Evaluating the quality of research is laborious. Unless you re-do the whole paper yourself, how do you know the authors were not only truthful, but careful? Faced with this quandary, one of my favorite heuristics is to ask: Did the authors want to find this result? If the answer is No, I put a lot more credence into the results. In research as in the law, statements contrary to interest count more.
For example, when I learned that most economists find little effect of national education on national GDP, I was simultaneously surprised and convinced. Surprised, because I know that most economists want to find a big effect of national education on national GDP. Convinced, because if legions of smart people fail to find the result they want, the best explanation is that what they want to believe isn’t true.
Moving along… Many people debate the effect of immigration on redistribution. Libertarians (like me) want to find that immigration reduces redistribution, because we like immigration but dislike redistribution. As a result, non-libertarians sensibly discount libertarian claims that this is so. Sensible libertarians would do the same. People who agree with you are still flawed human beings, right?
So how can we approach the truth despite these impediments? Well, most of the researchers who study the effect of immigration on redistribution are, in fact, left-wing. They like immigration and redistribution, so they want to find that immigration increases redistribution.
In practice, however, they usually don’t. And it disturbs them! Here are two notable examples.
First, Alesina, Miano, and Stantcheva’s recent NBER working paper:
Support for redistribution is strongly correlated with the perceived composition of immigrants — their origin and economic contribution — rather than with the perceived share of immigrants per se. Given the very negative baseline views that respondents have of immigrants, simply making them think about immigration in a randomized manner makes them support less redistribution, including actual donations to charities. We also experimentally show respondents information about the true i) number, ii) origin, and iii) “hard work” of immigrants in their country. On its own, information on the “hard work” of immigrants generates more support for redistribution. However, if people are also prompted to think in detail about immigrants’ characteristics, then none of these favorable information treatments manages to counteract their negative priors that generate lower support for redistribution.
While Alesina et al. maintain a scholarly tone, their sympathies are pretty clear:
Anti-immigration parties have an incentive to maintain and even foster the extent of misinformation. Because information is endogenous, a vicious cycle of disinformation may arise. The more natives are misinformed, the more they become averse to immigrants and redistribution, and the more they may look for confirmation of their views in the media.
Second, Soroka, Banting, and Johnston’s chapter in Globalization and Egalitarian Redistribution (Princeton University Press and Russell Sage Foundation, 2006):
International migration does seem to matter for the size of the welfare state. Although no welfare state has actually shrunk in the face of the accelerating international movement of people, its rate of growth is smaller the more open a society is to immigration. To the extent that spending growth is inescapable, mandated by the aging of populations in industrial societies, specific parts of the welfare states—especially the parts that redistribute from rich to poor or from the old to the young—may truly have shrunk in the face of migratory pressures. Whatever the details, the typical industrial society might spend 16 or 17% more than it now does on social services had it kept its foreign-born percentage where it was in 1970.
Their sympathies, too, are also pretty clear:
What do the propositions imply? They do seem to vindicate Miller’s (1995) worries about threats to the national basis of the welfare state… The attitudinal problem is more among natives than newcomers and reflects more the apprehension of cultural threat than the fact of threat. But those apprehensions, combined with often realistic appraisals of cost and benefit, mean that the human component of globalization may represent a constraint on the expansion of welfare states that seemed fully consolidated two decades ago.
If you want to go meta, you could naturally object, “Libertarians want to believe that non-libertarian researchers support their desired conclusions. So why should I trust Bryan’s summary of the research?” Yes, it’s a problem, but it’s not insuperable. Try reading Alesina et al.’s literature review and see for yourself if I’m being unfair.
READER COMMENTS
Benjamin Cole
Feb 6 2019 at 7:34pm
I would say that both immigration and what is called “free-trade” are sacralized in American academia.
Is there even one economics department in all of US academia where serious reservations about immigration or free-trade define the department?
Warren Platts
Feb 11 2019 at 10:49am
Harvard..
sd0000
Feb 10 2019 at 2:54pm
I don’t necessarily agree with the argument. Left-leaning economists would want to find results that show that increased immigration doesn’t lead to increased redistribution as the people they’re trying to win over are the ones who are skeptical of immigration due to risk of increased redistribution.
Those that are already in favor of redistribution are likely also to be in favor of immigration, so there’s no reason to win these folks over.
MikeP
Feb 11 2019 at 3:56pm
Those that are already in favor of redistribution are likely also to be in favor of immigration…
Citation needed.
Believing 95% of immigration should be illegal rather than believing that 98% of immigration should be illegal is not “in favor of immigration.”
Weir
Feb 10 2019 at 5:01pm
What is a welfare state? A state via which elderlies redistribute money to themselves from random newborns.
So why would elderlies become less willing to redistribute money to themselves when those infants are born elsewhere?
The basic premise of the welfare state is that elderlies can spend whatever amount of money they want on themselves right now and the bill gets delivered to other people too young to vote or talk.
Running up trillions of dollars in debt and sticking younger generations with the bill is the welfare state in its essence. The welfare state exists in order to rob kids. Think of George W. Bush and the bill for prescription drugs. The recipients of his largesse didn’t point to the immigration statistics and say, “Let’s not redistribute so much free money to ourselves anymore. Let’s not burden the little babies any further with ever more expansive unfunded liabilities.”
The same goes for Medicare in general. Or for grandma’s next round-the-world cruise, since money is fungible. The whole point of the welfare state is that selfish and hard-hearted elderlies, mostly rich but with a handful of poor seniors in there too, get a free pass on their trillions of dollars of debt. Random newborns pay that bill instead.
Which is why it makes no sense to me that there might be these wealthy elderlies who suddenly feel sympathy for the younger generations when they remember the geographical origins of the young. Having spent all these trillions of dollars on themselves, they only now feel like these infants shouldn’t be born in debt, facing a lifetime of slower growth and extra tax? How does that logic work?
A callous disregard for everyone younger than yourself is the sine qua non of the welfare state. Redistributing money to yourself from babies is what the welfare state means. So why would you become less selfish when the babies you’re robbing are born elsewhere?
Niko Davor
Feb 11 2019 at 4:13pm
Caplan is misreading the research.
If researchers wanted to find examples like California where immigration pushed politics very far to the left in favor of more redistribution, they could easily find that. If researchers wanted to demonstrate that cities open to immigration have a surge in support for openly socialist politicians like AOC and ridiculous hard left, pro-redistribution policies, they could do that.
Caplan/Henderson is correct in the sense that people are more willing to pay into government charity for others perceived as like them and less for those perceived as the “other”. Immigration can undermine unity, and undermine support people’s willingness to pay into a welfare state. This absolutely does happen, it upsets and surprises left-wing researchers who wanted to discover a different outcome. Immigration can also lead to the opposite effect, which is why a state like California moved far left politically and voted for a bigger welfare state. And also why immigration heavy cities like NYC are fanatical about candidates like AOC.
Weir
Feb 11 2019 at 6:13pm
What people have paid in to Social Security is a fraction of what they’ve taken out. Which is why, in the future, what people take out is going to be much less than they’ll be made to pay in. So I wouldn’t call that unity. I’d call that the opposite of unity.
This has already happened, over and over, in lots of different countries, lots of different ways. Higher education doesn’t cost anything for one generation, and then it costs more and more for every subsequent generation. Real estate gets the free money treatment for one generation, and then for every subsequent generation it becomes ruinously expensive. One generation, united, enriches itself at the expense of everyone else. Which is only a very limited definition of unity. It excludes everyone younger than yourself. It makes every newborn your other, and your victim, and your source of cash.
Your other is whoever gets stuck with your debt. Your other is not like you in this sense: She was born after you. That’s the logic of the welfare state: “Apres moi, le deluge.”
The myth of unity is really clearly a myth. It’s not about survey questions. Look at how people in welfare states grasp and claw for their entitlements.
Boomer millionaires are not unaware of what they’re up to when they maximise their entitlements to government handouts. When they go to great lengths to arrange their finances to avoid missing out on freebies, it’s because they know exactly what they’re doing. If it’s government policy to treat real estate as a non-asset for the purposes of means-testing, then elderly millionaires will redirect as much of their wealth into real estate as they can. If it’s government policy to punish people with more than $400,000 in stocks, then that’s the sweet spot and the magic number, and elderly millionaires will reduce their stocks to a point just below $400,000, and collect their reward.
Look at what people do, not what they say. If their actions reveal that they feel no unity with the next generation of taxpayers, then there’s no unity there. This generation clearly feels that every younger generation owes them plenty.
Mark
Feb 12 2019 at 9:40am
AOC won because of educated white gentrifiers, not immigrants; she did worst in the majority-minority parts of her district: https://theintercept.com/2018/07/01/ocasio-cortez-data-suggests-that-gentrifying-neighborhoods-powered-alexandria-ocasio-cortezs-victory-over-the-democratic-establishment/
Socialists defeated Democratic incumbents in several state house elections in Pittsburgh last cycle as well, even though that city has one of the lowest immigrant populations in the US.
It’s also an open question whether the educated white gentrifiers who supported socialist candidates actually support socialism as opposed to just wanting a fighter against Trump, and socialists are the only fighters on offer.
Niko Davor
Feb 13 2019 at 4:18pm
Mark,
You present two strong, intelligent, well supported points. You can find plenty of evidence and data supporting both sides of this issue.
Caplan’s thesis in the post is that it makes a particularly strong case when a researcher who clearly emotionally wants to find one outcome finds the opposite outcome. I can see two such scenarios in the opposite direction.
CATO strongly advocates for open borders. They have argued that the state of Texas shows that large levels of hispanic immigration can stay firmly Republican. That argument doesn’t seem to hold up very well. The heavily hispanic areas of Texas went blue in 2018. The heavily white areas stayed red. And yes, the white voters in the hispanic areas often went blue as well.
Bill Kristol regretfully wrote upon seeing the November 2018 midterm outcomes, “I’ve always disliked the phrase “demography is destiny,” as it seems to minimize the capacity for deliberation and self-government, for reflection and choice. But looking at tonight’s results in detail, one has to say that today, in America, demography sure seems to be destiny.”
Fred_in_PA
Feb 12 2019 at 7:34pm
Mark;
Your post re: AOC is a real contribution. Thank you.
Also, I live in Pittsburgh, and your speculations on why American Socialist Party candidates were able to win on the Democratic ticket rings true to me. In my opinion, our local Republican office holders were a little too belligerently pro-Trump, and I suspect that hurt them.
Comments are closed.