Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Growth in Population, Immigration, and Migration

Just some ramblings of mine after looking at numbers. I do know Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania voter politics are changing. They are slowly becoming Democratic. People migrating to other states appear to be more liberal than the ones living there already. AZ is a purple state. That is the longer term outlook. It looks like […]

Seasonal Migrant Surge At the Southern Border

In the practice of Law, there is terminology used to establish whether a person or Company (also a person) is following a pattern or practice of doing something. Typically, the terminology is used in discrimination suits to determine or describe whether a defendant has a policy of doing so, even if the policy of doing […]

Not With a Bang, but a Whimper… Democratic Party Edition. An Op Ed.

A presidential candidate like Donald Trump should not be viable. Candidates he supports should not be viable. The existence of Donald Trump should be a boon for the Democrats. And, in fact, it has been. But it hasn’t been enough. Perhaps four (or eight?) years worth of results will tip the balance for Democrats, but […]

George Borjas on the New Immigration Meme

George Borjas, perhaps the US’ pre-eminent immigration economist notes: Maybe it’s just me because I instinctively read in between the lines whenever I read anything about immigration, but I’m beginning to detect such a seismic shift in the immigration debate. We all know the party line by now: Immigrants do jobs that natives don’t want […]

The Murder Rate – A Regression with Many Variables

In this post, I want to look at the murder rate, by state. I ran a regression with the state murder rate for 2015 as the dependent variable, and literally threw the kitchen sink at it: demographics, weaponry, income, education, population density, etc. Basically, if its something some reasonable percentage of the population believes matters, […]

Education and Externalities

Some years ago I read this NBER working paper. (Note – a couple years later a slightly modified version appeared in the American Economic Journal but I will quote from the earlier, non-paywalled version since it is available to everyone.) Here’s the issue, in a nutshell: In this paper, we use administrative data from the […]

Net Migration and Economic Growth Around the World – 1958 to the Present

In my last post, I used World Bank data to look at the effect of net migration on economic growth. Net migration is defined by the World Bank as the number of immigrants (coming into a country) less the number of emigrants (leaving the country). I showed that net migration as a share of the […]