Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…But I can if I choose to. The question I ask myself is this. Let’s suppose that the tradeoffs are, let’s suppose is as you’ve put it. Which is that we can allow some people to come in, and those who are coming in are going to be better off, potentially at the cost of some of my own conationals being worse off. My answer is that, at the margin, this is a relatively easy question to answer. Because I say, “OK, how much weight would I have to place on somebody on the other side of the border, relative to somebody on my side of the border, for me not to let that person in?” If you do the calculation, which I have done recently, which is to say . . . Let me be clear about what I’m saying. I’m asking the question, under what kind of weighting of outsiders would it be a bad idea for me not to let some more people to come in? The answer is that I would have to put a weight of less than one-fifth of somebody on the other side of the border compared to somebody here. Then I say, look, I might understand that it’s reasonable to say, “OK, maybe I care twice as much as somebody who’s my neighbor as somebody who’s not,” but five times as much? I’m not so sure. That seems excessive. Given how restrictive and how high these barriers are at the moment, at the margin, to me it’s a relatively easy answer. Which is to say, yes, at this point, it makes sense for rich countries to take in more people from the poor countries. To put it in a somewhat, to draw an analogy between the trade regime, what has happened in terms of trade liberalization and the migration regime, the migration regime today is more or less where the trade regime was back in the 1950s. Back in the 1950s, the global gains from further liberalizing of trade relative to the income distributional costs within countries and so forth was relatively huge.* I think the migration regime is somehow back there. We need to rationalize it and liberalize it a little bit more. I’m evading the tougher question, of course, which is where would you stop? It’s easy for me to answer at this point — the regulations are too restrictive. But where would you actually stop? I would certainly stop at a point where the integrity of public institutions and the welfare systems of the advanced countries would be seriously threatened. But I don’t know where that is. I would say today Germans are a relatively cosmopolitan people on the world stage. How well will the absorption of 800,000-plus Syrians go in Germany? What is your opinion? I think they have absorbed more Turks over the 1960s and 1970s, and look at the German national team.…

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