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Is Migration Good For Development - Columbia
Is Migration Good For Development - Columbia
Development?
How Could You Even Ask?
Lant Pritchett
Harvard Kennedy School
Presentation at
Columbia University
Feb. 13, 2009
Is Migration Good for
Development?
• Ideas and their evolution: Marx and Foucault
• Spatial Based versus People Based thinking—
why does dirt matter in theories of justice?
• The movement of people leads to development
gains orders of magnitude larger than anything
else on the agenda
• For some places mobility may be the only
development agenda
• Ideas and their evolution: Crazy, Crazy, Crazy,
Obvious
The world that was lost in 1914
He could secure forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and
comfortable means of transit to any country or climate
without passport or other formality, could dispatch his
servant to the neighboring office of a bank for such
supply of the precious metals as might seem convenient,
and could then proceed abroad to foreign quarters,
without knowledge of their religion, language, or
customs, bearing coined wealth upon his person, and
would consider himself greatly aggrieved and much
surprised at the least interference.
JM Keynes
Second Globalization as Farce
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-
historic facts and personages appear, so to
speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as
tragedy, the second time as farce. …Men make
their own history, but they do not make it as they
please; they do not make it under self-selected
circumstances, but under circumstances existing
already, given and transmitted from the past.
The tradition of all dead generations weighs like
a nightmare on the brains of the living.
• God is dead
• All “..isms” are mortally wounded (e.g.
racism, sexism, sexualism)
• “Truth” and “Reason” have retreated into
scare quotes
And the “imagined communities” that are
“nations” are all that is left
Estimated wage gains to low skill workers of
crossing the US border—on average (from
42 countries), conservatively, P$10,000
25000
Annual eanrings (in PPP)
20000
15000 In home
10000 In USA
5000
Wages of “same” workers
0
$10,000 to $15,000 (in PPP)
By crossing the border
iti
na
ala
sia
sh
Ha
m
e
e
Gh
on
ad
te
d
a
ng
In
Gu
Ba
Place based versus People based
thinking
• A person moves from Peru to the US, his/her
income increases by $10,000.
• Suppose no one else is affected.
• Assume they make above average wages in
Peru and below average wages in the USA.
• The traditional, “national” place based measures
(e.g. GDP per capita, average wages) of
“development” go down in both places
Output per natural (or wages per
natural or poverty per natural) is the
more natural way to think
• If person
moves from 9000 Guyanese
rural to urban 8000
Jamaicans
70000 65000
60000
Welfare gains, in billions $
50000
40000
30000
20000
10000
65 109
0
Complete liberalization Complete equalizatoin Complete liberalization
labor mobility MPK of goods markets, to
developing countries
Stand the question on its head…
Not “Is Migration Good for Development?”
but, since labor mobility is so good for
proper, people based, measures of
development why is there so much talk
about things that have gains that are so
much smaller?
(Hint: It has something to do with power)
But it is worse…
• The myth of the current international
system, the world created to “win the
peace” after WWII—the “Pax Americana”
is:
– The world can be divided up spatially into
arbitrary bits
– Each of those bits can achieve an adequate
standard of living
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Contiguous regions of the USA are a
third their counter-factual size
Region of the % change Ratio of Number of Ratio of area per
United States in current countries (of 192) capita income to
(contiguous populatio population with smaller area national average
counties) n 1930- to counter (with examples)
1990 factual at
rate of
natural
increase
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60
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t)
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1963 1992
MLK assassinated Barack Obama
MLK’s March
LA riots spurred by runs for President
on
tape of Rodney of the United
Washington
King beating States
Crazy, crazy, crazy…hero