most Americans. I have been to a football game once in my life. I have watched very few television programs, do not own a set.3 I only once drank enough alcohol to have an effect on me large enough for me to notice, probably not enough for a stranger to notice. I tried marijuana a few times some fifty years ago but the first time it did more than making me feel as if I was falling asleep was the last time I tried it.
A generic American, if there is such a thing, is not someone like me. Someone who knows and likes a lot of poetry, especially if some of the poetry is Kipling, is, even if he speaks with a Norwegian accent. So is someone who naturally thinks like an economist as some people do, most do not. Keeping out foreigners does not make my environment a place where my neighbors are like me.
the class of people who are like economists
The reference was probably not to me, although I may be the only economist he has argued with. It probably includes academics, which I am, a group that probably differs from the generic American a little in my direction, although only a little — most college professors, like most other Americans, know none of Kipling’s poetry, share more of generic American culture than I do. But my guess, from past interactions online with him and others with similar views, is that what he is thinking of is the division, cultural and economic, between the bicoastal elite and flyover country.4 It is a cartoon vision of America but not entirely false, expressed from the other side by Hilary Clinton in her view of “deplorables.” The difference in economic interests is less than the poster thinks — he has as much interest in understanding economics as I have in understanding astrology — but the cultural difference is real, if less sharp than in the cartoon version. In the case of immigration there may be large parts of the population who share my taste for what sort of country they want to live in, large parts who share his.
Past posts, sorted by topic
My web page, with the full text of multiple books and articles and much else
A search bar for text in past posts and much of my other writing
There are lots of Mexican restaurants too but not everyone in the family likes Mexican food.
My desktop monitor thinks it is a smart television — from time to time I have to remind it that I bought it as a screen for a computer — but that is not how I use it.
The difference between you are the poster is that if you get your way, all the stuff he likes will still be there. There will be plenty of places where he can talk to people who speak English. There will be plenty of towns with small numbers of immigrants. The immigrants will be there in addition to the native-born citizens he loves, it's not like every time a Mexican moves here an American has to move to Mexico. By contrast, if he gets his way, something you love is gone.
H. L. Mencken described the Puritan mindset as "The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." I think you can describe nativism similarly, as the haunting fear that somewhere in your vast country, there might be foreigners. It doesn't matter that they rarely interact with the immigrants. It doesn't matter that the immigrants moved to LA while the nativist lives in Missouri. He wants them gone.
I think I know the forum poster you're referring to. I think both of you could imagine scenarios that are both plausible and the most exemplary of what each of you fears or hopes.
I think libertarianism's ideal is open borders, probably in the Bryan Caplan sense. I see the logic in opening a society to whomever wants to come here, as well as the past evidence that suggested it hasn't hurt the US. Having been forced to think about immigration a lot recently, I have to admit I can see some of the drawback as well.
One implausible but possible scenario is one where millions of immigrants enters just long enough to enjoy whatever public goods are produced by our society, then return to their homeland, or possibly to another country with more public goods to enjoy, leaving a mess in their wake. I think it's implausible because typical baseline immigration in the US - the country immigrants flock to more than any other, for the last five years, and any other year I check - is on the order of 0.5-1.7 million - about 0.2-0.5% of the total US population each year. This doesn't seem that hard to absorb, even if it were doubled. One question is whether doubling is the worst case - there are over 20 times as many people in the world as there are Americans, and if they were to all come over at once, I think we'd agree we'd be the ones assimilating, not them. If only about 10 million come in every year, we wouldn't have to assimilate, but they might not have to, either.
A more plausible scenario is one where immigrants flood specific parts of the country (we shouldn't expect them to distribute evenly, not even just among big cities), form enclaves, and distribute throughout the rest of the locale while still spending most of their time (and money) within that enclave. There would be some cross-pollination of culture, but not very much, and the enclave ensures preservation of a lot of whatever happened in the homeland.
Some broad culture is probably enriching on net - new clothes, food, music, dances, words, ideas. On the other hand, some of it is bad, and might be why those immigrants moved, and they might bring some of it with them nevertheless. It's a hundred little things - how you say hello or goodbye, how loud you are in public places or at night, who you look down on, how you resolve disputes, how you deal with police officers, how you manage your children, how you behave when you're a guest, how hard you try to deliver good service or products, or how hard you to try to repay debts.
A lot of Americans probably prosper because they don't worry about whether their neighbor is going to stiff them on anything from a bar tab to a truckload of pig feed to a shipping container of store inventory, so they get to save a lot of money on checking and double checking. They intuitively know whether the other person is going to work like mad to make good on the next lease payment or purchase agreement. And economic growth might be literally hampered by not knowing if your neighbor asking for a $10K loan is still going to be around in a month.
This in no way implies Americans are all inherently scrupulous and immigrants are all fly-by-night grifters. It could easily be the other way around, depending on the deal. An Nth-generation rancher might not accept an immigrants' apples, while that same immigrant might be skeptical of the local banker's loan terms. All it takes for business friction is for different people to not know each other's expectations.
Given that, it stands to reason that immigration can be a source of economic sluggishness. I wonder if Caplan's book addresses this.