On Thu, Mar 11, 2004 at 07:23:00PM -0800, Gautam Mukunda wrote: > It's plausible. It _may_ even be true. The other big difference > between the European and American economies, though, is mass > immigration - particularly mass unskilled immigration. That drives > the wages for low-skilled workers in the US down, and creates a > pool of poor in the US who have no equivalent in Europe, increasing > inequality in two ways. It's at least possible that the US could > maintain higher economic growth than Europe _and_ equivalent > differences in income without that factor. Or it might not - but > certainly a large part of that difference is because of that.
Gregg Easterbrook, right? http://www.economist.com/world/na/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2501977 "Waiting for the job recovery might be a good time to take a broader measure of the material well-being of Americans. Their condition is widely held to be perilous. The economy, it is said, is being .hollowed out. by international competition and the connivance of business and political elites, creating .two Americas., one rich, one poor. Median income of American households, commentators often say, has been stagnant, though census figures give a rise of one-fifth since 1980. Lou Dobbs, on CNN's .Lou Dobbs Tonight., is just one media fabulist who makes his living by claiming that, as America is being .exported., so the well-being of middle Americans is in a parlous state. It is a good story, but false on many levels. For a start, this slow growth in median income overlaps with a scale of immigration into America outpacing all immigration in the rest of the world put together. Many immigrants have come precisely to take up the lowest-paid jobs. As a result, in the 20 years to 1999 some 5m immigrant households were added to those defined as below the poverty level. Yet among native-born Americans, poverty rates have declined steadily since the 1960s. In the case of black families, median incomes have recently been rising at twice the pace for the country as a whole. Strip out immigrants, and the picture of stagnant median incomes vanishes. Indeed, for the nine-tenths of the population that is native-born, middle-income trends continue their improvement of the 1950s and 1960s. For these people, inequality is not rising, but falling. Gregg Easterbrook cheekily points out in his excellent recent book, .The Progress Paradox. (Random House), that if left-leaning Americans seriously want better statistics about middle-income gains, then they should simply close their borders." -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
