About footnote 20 (high skill workers) - a friend of mine had a nice suggestion: prioritizing immigration based on the salary paid by the company sponsoring the visa.
It clearly solves the let high skill workers in problem, while potentially limiting the cultural/economic impact of mass immigration; for whoever is concerned about that. Even today, in some countries extremely talented people might have to wait ~20 years for a green card.
The USA is destined to balkanize at this point. The bad policies of the last 50 years have ensured any of your pragmatic suggestions to not be popular campaign points for the average disenfranchised member of the electorate.
That's possible (though I sure hope not). History is hard to predict though. Sometimes you just have to do your best to make things better however you can without thinking about the odds.
I wonder if GDP per capita is the right metric as opposed to GDP growth per capita, considering most of the countries you mentioned basically had to start from scratch after WWII. I was about to say that the US has some kind of "homefront peace" advantage, when I realized that it spends much more on military and has been at war longer than all of the other examples you cited.
Still, when you look at growth, US exceptionalism becomes less apparent:
That's a good point (although the other rich countries, in western Europe and Japan or Canada, mostly have not kept pace, so while the US is less exceptional in this metric it's still not unexceptional. And on the other side there's also a question of why the US doesn't look more like Mexico).
I think there is some degree of gravity on GDP (it's easier for countries that are behind due to idiosyncratic reasons to catch up; it's harder for countries that are ahead to maintain their lead, since having high GDP on an absolute scale is hard). But agree that this weakens the case for US exceptionalism (we're making more and shakier assumptions now).
Nice post!
About footnote 20 (high skill workers) - a friend of mine had a nice suggestion: prioritizing immigration based on the salary paid by the company sponsoring the visa.
It clearly solves the let high skill workers in problem, while potentially limiting the cultural/economic impact of mass immigration; for whoever is concerned about that. Even today, in some countries extremely talented people might have to wait ~20 years for a green card.
The USA is destined to balkanize at this point. The bad policies of the last 50 years have ensured any of your pragmatic suggestions to not be popular campaign points for the average disenfranchised member of the electorate.
That's possible (though I sure hope not). History is hard to predict though. Sometimes you just have to do your best to make things better however you can without thinking about the odds.
I wonder if GDP per capita is the right metric as opposed to GDP growth per capita, considering most of the countries you mentioned basically had to start from scratch after WWII. I was about to say that the US has some kind of "homefront peace" advantage, when I realized that it spends much more on military and has been at war longer than all of the other examples you cited.
Still, when you look at growth, US exceptionalism becomes less apparent:
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD.ZG?locations=FR-US-DE
That's a good point (although the other rich countries, in western Europe and Japan or Canada, mostly have not kept pace, so while the US is less exceptional in this metric it's still not unexceptional. And on the other side there's also a question of why the US doesn't look more like Mexico).
I think there is some degree of gravity on GDP (it's easier for countries that are behind due to idiosyncratic reasons to catch up; it's harder for countries that are ahead to maintain their lead, since having high GDP on an absolute scale is hard). But agree that this weakens the case for US exceptionalism (we're making more and shakier assumptions now).