Editing Borjas Rectangle Theory (section)

=== 2024 ===

{{Tweet
|image=Eric profile picture.jpg
|nameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1816900447170625826
|name=Eric Weinstein
|usernameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein
|username=EricRWeinstein
|content=Is immigration simply “good”? Why are we not more alarmed about its impact?

———-

I saw the '''Harvard Economist George Borjas''' years ago. He was about to retire.

“I love your work.” I said sadly. “Are you going to miss doing research?”

“No! Not at all.” he said unexpectedly.

“Wow!” I exclaimed. “How can that be?”

“You see,” he said in Cuban accented English, “I spent my entire life trying to make one simple point to my academic colleagues. And I must accept now, at the end, that I have simply failed. And, at just one point!”

“You mean…” I began. 

“Yes: immigration also has negative effects in addition to the positive ones…just like everything else in this world.”

There was a *long* silence. And then, at the same moment, we both started laughing. I don’t know why exactly. It was as if we both realized there was nothing else to do. The career was ending, and we both knew exactly what had happened.

———————-

Academe when it comes to immigration, economic indices, Neo-Darwinism, String Theory, Neo-classical economics, etc. is no longer an academic environment. 

This is not true for many subjects that are continuing to function: effective field theory, machine learning, algebraic geometry, etc. would be examples.

[[Morals|MORAL]]: Universities are neither fully  failed in 2024, nor successful. There is serious rot that is growing and eating away at them, but there are stillmany good researchers and scholars trapped inside, who are being driven to silence, in order to hold onto their remaining zone of scholarship and research “autonomy”. 

I was in the economics department at Harvard for a while. During that time I had many bizarre conversations about free trade, free migration, stable preferences, etc. I would point out that the field’s policy recommendations to lawmakers simply did NOT follow from the field’s methodology. It was as if the field was often going backwards from what it knew it had to conclude if it wanted to weild power in Washington, rather than forward from scholarship. 

You could go to a microeconomics seminar that had nothing to do with policy and everything would be scholarly. 

Then you would go to a seminar in Macro or Labor economics and it would be essentially a competition between professors in Cambridge MA who were desperate for influence in Washington, trying to reach conclusions that would change the lives of all Americans.

Academe isn’t dead yet…but we aren’t removing the cancer either. We are just letting it go untreated.
|timestamp=6:16 PM · Jul 26, 2024
}}


{{Tweet
|image=Eric profile picture.jpg
|nameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1856409509646024925
|name=Eric Weinstein
|usernameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein
|username=EricRWeinstein
|content=For whatever reason the campaign doesn’t reach out much. I don’t know why. But that is an observation so I don’t want to take crap for observing it. 

There are many dissident experts out here. Their phones are not ringing, and when you point this out it is treated the wrong way. “Boo hoo, everyone has a hand out.” It’s so dumb it’s funny, because these are exactly the people who have stood up for free for 30+ years. Just effing call them. They precede MAGA. 

Bottom line: there aren’t enough hardcore MAGA among the experts who know where the bodies are buried to run and fix the government. But there are dissident experts everywhere who will work even better in these positions. People who are aligned with the idea of clearing out the rot and who aren’t famously aligned with ideology. Patriots if you will.

Let me give an example. If you wanted to tackle [[Immigration|immigration]] you would hear lots of talk about '''George Borjas'''. And Norm @matloff. And Michael S Teitelbaum. And Edith Holleman. I’m not hearing any.

If you wanted to solve the problem of the CPI undercounting inflation you would be discussing the failure of Superlative Index Numbers, the [[Boskin Commission|Boskin treachery]]  and work of Bert Balk, Erwin Diewert, F. Fisher and Shell, Amartya Sen, Herb Gintis, P Malaney & me, Subramaniam Swamy, @tylercowen. 

If you were focused on the workforce for STEM you would reach out to all the critics who have been dying to fix or even discuss these problems. Richard Freeman, Ralph Gomory etc are old. But you would hear about them.  I don’t .

Look. Bottom line: MAGA doesn’t understand how administration Jobs work. If dissident experts were so hungry for jobs for personal gain they wouldn’t have been living on scraps and berries fighting this war against Washington before Trump ever came on the scene. They sacrificed their comfort for the country often scraping by. That is not the class of people asking to be made Treasury secretary on Twitter. 

The MAGA picture of expertise is wrong. Expertise didn’t fail. What failed is which experts we went with for 32 years. We just have the wrong experts everywhere. Don’t be afraid of non MAGA dissident experts. But they aren’t going to fall over themselves to beg for a position. 

The interpretation of MAGA and the campaign not reaching out is this: 

The transition team doesn’t understand the dissident expert landscape and doesn’t seem to care to either. It’s about loyalty.

I don’t know if that is true because I have never spoken to anyone in the campaign. 

If it is wrong, then just place some calls out here. But I am not hearing from anyone I know among the heterodox experts “Hey I just got a call from the incoming administration.” 

I hear those calls coming to other people. But not the quiet folk. 

Start here: Call '''Borjas''' on [[Immigration|immigration]] if you haven’t already. Call Norm Matloff. Call Harald Uhlig in general. I could go on. 

Everybody more or less knows everybody. They will help staff. And you will get great people who just aren’t very well known. One man’s opinion.
|timestamp=6:51 PM · Nov 12, 2024
}}