Periodically, I Post Graphs Made By Lant Pritchett
Although I like to think I blog about important issues that affect lots of people, when it comes down to it, there is really only one issue that matters: global poverty (nuclear proliferation too, but I don’t want to ruin the flow). Or to be more precise, the fact that hundreds of millions of people have living standards so low, that it substantively affects the length and quality of their lives. The other “only issue” that’s a simple corollary to global poverty is global labor mobility. The income deprivations people experience simply from the chance of being born in the wrong country are extreme. Kerry Howley comments on a new Lant Pritchett paper which finds that wage gaps between otherwise equivalent workers living in different countries swamps “any form of wage discrimination (gender, race, or ethnicity) that has ever been measured.” . That’s including the gap between whites and blacks in the USA in 1855.
Although I’m super enthusiastic about what the people at the Jameel Poverty Action Lab are doing and all the good work that development economists are doing to try to improve the well being of the world’s poorest, it all seems kinda pointless until we’ve liberalize the immigration system to the politically feasible maximum. Considering that “Simply allowing one member of a Bangladeshi household to work in the US for one month (for a gain of US$835 in present value) brings a larger increase in earnings to that household than a lifetime of microcredit (for a gain of US$683 in present value)” one has to wonder why global labor mobility isn’t all development economists talk about. And for that matter one wonders why this isn’t the only thing that all activists, journalists and intellectuals concerned with social justice, fairness or equality talk about.
