Another Reason America Should Welcome Immigrants

Tyler Cowen writes an excellent article explaining why immigrants help create more jobs.

The study notes that when companies move production offshore, they pull away not only low-wage jobs but also many related jobs, which can include high-skilled managers, tech repairmen and others. But hiring immigrants even for low-wage jobs helps keep many kinds of jobs in the United States, the authors say. In fact, when immigration is rising as a share of employment in an economic sector, offshoring tends to be falling, and vice versa, the study found.

In other words, immigrants may be competing more with offshored workers than with other laborers in America.

American economic sectors with much exposure to immigration fared better in employment growth than more insulated sectors, even for low-skilled labor, the authors found. It’s hard to prove cause and effect in these studies, or to measure all relevant variables precisely, but at the very least, the evidence in this study doesn’t offer much support for the popular bias against immigration, and globalization more generally.

We see the job-creating benefits of trade and immigration every day, even if we don’t always recognize them. As other papers by Professor Peri have shown, low-skilled immigrants usually fill gaps in American labor markets and generally enhance domestic business prospects rather than destroy jobs; this occurs because of an important phenomenon, the presence of what are known as “complementary” workers, namely those who add value to the work of others. An immigrant will often take a job as a construction worker, a drywall installer or a taxi driver, for example, while a native-born worker may end up being promoted to supervisor. And as immigrants succeed here, they help the United States develop strong business and social networks with the rest of the world, making it easier for us to do business with India, Brazil and most other countries, again creating more jobs.

Cordarounds: Life is Better Horizontal!

As the former Corporate Philosopher for Cordarounds, I'm excited to see such success come for the masters of the "crotch heat index," Chris and Enrique.  Great article in the New York Times:

To understand the thinking behind Chris Lindland’s company, Betabrand, you need to keep three seemingly disparate ideas in your head at the same time: 1) It’s a challenge for Web-only businesses to sell clothing. 2) Most people want to be witty. 3) Some shoppers go crazy for limited-edition goods. (Think Beanie Babies.) 


Betabrand employs No. 2 (our desire to be funny — or at least original), to trump No. 1 (our reluctance to buy something we can’t examine up close). Then the company seals the deal by exploiting No. 3. (Because its products are made only in batches of a few hundred, you’ll miss them if you don’t hurry.)
“We could never afford to make product in volume, so we adopted kind of like a Beanie Baby approach: we’d create small collections that supremely rabid buyers would end up buying,” Mr. Lindland said, noting that some customers own more than 20 pairs of his signature pants. “They’re a collectors’ item, oddly enough.”

Spreading Ideas

A great post from Seth Godin on the reasons why we spread ideas.

I spread your idea because...

1. I spread your idea because it makes me feel generous.
2. ...because I feel smart alerting others to what I discovered.
3. ...because I care about the outcome and want you (the creator of the idea) to succeed.
4. ...because I have no choice. Every time I use your product, I spread the idea (Hotmail, iPad, a tattoo).
5. ...because there's a financial benefit directly to me (Amazon affiliates, mlm).
6. ...because it's funny and laughing alone is no fun.
7. ...because I'm lonely and sharing an idea solves that problem, at least for a while.
8. ...because I'm angry and I want to enlist others in my outrage (or in shutting you down).
9. ...because both my friend and I will benefit if I share the idea (Groupon).
10. ...because you asked me to, and it's hard to say no to you.
11. ...because I can use the idea to introduce people to one another, and making a match is both fun in the short run and community-building.
12. ...because your service works better if all my friends use it (email, Facebook).
13. ...because if everyone knew this idea, I'd be happier.
14. ...because your idea says something that I have trouble saying directly (AA, a blog post, a book).
15. ...because I care about someone and this idea will make them happier or healthier.
16. ...because it's fun to make another teen snicker about prurient stuff we're not supposed to see.
17. ...because the tribe needs to know about this if we're going to avoid an external threat.
18. ...because the tribe needs to know about this if we're going to maintain internal order.
19. ...because it's my job.
20. I spread your idea because I'm in awe of your art and the only way I can repay you is to share that art with others.

What a Life!

Richard T. Gill, in all statistical probability the only Harvard economist to sing 86 performances with the Metropolitan Opera.  At 16 he entered Harvard, where he sang in the glee club, interrupting his studies for Army service with the postwar occupation forces in Japan. He pursued graduated studies at Oxford and returned to Harvard as an Assistant Dean at age 21.  Before beginning his operatic career, Mr. Gill had published short fiction in The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly. In later years he was the host of “Economics USA,” a 28-part public television series first broadcast in 1984 and 1985.

Scale of the Universe

Adam Smith: Pro-Tax

"The rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion."

Adam Gopnik's recent article in The New Yorker demonstrates that Smith, the father of capitalism, was far more concerned with the ability of producers to band together and promote unfair prices for consumers than he was about government interference in the market.  Indeed, he welcomed government interference insofar as it necessary to promote competition and protect consumers from wealthy businesses.

The interest of manufacturers and merchants "in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public.  To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers... and can serve only to enable the dealers, by raising their profits, above what they naturally would be, to levy, or their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow-citizens."

Aircraft crashes after crocodile on board escapes and sparks panic

 

A small airliner crashed into a house in the Democratic Republic of Congo, killing a British pilot and 19 others after a crocodile smuggled into the aircraft in a sports bag escaped and started a panic.

Read more details at the Telegraph.

 

 

Shipping Costs: Demand matters more than distance

A great new post from Ethan Zuckerman on shipping costs and routes around the world.

Americans buy a lot of atoms from China. The Chinese don’t buy nearly as many from the US. A 40′ container filled with household goods, shipped from Shanghai to Houston, TX costs $6169.93. Reverse the trip and ship the same container from Houston to Shanghai and the cost is $3631.07. That’s because 60% of containers on ships coming from the US to China are empty, which means Maersk and other shippers are desperate to sell container space.


(The 2006 New York Times article that offers that 60% empty container statistic suggests that lots of full containers are coming to China from raw-materials rich countries like Australia, Brazil and the Middle East. That suggests we should see the opposite pattern – expensive containers from Sao Paolo to Shanghai and cheap ones in the other direction. Nope. $5101.70 from Shanghai to Sao Paolo, $1930.59 in the other direction. Perhaps containers from China to Brazil are riding the same ships as those to the US and paying the same premiums?)

How much water goes into a morning latte?

Is Sitting the New Smoking?

"Sitters of the world, unite. It is time to rise up now."

"But when we sit, researchers say, important biological processes take a nap. An enzyme that vacuums dangerous fat out of the bloodstream only works properly when a body is upright. Standing also seems to ward off deadly heart disease, burn calories, increase how well insulin lowers glucose and produce the good brand of cholesterol. Most of these processes occur - or don't - regardless of whether someone exercises. Human beings need to stand."

"Hedge, the Cornell professor, isn't a fan of all this standing. "Making people stand all day is dumb," he said. "Standing increases torso muscle activity and spinal disc pressure, increases the risk of varicose veins, increases the risk of carotid artery disease and increases the load on the heart." 

More of this Washington Post article here.

Adjustable desk for sitting or standing:  GeekDesk

War

As the great economist Adam Smith put it, Ch.3, Of Public Debts, “Were the expense of war to be defrayed always by revenue raised within the year … wars would in general be more speedily concluded, and less wantonly undertaken.”

Dream City

Zadie's Smith's article, Speaking in Tongues, about the many voices of Barack Obama is engaging and thought provoking.  A few snippets:

"Dream City is a place of many voices, where the unified singular self is an illusion. Naturally, Obama was born there. So was I. When your personal multiplicity is printed on your face, in an almost too obviously thematic manner, in your DNA, in your hair and in the neither this nor that beige of your skin—well, anyone can see you come from Dream City. In Dream City everything is doubled, everything is various. You have no choice but to cross borders and speak in tongues. That’s how you get from your mother to your father, from talking to one set of folks who think you’re not black enough to another who figure you insufficiently white. It’s the kind of town where the wise man says “I” cautiously, because “I” feels like too straight and singular a phoneme to represent the true multiplicity of his experience. Instead, citizens of Dream City prefer to use the collective pronoun “we.”

Throughout his campaign Obama was careful always to say we. He was noticeably wary of “I.” By speaking so, he wasn’t simply avoiding a singularity he didn’t feel, he was also drawing us in with him. He had the audacity to suggest that, even if you can’t see it stamped on their faces, most people come from Dream City, too. Most of us have complicated back stories, messy histories, multiple narratives.

It was a high-wire strategy, for Obama, this invocation of our collective human messiness. His enemies latched on to its imprecision, emphasizing the exotic, un-American nature of Dream City, this ill-defined place where you could be from Hawaii and Kenya, Kansas and Indonesia all at the same time, where you could jive talk like a street hustler and orate like a senator. What kind of a crazy place is that? But they underestimated how many people come from Dream City, how many Americans, in their daily lives, conjure contrasting voices and seek a synthesis between disparate things. Turns out, Dream City wasn’t so strange to them.

George Bernard Shaw said, "Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it.” But that may be an audacious hope too far. We’ll see if Obama’s lifelong vocal flexibility will enable him to say proudly with one voice “I love my country” while saying with another voice “It is a country, like other countries.”

"How can the man who passes between culturally black and white voices with such flexibility, with such ease, be an honest man? How will the man from Dream City keep it real? Why won’t he speak with a clear and unified voice? These were genuine questions for people born in real cities at a time when those cities were implacably divided, when the black movement had to yell with a clear and unified voice, or risk not being heard at all. And then he won."

"For reasons that are obscure to me, those qualities we cherish in our artists we condemn in our politicians. In our artists we look for the many-colored voice, the multiple sensibility. The apogee of this is, of course, Shakespeare: even more than for his wordplay we cherish him for his lack of allegiance. Our Shakespeare sees always both sides of a thing, he is black and white, male and female—he is everyman."

"Shakespeare’s art, the very medium of it, allowed him to do what civic officers and politicians can’t seem to: speak simultaneous truths. (Is it not, for example, experientially true that one can both believe and not believe in God?) In his plays he is woman, man, black, white, believer, heretic, Catholic, Protestant, Jew, Muslim. He grew up in an atmosphere of equivocation, but he lived in freedom. And he offers us freedom: to pin him down to a single identity would be an obvious diminishment, both for Shakespeare and for us."

Alms Dealers

Philip Gourevitch's recent New Yorker piece on how humanitarian aid contributes to conflict throughout the world was eye-opening.  He refers mostly to the strong arguments of Linda Polman, a Dutch journalist, who wrote the new book, The Crisis Caravan:  What's Wrong with Humanitarian Aid, after spending 15 years researching the ill effects that humanitarian aid has on people, as it has a strong tendency to increase and lengthen conflict, arguably causing more harm to civilians than help.

As David Kennedy writes in The Dark Side of Virtue, "Humanitarianism tempts us to hubris, to an idolatry about our intentions and routines, to the conviction that we know more than we do about what justice can be."

The Social Network

The best commentary I've read about Facebook, Harvard, and that new movie that focuses more on the rules of narrative fiction than on trying to get the story right.

"We are told that people liked Facebook because it took "the entire experience of college," especially the exclusive final clubs, and transferred it online. This is a bit like saying books caught on because they put the whole experience of talking onto paper. What Facebook really gave us, for better or worse, was a new social and intellectual culture that we could claim, finally, as our own. During its early rise, the site allowed the social flavor of the Ivy League to include more than just playing dress-up and pretend. (We now played those games online, as our own.) These days, it's helped open a large, uncharted territory for a generation whose world first seemed, in many ways, competitively tighter and more predetermined than ever. There is the story of a kind of revolution here. It's just a shame The Social Network tells it in the style of the old regime."
- Nathan Heller, "You Can't Handle the VERITAS", Slate