DISQUS

bjkad · 2 years ago

Facts? I see no facts. Only moral posturing. But I'll be glad to introduce facts. For instance, employers shift the cost of alien workers to taxpayers, who usually have no idea who they're subsidizing. Many of these jobs Americans won't do are jobs that can't be done profitably in the U.S. *at any wage.* Textiles, for instance. U.S. or alien workers at $0 in the U.S. still cannot compete with Cambodians, without tariffs and subsidies. Even Mexicans can't compete with Cambodians. Illegal alien labor is just another subsidy for businesses that would have closed down long ago. It might be a different story if the employer was obligated to cover every cost of the employee to the taxpayer. Then you would see immigration restricted to skilled workers. But then that wouldn't be humanitarian migration, it would be the wealthy getting wealthier, which is not what Will is talking about.

mk · 2 years ago

Suppose a majority of American public opinion is not on your side. Do you believe this is one of those issues (like e.g., slavery, or Jim Crow) where the government's first obligation is to ensure voluntary exchange, above the wishes of the electorate?

mk · 2 years ago

Also...

The ultimate reason to endorse liberal principles is that adherence to them produces conditions under which human beings are most likely to thrive (according to the broadest variety of different conceptions of thriving).

This is a crucial, under-argued point that requires clarification. For example:

1) Are some people's conceptions of "thriving" supposed to be dismissed out-of-hand in this moral calculus? What are the rules for dismissing someone's conception of thriving?
2) If 5 people have 5 different "conceptions of thriving", yielding 5 different preference-orderings on e.g. immigration policies, how do we decide whether "liberalism" or "statism" or "communism" or "authoritarianism" best satisfies these conceptions in the aggregate? What is the method of aggregating? Is this a weighted average of 5 different cardinal utility functions? Is it a minimax criterion?

I'm sure you'd agree that there is a lot to unpack in your statement.

If you want to be consequentialist about your liberalism, why not abandon liberalism and become a full consequentalist: evaluate each public-policy question on a case-by-case basis, looking at preference functions and attempting the best synthesis of everyone's preferences? You seem to believe that such "nuts and bolts" work can be short-circuited in general, on consequentialist grounds. That's an extraordinarily interesting claim.

bjkad · 2 years ago

Actually, as I think about it, most alien labor is probably unproductive makework. The most efficient division of labor would be a) bring in high skill talent to the U.S. and b) ship low skill labor (agriculture, primarily) overseas. Like any sort of unproductive subsidy, subsidizing makework in the U.S. ultimately doesn't benefit anyone.

Will Wilkinson · 2 years ago

MK, First, I do think we have a pre-instutional right to exchange, so, yes, I think it is an obligation to secure that right even if it is democratically opposed. Second, I think American sentiment toward immigration and open labor markets is actually rather positive. In the current debate, restrictionists are simply most salient; they aren't the necessarily the majority. Additionally, one important function of public arguments in democracies is to change public sentiment.

Also...

Yes, there is a lot to unpack. Short answer: I'm a pluralist about consequences, so there's no aggregation. I think there is a pretty broad overlap in various American conceptions of well-being, and I'm aiming for the overlap. Disagreements are obviously most salient, but data on health, the development of capacities, life-satisfaction, and other quality of life metrics are deeply persuasive to huge swathes of the population. There are, of course, elements of every conception that get left out of the overlap. For instance, I have very strong views about autonomy that are not widely shared in other conceptions of well-being. Some conservatives have strong views about the centrality to well-being of cultural stasis and "thick" identities, which are by their nature threatened by the sense of contingency bred by markets and cultural diversity. This is also outside the overlap. I think a lot of public argument is argument over what we're going to count as good or bad public reasons. We've stopped counting certain kinds of racist, sexist, and homophobic arguments as providing public reasons in quite a short period of time. That's probably partly why Reihan, Larison, etc., got so testy from what they wrongly took to be an intimation of racism: if you're guilty of racism, you're outside the pale. I would in fact like certain kinds of "national identity" considerations to be considered more like racism than they currently are. I think they know or sense that some of their main political themes are screwed if they are. So we fight elliptically about what does count as a good reason in a public argument, since there is no definitive objective metric by which to gain agreement on policy. A bit of tangent there....

Will Wilkinson · 2 years ago

bjkad: "most alien labor is probably unproductive makework." Wow. Bzzt! You're disqualified! American employers are clamoring for alien labor because unproductive make-work somehow enriches them? The largely migrant-built ten story condo building (real bricks and everything) going up next to my office sure LOOKS like it will be nice to live in.

bjkad · 2 years ago

Taxpayers at the bottom are net consumers of government services, and you have to figure those costs in. The Fairfax county budget this year will be $3.3 billion in a county with 1 million people, at a rate of $3,300 per person. Does anyone think that construction workers in Fairfax county pay $3,300 in local taxes? Or that each consumes less than $3,300 in services? There is no such thing as cheap labor. Once you figure those costs in, even aliens in industries protected from foreign competition are probably uneconomic.

Daniel Larison · 2 years ago

"That’s probably partly why Reihan, Larison, etc., got so testy from what they wrongly took to be an intimation of racism: if you’re guilty of racism, you’re outside the pale."

I can't speak for Reihan, but in my case I objected to it as strongly as I did because it seemed to give the impression of that kind of accusation. Even though I accept now that it wasn't such an accusation, at least not directly, I objected to it because I thought it was false and because it seemed to be designed to shut down argument rather than illuminate anything. However, if you believe that "certain kinds" of national identity considerations should be regarded as being more like racism, that suggests that you think those who have these considerations are rather more like racists than most people would take them to be, which would seem to make the harping on about Ross' nationalism to be less of a description and more of an anathema. It seems to me that it can't be terribly good for the "theme" of liberty to tie it to transnationalism and enrichment of corporations, but that's just me.

mk · 2 years ago

Will, Thanks for the response. I'm still trying to pin down this statement:

The ultimate reason to endorse liberal principles is that adherence to them produces conditions under which human beings are most likely to thrive (according to the broadest variety of different conceptions of thriving).

Ideally it would be nice to give this an explicit logical structure, with quantifications, etc. But if I read your response correctly, there may be no such translation of your statement. The best I could do would be something like:

There is a broad swath (95+ %) of the population that agrees that a broad swath of things are to be valued. My valuing function (let's say ordinal rather than cardinal) is incommensurable with yours. It is not analytically true that liberalism is Pareto-optimal-- in fact, it's probably just not true at all, since some people don't like liberalism. However, if you restrict attention to the overlapping values of the agreeing 95+%, you end up with a multidimensional space: there are a bunch of axes, one for each value, and there is a mapping from world-states to points in the multidimensional value space. Since the different axes/values are incommensurable, Pareto is the only acceptable ordering of points in the multi-dim space. Now, you are saying that within this space, liberalism is pretty much Pareto optimal.

Well, already I have a question. If Pareto is our only guide here, how can you make a unique claim about liberalism? Aren't there many, many incommensurable Pareto-optimal points? Presumably not all of these are liberalism?

I'm certainly inferring things here you haven't precisely said. If I've said something you wouldn't say, please let me know.