First, Eduardo Porter of the NYT wrote a controversial piece about the negative impacts of immigration (not Porter’s view–he’s reporting, not endorsing). I’ll have a lot more to say about the research in the piece, but to put it mildly, I’m unconvinced. The piece reports on research suggesting the increase in low-skill immigration has put… Read more
Archive for the ‘Immigration’ Category
House cleaning…and where’s Jared?
Sorry, OTE’ers. I’ve been remiss. Not only have I failed to post much here of late, but I haven’t been providing links to posts I’ve placed elsewhere. EG, over at PostEverything: From today, a discussion about very recent wage trends. They’ve turned up due both to tighter job markets, a central prediction of so much… Read more
Gridlock, schmidlock. The Obama admin keeps doing cool stuff.
Back when I worked for the Obama administration, I remember a depressing meeting our econ team had, circa late 2010, after the Tea Party came to town and pretty much shut down the Congress as far as policies to boost the still-weak recovery. The point of the meeting was to come up with policy ideas… Read more
My cat’s foreign policy
Apropos of nothing (and sorry for a cat anecdote vs. hard-hitting econ analysis – a strong dose of that is on its way), I’ve noticed something of late that I’ve found interesting. My cat supports the TPP but opposes comprehensive immigration reform. That is, she doesn’t mind when neighboring cats hang out in our yard. She… Read more
Models of the minimum wage (for what they’re worth)
The recent minimum wage debates among the various campaigns are pretty disconnected from a model of how the damn thing actually works in the real world. In part, that’s a function of campaigns not doing nuance, but it’s also because there is no model that economists agree on as per why the empirical results on minimum… Read more