steve hsu@hsu_steve
YAWN 🥱🙄🤥
Topics such as free trade and mass (low-skill) immigration are too complex and important to be left to social scientists.
Anyone who aspires to epistemic rigor should study the record of "experts" on these issues, over timescales of decades.
From the FT:
ft.com/content/1b934a…
Economists generally assume that a decline in available workers will mean stagnation and contraction and make the case for high levels of immigration on those grounds. Acemoglu and colleagues found the opposite: “In contrast to the prevailing wisdom, we find that lower birth rates so far have led to higher growth in GDP per worker across countries and higher wage growth across local labour markets in the US.”
Their explanation? “The endogenous, labour-saving response of technology to the scarcity of younger workers.” Simply put, less available labour led to technological innovation and investment, leaving the economy intact and, by boosting productivity and wages, improving outcomes for workers.