We globally have (relatively) free movement of money, goods and services. What we don't have globally is (relatively) free movement of people (for work).
I do believe, that if the world were to add free movement of people to the first lot, within a generation you'd get normalisation of incomes and lots more besides (laws relating to workplace rights, OHS, environmnental etc).
Of course that pain that would be suffered in that generation would be pretty huge as entire populations started moving. It's a pretty big perturbation to settle into a new stable state.
Idealistically yes.
But you should focus on financial inequality first(for example with global remote work accepted as the norm).
If all of a poor third world country move to a first world country overnight this is just the same poor country on another continent.
I'm 100% for immigration, but realistically if you just allow everyone to move overnight, it's just going to make a big mess unless we first focus on financial inequality.
And it's not a simple issue. Free movement works well for people who are comfortably off, but tends to trash the economies of those left behind. I don't think FoM is a full solution.
The end state is the end of nation states, and especially competitive nation state economies. Not only would this create a multi-trillion dollar peace dividend which could be spent on original R&D and social investment of all kinds, it would also create a massive wealth equalisation, end many of the more obvious and pointless kinds of wealth speculation, and create a global wealth boom, as location became much less important than talent and imagination.
Free movement will drive down wages and labor costs. Labor will lose value while capital will increase in value.
Combine this dynamic with our current world in which the gulf between a small elite class and everyone else is widening with the middle class in between deteriorating, and you have a recipe for disaster. The modern welfare state that exists in Europe and to a (much) lesser extent in the US would crumble from the stress of millions of new individuals flooding the economy at the low end and being stuck there because of economic dynamics beyond anyone's control.
Rather than importing the impoverished from poor nations to rich nations, we should be working together as a community of nations to establish law and order where there is lawlessness. Once law, order and in particular property rights are followed and enforced, wealth can and will grow as it has in places like China and Vietnam.
Encouraging freedom of movement will result in poor regions becoming even more destitute. As one of my wealthy friends from Pakistan lamented to me once when considering whether she should move to Canada or stay in Pakistan, "if people like myself flee Pakistan, who will stay to build it into a strong and prosperous nation?"
Overall, free movement would be a terrible idea for most people. This article does a really poor job of considering the issue.
Agreed, if anything more migration opportunities would be much better for those who are poor. A semi-recent article put the value of free movement globally at an additional $78 Trillion for the global economy
World of free movement, would make anybody remotly compent move to one of the huge cities, while the rest of the world would either empty out, or fail horribly with people left over, who are unable to leave.
I lived in a country where the biggest export was the (young, competent) workforce.... I still live here, but the country doesn't exist anymore.
One of the most positive political changes we could hope to see in the 21st century would be more free movement of people across borders. Not just for tourism. For work.
We're all better off if people can legitimately move to where their labor productivity is higher. The numbers are fairly clear on this. I've seen estimates that you could double global GDP just by letting people migrate to where there's more productive capital available.
Climate change makes this even more important. Mass migration is almost certainly going to happen -- we can let it happen in an orderly way, or we can let it be chaotic.
A world of free movement would be poorer as mass immigration would overwhelm developed societies, increase conflict and eventually lead to even more protectionism than existed before (Brexit).
Rule of law and institutions in developed countries will suffer and mass migration would also destroy the economies of the migrant exporting societies (Puerto Rico).
I think you make excellent points. I think where we'd probably disagree is in how quickly (or easily) we'd reach some sort of equillibrium state.
You are absolutely right that countries which enjoy greater public benefits would likely enjoy a greater influx of people. But I disagree that that's necessarily a bad thing. I'm a firm believer that there is no such thing as a free lunch. And if residents of Iceland make it so appealing to just live there without contributing to society, then I don't see how it is a (globally-speaking) bad thing to have migration make it so that enough people decide to move there to make it less feasible.
Let's not forget: The people supposedly moving into those economies would likely be fleeing oppressive regimes with very little economic opportunities. And, with free movement, it would become much harder to give away freebies, AS it would become much harder to become an oppressive government. Stories like Venezuela would be more hard to come by if people could simply leave the country more easily.
Just take familiar HN-turf: Software development. What do you think would happen if all Indian developers (many of whom are actually really, really talented), could just as easily apply for jobs in the US? Undoubtedly worse for US-based developers, right? And maybe there is some sense that such a massive disrpution should be avoided, at least "suddenly" as you say.
But now you multiply this across every industry, with all of their individual justifications, and what you end up with is with an ossified global society. We end up trying each to protect our pie (from crop subsidies on out), all perfectly justifiable. But, as a global community, we make it worse for all of us.
Just this week Elon tried to inspire us about the idea of an interplanetary species. It just seems inconsistent to me for us to dream about being a people who can travel freely to the stars, but that we need to ask permissions of random strangers to visit family members, to employ our talent productively far from where we were born, etc.
I think you raise really valid points. But in my eyes, those are issues to be dealt with in the pursuit of this ideal, not justifications on why it should not be pursued/is not feasible.
A world of free movement will not have a single welfare state.
Even after decades, and generations, immigrants from certain regions have absolutely abysmal rates of employment in more developed countries they have settled in. How would an even larger scale of immigration flip the trend we can already witness, a complete 180 degrees? Many seem completely content on living on benefits alone, or fully unable to find employment with the skill set they have gathered, even when they have born in the country where the natives fare much better. The way I see it, the money that is being spent on these people could be spent with a far better interest elsewhere.
78 trillion, truly, is a fantasy pulled from a behind.
If people could migrate freely around the world to seek work, economists crudely estimate that world GDP would roughly double, and that most of this enormous windfall would go to the poorest people on Earth. There is literally a hundred trillion dollar bill on the sidewalk for bringing together third-world labor and first-world legal systems, capital, and service demand.
Instead the first world does its best to wall itself off from economic migrants, because the right fears that migration will threaten their culture and the left fears that migration will threaten the welfare state.
As with any prohibition, the economic opportunity gets colonized by criminals. People seeking a better life will be taken advantage of and some of them will even wind up worse off than they started. But the root problem isn't the criminals, and it isn't customers who want cheap electronics. It's the prohibition of migration.
Haven't read the article yet. Will soon. But it occurred to me years ago that people should be the "currency of nations". If people were able to freely and easily move between countries -- and countries should generally want this b/c people are their greatest asset -- then the quality of life ought to rise rather rapidly as countries compete for citizens.
Of course the problem is our current systems rather suck. They don't have any idea what to do with people. For the most part they are just wasted assets, and new people are often thought of as "drains on the system" instead. If that's truly the problem then it's the system that is broken, not the people.
Not on a 1-for-1 basis, but something like this is the argument for allowing free movement between comparable countries. If the UK, Canada & Australia opened up to each other, there'd be no massive net flow, but many individuals could work for the most suitable company / near their in-laws / in a climate they like.
This was I think also what was envisaged when the EU first wrote free movement into law -- general mixing, rather than one-directional floods.
That should be expected after having decades of free movement of capital, free movement of goods, but restricted movement of people. That maintains labour arbitrage which leads to wealthy countries becoming wealthier
Wealthy countries would immediately be flooded with all the world’s problems if anyone was allowed to migrate. Since wealthy people draw the world’s borders, they aren’t going away. Global equality would be a terrible thing for most people in NA or Europe.
There would be little reason to migrate if those European nations didn't exploit corruption and poor labour/environmental standards in other countries. Allowing free movement of goods and services without free movement of people entrenches inequality and makes the problem worse. Time to look at whether global capitalism is culturally "good", rather than shifting the blame to desperate people seeking safety or a better life for their family.
An outcome of free movement is flattening of income distribution across geography. Nowhere stays cheap, as wage inflation hits, and nowhere stays expensive, as employers move to cheaper places.
Sure, cities will be wealthier than the regions, but ultimately a city in Romania and a city in sweden, infrastructure and education being also equalised through structural funds, should present equal opportunities.
I do believe, that if the world were to add free movement of people to the first lot, within a generation you'd get normalisation of incomes and lots more besides (laws relating to workplace rights, OHS, environmnental etc).
Of course that pain that would be suffered in that generation would be pretty huge as entire populations started moving. It's a pretty big perturbation to settle into a new stable state.
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