Borjas Rectangle Theory
At that point, I also became aware of what I have termed the Borjas Rectangle Theory: that is that employers generally, in free market economies, when theyâre complaining about labor shortages, are actually trying to transfer wealth from labor to capital, complaining instead that there is a small inefficiency that needs to be rectified, which we might call the Harberger Triangle. So that is, employers claim that thereâs a small inefficiency, but in fact, theyâre seeking large transfer payments from the vulnerable to the well-heeled.
- Eric Weinstein on The Portal Ep 25 ~09:37
On X
2016
We pretend @HillaryClinton that immig. is about efficiency. But work of Borjas at Harvard shows it is wealth transfer from labor to capital.
2017
Great. Let's do this then as I'm can play as an expert too: Harvard PhD. MIT/Harvard/NBER Post-Docs. Sloan Funded. NSF-Fellowship. Etc...
I'm sorry to tell you, *we* the experts have been lying to Laypeople on Trade, Immigration, STEM and Terror. The crumbling embargo was real. https://x.com/RadioFreeTom/status/941911773376139264
1/ I was in multiple closed rooms where experts told me over and over "Well of course we can never say that to the public/donors/students/patients/voters." Cambridge MA, Washington D.C., New York. And now, San Francisco too where it hit quite a few years later.
2/ Let me tell you what we've been lying about (in elite terminology) on MAJOR issues one by one: immigration, trade, STEM, mortgage backed securities and self-regulation, terror, fake news and conspiracy. [I will need to run a few errands now, but will return here later today.]
3/ IMMIGRATION: EXPERT LIES Experts lie about work based immigration as needed for free markets to remove a tiny 'Harberger Triangle' of inefficiency. It is the reverse: an uncompensated taking of citizen's rights without securitization to transfer a massive 'Borjas Rectangle'.
4/ IMMIGRATION (CONTINUED). In free markets, citizens TRADE their rights of preferential labor market access a la Coase's theorem. The giant Borjas Rectangle would stay w/ labor. Inequality could reverse. Women/minorities would enter. Income might again rise. Foreigners welcomed.
5/ IMMIGRATION (CONTINUED). Here is an expert article I wrote on the subject (peer reviewed, UN sponsored Journal): https://www.ilo.org/sites/default/files/wcmsp5/groups/public/@ed_protect/@protrav/@migrant/documents/publication/wcms_201871.pdf
Of course the expert community pretends it isn't there as they support a wealth transfer through forced takings of workers' livelihoods.
6/ TRADE: EXPERT LIES. In the theory of trade, lies are deeply layered. First there is a nonsensical emphasis on Pareto improvement (as if that was a meaningful social welfare function) & a denial of cardinal utility to stop diminishing returns arguments being applied to wealth.
7/ TRADE (continued): [ for @RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg ] Then we substitute a Kaldor-Hicks standard for Pareto welfare as if we were going to tax winners to pay losers. Which trade economists laugh about. Because what factory worker ever heard of âunimplemeted Kaldor-Hicksâ.
8/ As the grandson of a seamstress, a door2door used clothing salesman, a self educated chemist thrown out of work for his politics and a female college grad who couldnât work in a manâs world, it feels great to stand as a STEM PhD speaking the language of the academy for them.
@SamHarrisOrg @RadioFreeTom 9/TRADE (CONT.): Then thereâs the appearance of âComparative Advantageâ which was recently revealed as an iron clad Exoteric explanation trade experts give to all but each other because the real Esoteric is âtoo complexâ for the rest of us & has holes.
@RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg Nah. Itâs about institutional betrayal. Nobody resents Elon Musk or Tony Stark for wealth. The poor want experts.
And Iâm just looking to you & Sam as my fellow experts to help me try to stop those betrayed from sending a wrecking-ball through the infrastructure of our world.
@RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg Oh cool. âInstitutional Betrayalâ is an academic theory for trauma differentiation of @jjforegon. You in particular should find it interesting I think. People betrayed by institutions with mandates to care for them behave differently re trauma.
Helps to explain a lot in 2008-17.
@RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg Also, the public that is HIGH agency is looking for alternate non-institutional experts: @nntaleb @BretWeinstein @jordanbpeterson @CHSommers @SamHarrisOrg @HeatherEHeying @PiaMalaney @peterthiel @DouglasKMurray @Raheelraza @tristanharris @sparker etc....
@RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg
These are from trade theorist @paulkrugman in his âProtectionist Momentâ piece. Iâm not trying to win here. Iâm worried that you arenât watching how this neo-liberal edifice is being abandoned because the expertâs public stance was a lie.
@GodDoesnt @RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg @paulkrugman That doesnât solve it. Are the Harvard and UChicago Econ departments elite or expert? National Academy complex? Same question. NPR? CFR?
Where are the non-elite experts? They are off the institutional grid. They were disappeared. They donât exist. Yet they are my Shabbat guests.
@GodDoesnt @RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg @paulkrugman Same here. All Iâm saying is the institutional elites compromise their institutional experts. Every day, institutional experts are free to speak against their institutionâs bias. Itâs the next day when survivor bias kicks in. Now repeat across non-financially independent experts.
@fazinga They are typically educated at top universities. They are typically in non-standard employment. I frequently donât like what they are saying as it is often disturbing.
@SamHarrisOrg @RadioFreeTom 10/TRADE (CONT.) Look at the slide & listen to this talk from a former Clinton administration economist. Notice the words 'Esoteric' vs. 'Exoteric'. Claiming the real arguments are too complex to math guys like me is laughable:
11/ TRADE (CONT.) Now what happened when @PiaMalaney, a Harvard PhD Economist finally got to explain to the 'experts' why the world is rejecting experts, and in their own professional language? She's *totally* ignored by the panel.
As if nothing happened.
@SamHarrisOrg @RadioFreeTom
12/ End.
I'll pause here. But there's an entire world of Ivy-Level experts who the public suspects exist. People who have paid for their integrity with their careers. Either undisappear these good folks ... or prepare for 7 more years of Trump.
@GodDoesnt @disitinerant @RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg @paulkrugman Nah. Just more systems of selective pressures ...
@RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg @paulkrugman What are your thoughts here @RadioFreeTom? I can go into detail on a number of these. We could do the fake STEM shortage backed by the @NSF and @theNASciences if you donât believe in such things.
@RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg @paulkrugman @NSF @theNASciences Do we disagree on fundamentals over this:
@RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg @paulkrugman @NSF @theNASciences And, no I donât call something a conspiracy because I disagree w/ experts. I usually agree w/ them! What I disageee with is using expertise to transfer wealth & agency from the supposedly childlike voters who intuit something is rigged but canât name it in political 3 card Monty.
@nntaleb @RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg @BretWeinstein @jordanbpeterson @CHSommers @HeatherEHeying @PiaMalaney @peterthiel @DouglasKMurray @Raheelraza @tristanharris @sparker Hi Nassim, With 66 dyadic relationships between 12 individuals there was zero implied pairwise mutual endorsement or respect implied. Iâm certainly happy to make that explicit here for the record if that wasnât clear.
@nntaleb @RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg @BretWeinstein @jordanbpeterson @CHSommers @HeatherEHeying @PiaMalaney @peterthiel @DouglasKMurray @Raheelraza @tristanharris @sparker Will read. Thanks!
@Noahpinion So if we push out supply curves there is no first order depressing effect on price...except that maybe it rises? Man this is big. Like Nobel Big!
I mean...I did use supply and demand curves of Borjas. So...What did I get wrong? Do I need to retract:
The mistake, IMO, is in modeling immigration purely as a shift in labor supply (partial equilibrium). Since immigrants buy stuff locally, immigration also causes a rightward shift in labor *demand* (general equilibrium).
Hence my use of the term '1st-order' (partial equilibrium). A full model would go well beyond what you write including social services, chain migration, dependency ratios, negative externalities, concentrated impact, vote dilution, patent production, sending country impact, etc..
A big game in economics is often who gets to use simple models & who gets forced into adding a million baroque complexities. I agree that immigrants add to demand. Also tax social services. Also pay taxes. Also send remittances. Also found businesses. Also crowd out natives. etc.
Perhaps you were so busy reacting to the name Borjas that you missed the point of introducing Coase. Coase allows those many nth order effects to be subsumed in the choices of those impacted both positively & negatively. Hence the ability to have unlimited migration. Re-read it.
Let's not play games. The unpopular transfer from L to K by a forced taking of the rectangle without the securitization of labor's valuable asymmetric rights and workers rights to trade them stands as an issue having nothing to do with your attack on Borjas.
Your move.
Yes, the key is that immigration causes labor demand, as well as labor supply, to shift to the right.
That's going to shrink that rectangle a lot, and could even make the rectangle positive for native-born workers rather than negative.
Just to show this with an easy thought experiment, imagine a bunch of rich retirees moved here and spent down their savings. That would shift ONLY labor demand, and not labor supply, unambiguously boosting wages for native-born workers.
Now, working immigrants are not rich retirees. But you can apply the same principle. Working immigrants supply labor, but they also demand goods and services produced by labor. So both curves shift, not just one.
Also, because immigration causes shift in demand for capital goods, such as housing, in the short-run and medium run there are "accelerator" effects that temporarily boost labor demand even further. See JMP by Greg Howard: https://economics.mit.edu/files/13670
Very true, but Eric wanted to stick to the simplest possible model, and I'm obliging him! :-)
Look again at my paper and you will see something very odd from a mathematician: there are no equations. That came from reviewing this style of argument you are engaging in now. The point isn't this or that effect. It is forced transfers by capital vs voluntary trade with labor.
Remember, Eric, I'm not talking equations! I'm only talking about your graphs! đ
So put in a moving demand curve or even negative rectangles or other red herrings.
The issue is choice. Our work based immigration programs are loved by employers and generally resented by those on whom they are imposed because they involve an unpopular and unsecuritized taking.
Sure! No disagreement about that. I'm only taking issue with the idea that immigration can be modeled as a labor supply shock with no labor demand shock! We must include both.
No one is arguing that in a full model. The issue isn't about immigrants either. It is about forcible non-Coasian taking of rights through law by employers without trade or consent of labor aided by economics 'experts' portrayed falsely under the banner of free markets.
What if my company hires entry-level native-born workers? Seems like a similar situation. The only difference is citizenship.
Noah, I'm just really not sure what game you're playing. Economists add (e.g. "your model forgot this externality!") and subtract effects (e.g. "for simplicity we neglect"). None of this matters to my paper or point. None of it. My point is expert aided non-consensual transfers.
No games, Eric. Nothing complicated.
Just Econ 101.
You're not even close. In econ 101, agents are rational. Remember? If workers benefit from immigration they will support it in droves. Right?
Let me guess, we have to add baroque adjustments to rationality to explain this self-defeating rejection of mass immigration? Something?
Baroque adjustments?
Is "immigrants buy stuff" a baroque adjustment?
If so, just call me J.S. Bach!
@Noahpinion @TimBartik Oh wow! That's what I *love* about economists: a total reliance on ad hoc selective application of standards to reach desired conclusions.
This is fun. Please apply that selective standard evenly to all of Econ 101 and let's watch your *entire* field disintegrate.
I'll wait.
Ha! I'm trying Noah. But it's hard to Teleman something when his econ job depends on his not understanding it, no?
Now engage with the point. Why are the rational worker agents from Econ 101 not favoring this mass immigration that enriches them? Is this Econ 101 or Room 101?
Well, I don't have polls of rational worker agents specifically, but just today I did write a post showing several polls indicating pro-immigrant sentiment in the United States: https://bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-12-18/anti-immigration-fervor-is-different-this-time
In other words, I'm not Haydn anything. Can you Handel the data? :D
Wait, don't those swings *undermine* your Econ 101 point? The power of the Purcell getcha every time. See attached from:
https://politico.com/f/?id=0000015d-c4ac-dd39-a75d-cfbfbc3e0002
Noah, I answered all your points substantively. Nothing depended on Partial v General or demand curve modeling. It's about capture. https://t.co/poJztJTjOz
It's not about polls. It's not about Partial vs General equlibrium models. Not about Econ 101. It's about taking something valuable almost no one would give by choice by having experts defend the interests of employers with selective modeling.
A) I'm concerned not with the interests of employers, but with the national interests of the United States of America and its economic health. B) I don't rely on selective modeling, but on empirical evidence, which I believe supports my position pretty solidly!!
Noah, I answered every point. You are both for & against Econ 101 while I have no investment in it. If you want to forcibly transfer rights instead of letting workers trade them, ask yourself who you are really trying to benefit.
I'm trying to open borders too, but not as theft.
If you want to write a paper detailing my failures, it will be an honor to review it fairly. But it had ZERO dependence on any of the points you made. Including demand curves. Be well.
I will consider it. More likely a blog post. In any case, I hope you realize that the vast majority of immigration advocates in the econ profession are being intellectually honest, and not lying to anyone!
Take care, Eric!
@Noahpinion @TimBartik If you're honest, then stop w/ the red herrings on Demand Curve modeling as my point is TOTALLY agnostic to that. You write that my paper "Is a good idea that deserves much more thought!" Okay. Don't tell me. Show me a lack of capture. Put in demand curve shocks. NOTHING changes. https://t.co/n8s40niyuf
Great. Let's do this then as I'm can play as an expert too: Harvard PhD. MIT/Harvard/NBER Post-Docs. Sloan Funded. NSF-Fellowship. Etc...
I'm sorry to tell you, *we* the experts have been lying to Laypeople on Trade, Immigration, STEM and Terror. The crumbling embargo was real. https://x.com/RadioFreeTom/status/941911773376139264
In the second post on this thread you stated there is resistance by "laypeople" to "experts" because "they donât speak the language of the academy. I think we can translate." and now you're saying experts are lying because the public won't get it. Root cause analysis anyone?
@MiriamMakEnergy Sorry Miriam: The laypeople don't speak the academy's language so the academy resists the laity and disparages them. Renegade experts who are tired of the expert cartels' embargo against sharing more deep expertise with the laity can translate the laity to the cartels. Helpful?
Thanks for the clarification. Luckily we have info sharing platforms that override traditional communication mediums, despite their many flaws.
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 meanâŚâ I began.
âYes: immigration also has negative effects in addition to the positive onesâŚjust 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 yetâŚbut we arenât removing the cancer either. We are just letting it go untreated.
For whatever reason the campaign doesnât reach out much. I donât know why. But that is an observation so I donât 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. âBoo hoo, everyone has a hand out.â Itâs so dumb itâs 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 arenât 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 arenât famously aligned with ideology. Patriots if you will.
Let me give an example. If you wanted to tackle immigration you would hear lots of talk about George Borjas. And Norm @matloff. And Michael S Teitelbaum. And Edith Holleman. Iâm 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 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 donât .
Look. Bottom line: MAGA doesnât understand how administration Jobs work. If dissident experts were so hungry for jobs for personal gain they wouldnât 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 didnât fail. What failed is which experts we went with for 32 years. We just have the wrong experts everywhere. Donât be afraid of non MAGA dissident experts. But they arenât 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 doesnât understand the dissident expert landscape and doesnât seem to care to either. Itâs about loyalty.
I donât 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 âHey I just got a call from the incoming administration.â
I hear those calls coming to other people. But not the quiet folk.
Start here: Call Borjas on immigration if you havenât 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 arenât very well known. One manâs opinion.
2025
Is this what you mean by âAmerica Firstâ? Ha ha.
A Patriot would kill this evil program, assess the transfer of wealth over 35 years and pay reparations to Americaâs brilliant scientists & engineers who we systematically lured, misled, discarded and economically raped.
Pussies.
đ¨BREAKING: President Trump for ANOTHER WIN. The haters are FURIOUS!
Labor Secretary CONFIRMS that the administration is going FULL FORCE to SHUTDOWN all H-1B visa fraud and put Americanâs FIRST!
Everyone who says âAmerica needs the best and the brightest!â needs to close their mouth and open their wallets, minds and hearts in that order.
We are a market economy. We have a wage mechanism. On your next flight from Van Nuys to Teterboro: use it. Stop looking abroad.
Americans Scientists and Engineers are pains in the ass if you are looking for employees. We arenât really employee of the month types. Duh.
We are in a totally different idiom. We are badly behaved, maverick, cowboy science types. You arenât serious about the best brightest scientists and engineers if you are in the bargain aisle looking for lapdogs, yes-men, employees and indoor cats.
End the war to capture the value created by scientists and STEM workers. Let them capture their own immense value again.
They made you rich. They made you secure. Time to return the favor.
Return the Borjas Rectangle stolen by @theNASciences, GUIRR and @NSF.
The intellectual godfather of H-1B is @myles_boylan. None of you even seem to know this.
Myles, letâs continue the conversation. In public. You started this. Letâs end it.