Logographer

Here are a few things that have caught my attention and entertained me on the web recently.

• The funniest thing I’ve read in the last few days has to be Prof. Richard Nokes’s commentary on a 1200-year-old Viking turd. No, really!
• Continuing the story of the impending closure of Antioch College, which I mentioned a few days ago, two posts caught my attention: One on the lessons for college philanthropy from the Antioch debacle (are there any, really?), and another from Inside Higher Ed, which is itself interesting because of all of the comments attached to it.
• In the cold, icy realm of economics, that dismal science, Prof. George Borjas looks at the flip-side of immigration’s contribution to US GDP and attempts to calculate the impact of immigration on US wages.
• Prof. Mark Grimsley of Ohio State asks whether there’s any support for the claim that military history is a discipline strictly for conservatives.

There you have it. Scatological history, immigration, war, politics, and academic gossip all in one fell swoop.

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To illustrate the effects of an immigrant points system, George Borjas took Canada’s self-assessment for skilled workers and came up short one point of the required 67 needed to immigrate. I scored 71 on the test myself, so I guess I can move if I want to.

My scores: Education 20 out of 25; language ability 17 of 24; work experience 21 of 21; age 8 of 10; arranged employment 0 of 10; adaptability 5 of 10.

Why does a Harvard professor fail to pass Canada’s immigration test where I succeed? The main difference seems to come from our ages. Borjas made no points in that category; I scored eight. If I would only finish my MA thesis, I could receive the same number of points for education as Borjas did. That’s almost hard to believe.

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As the saying goes, so much to learn, so little time. One of many topics that I know very little about is economic theory. Few of my friends have a grasp of it either, although I suspect many of us, at times, think we have a handle on it.

To the rescue come Harvard professors Dani Rodrik and George Borjas, debating the economics (and the politics) of recently proposed US immigration reform, and specifically a guest worker program. Although Borjas and Rodrik hold different opinions on the benefits — social, moral, and economic — of the proposed reforms, Rodrik offers this common ground:

Interestingly, the difference of views has nothing to do with the economics of immigration, on which I think we all agree. Expanded immigration is likely to exert downward pressure on workers’ wages in the U.S. Where we disagree is on whether the gains to the rest of the world make this still a worthwhile effort (in the context, of course, of efforts to cushion the adverse effects on U.S.).

I’ll be keeping an eye on these two blogs, trying to gain some insight into the economic arguments for and against the latest proposed immigration reforms, the merits of which I am extremely skeptical, yet eager to learn.

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