George Borjas
2020
Thatâs beautiful. Theyâre also your labor force.
Check with your own economists Richard Freeman & George Borjas. They can explain the perverse incentives to âteachâ âstudentsâ by giving them âhands on experience.â
Just donât let them organize: it might interfere w/ their study.
âBut, until that time comes, we will not stand by to see our international studentsâ dreams extinguished by a deeply misguided order. We owe it to them to stand up and to fightâand we will.â - President Bacow (3/6)
I will also point out that you deliberately kept @BarackObamaâs own father from earning his PhD in economics by getting him sent home to Kenya on the down low. He may have been chasing white women. Which, BTW, was his perfect right as he was a student in good standing.
So maybe go easy on the sanctimony? Or give the man his degreee posthumously? Letâs face it. Itâs not about what you say it is.
Know what I mean? Here:
https://www.politico.com/story/2011/04/obamas-father-forced-out-at-harvard-053968
2022
"I've never seen anything as bad as the determination of a lot of people to say it's a recession," Krugman said. "It's above and beyond anything I've ever seen." -@paulkrugman
Would you like to talk about the Boskin Commission & the @BLS_gov pretending to move to a COLA for CPI?
Even top economists are struggling to explain perhaps "the weirdest economy" Americans have ever lived through, CNN's chief media correspondent Brian Stelter said. https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/31/media/economy-paul-krugman-reliable-sources/index.html
Would you be interested in discussing an entire field of economic experts laughing for 5-8 years at those of us who tried to warn the world about the impending danger of Mortgage Backed Securities during the âGreat Moderationâ?
Would you be interested in discussing the treatment of George Borjas by economists for pointing out that Immigration actually carries costs & redistributes wealth rather than a miracle free lunch that simply cannot do anything harmful?
Etc. Etc.
Because that is all much worse.
Youâre not being truthful about economics.
Iâm sorry. But at a purely technical level, you are just not being truthful about markets, economics and economists. I say this without an axe to grind as a huge promoter of your earlier work when you were trying to understand the đ.
2024
Is immigration simply âgoodâ? Why are we not more alarmed about its impact?
âââ-
I saw the Harvard Economist George Borjas years ago. He was about to retire.
âI love your work.â I said sadly. âAre you going to miss doing research?â
âNo! Not at all.â he said unexpectedly.
âWow!â I exclaimed. âHow can that be?â
âYou see,â he said in Cuban accented English, âI 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!â
âYou meanâŠâ I began.
âYes: immigration also has negative effects in addition to the positive onesâŠjust like everything else in this world.â
There was a *long* silence. And then, at the same moment, we both started laughing. I donât 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.
âââââââ-
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.
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 âautonomyâ.
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 fieldâs policy recommendations to lawmakers simply did NOT follow from the fieldâs 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 isnât dead yetâŠbut we arenât removing the cancer either. We are just letting it go untreated.
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