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by remarkEon 422 days ago
Yeah I got that part, maybe you're misreading. You seem to be interested in advertising that you've read all this stuff, which is great, a lot of people have. But you aren't really addressing the problem statement, so I'll state it clearly: no one gives a shit about a 2.6% hourly wage increase over 20 years. They don't care because immigration comes with a bunch of other externalities, that are very near term, that academics deliberately remove from their models. "Natives get a slice ... of 1.7-2.6% ... over the course of 20 years" is not a convincing argument, which is why most of the quantitative debate about immigration is largely academic. If the benefits were so obvious we wouldn't need a team of nerds to tell us that, well, actually your hourly wages do go up ... eventually. Insofar as you care about some sort of policy outcome here, you are going to have to figure out a different way to frame this.

I'm not familiar with zoning laws in the UK to comment, so, sure. Maybe a byzantine zoning bureaucracy is the problem there, that does ring distinctly "British" to me.

I haven't read the Mariel study, and honestly I don't really have any interest in it because the underlying story is that Cubans just replicated their own economic structures in a hyper-contained locality, with significant ethnic solidarity given a shared history of hardship. Again, there's qualitative aspects to this that economists - especially the econometricaly inclined - struggle with.

1 comments

> Qualitative aspects

name them!

> Haven't read the Mariel study

then stop making short-run supply shock claims

> Cubans just replicated their own economic structures in a hyper-contained locality, with significant ethnic solidarity given a shared history of hardship

Damn if only there was a way to study assimilation. Wait, there is, we have, and if you look a few replies up you'll see that its basically a complete success with sufficient NGO support that vastly boosts social participation.

> If the benefits were so obvious we wouldn't need a team of nerds to tell us that, well, actually your hourly wages do go up ... eventually.

This kind of thinking leads to Trump. Unironically. Handwaving about "if it were real I'd know of it" is what leads to terrible economic policy.

Well, if it were real people wouldn’t have voted for Trump. What you’ve presented is, like I keep saying, the most unconvincing tidbit of minor benefits. You seem totally uninterested in addressing the problem, that no one cares about this study and what it says because it’s such a tiny effect on the margins, utterly impossible to translate into daily life.

I’ll keep making whatever claims I want, and you can keep gatekeeping (or attempting to) as much as you like (now I really won’t read the Mariel study, nevermind that you are conditioning success on Uncle Sam handing over money to make it work). The force with which state something as plainly obvious only appears as such inside the spreadsheets, so enjoy them.

> …conditioning success on Uncle Sam handing over money to make it work). …

Are you referring to:

> …basically a complete success with sufficient NGO support that vastly boosts social participation. …

? …because NGO is Non-Government Organisation. I may have missed the bit you're actually thinking of.

> now I really won’t read the Mariel study

spite driven willful ignorance is something that I didn't expect to find when starting this conversation.

I'm mostly looking for you to retract your claim about how short-run supply shocks must obviously show up in wages and employment.

EDIT: also nowhere does it require fiscal outlays for assimilation, the single biggest thing is expedited provision of work permits, which is obviously fiscally positive.

>I'm mostly looking for you to retract your claim about how short-run supply shocks must obviously show up in wages and employment.

No.