Oog Wants Ugg to Keep Out of His Cave
Katherine Mangu-Ward | May 10, 2007, 6:19pm
For those who haven't encountered economist Paul Rubin's book Darwinian Politics: The Evolutionary Origin of Freedom, I highly recommend (1) buying it now, and (2) tiding yourself over with this nifty mashup of econ and evopsych from The Washington Post:
Our primitive ancestors lived in a world that was essentially static; there was little societal or technological change from one generation to the next. This meant that our ancestors lived in a world that was zero sum -- if a particular gain happened to one group of humans, it came at the expense of another.
This is the world our minds evolved to understand. To this day, we often see the gain of some people and assume it has come at the expense of others. Economists have argued for more than two centuries that voluntary trade, whether domestic or international, is positive sum: it benefits both parties, or else the exchange wouldn't occur. Economists have also long argued that the economics of immigration -- immigrants coming here to exchange their labor for money that they then exchange for the products of other people's labor -- is positive sum. Yet our evolutionary intuition is that, because foreign workers gain from trade and immigrant workers gain from joining the U.S. economy, native-born workers must lose.
Rubin touches on the fact that anti-immigrant sentiment is something that many people feel at a gut level. It's something more than prejudice--we've been wired that way. However, one of the important offshoots of evolutionary psychology is the insight that human beings wound up at the top of the food chain not because we have the best instincts hardwired in, but because our brains are the most flexible. As circumstances change, we adapt. We figure out new behaviors that serve us better than the ones our parents relied on. So don't despair over the immigration debate just because we're hardwired to be suspicious of The Other. To place two cliches head-to-head: Old humans can learn new tricks, even if old habits die hard.
Via Alex Tabarrok
John | May 11, 2007, 9:30am | #
So there are no social costs to illegal immigration. No one who has any reason to object. No one ever ends up indvidually being hurt by immigration. Nope. It is just all inbreed racism in our biololgy.
Are you people that stupid? Even if agree that huge numbers of immagrants are good for the country in the aggregate, only an economic illiterate would think that that means that large numbers of locals might end up individually worse off. There are good reasons why people object to immigration. Some of those reasons may be the result of pure self interest, but they are rational reasons none the less.
Back in the real world of reality, there are social costs to illegal immigration namely crime.
In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide (which total 1,200 to 1,500) target illegal aliens. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (17,000) are for illegal aliens.
confidential California Department of Justice study reported in 1995 that 60 percent of the 20,000-strong 18th Street Gang in southern California is illegal;
in 2000, for example, nearly 30 percent of federal prisoners were foreign-born.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_1_the_illegal_alien.html
In the real world people are not blind. They see this kind of thing and they object to it. Instead of answering the arguments or gasp trying to limit the problems associated with illegal immigration by controling the border and deporting the criminals who come here, elitist assholes in the media like this guy just right off any objection to racism. This is not about immigration per say. It is about illegal immigration. People would object a lot less if the U.S. actually controlled its borders but still let large numbers of legal immigrants in on the condition that they don't have a criminal history and if they commit a crime while here, they get deported. But that is not what is happening. Instead, we have no control over our borders and a lot of bad is coming with the good.
But don't think about those problems. Those are hard. All that matters is that you get your yard mowed cheap and none of that stuff happens in your neighborhood.
