Visas and education

Wait a second here: doesn’t this involve basically forcing people to be somewhere they would rather not be in order to benefit others? Even if we think this is a good idea, why should this burden fall only on people born in less developed countries? Shouldn’t we just send all engineers, doctors, etc for a two-year mandatory stint in the developing world?

Wait a second here: doesn’t this involve basically forcing people to be somewhere they would rather not be in order to benefit others?

Something inherent in any immigration policy that doesn’t involve open borders, anon.

Wait a second here: doesn’t this involve basically forcing people to be somewhere they would rather not be in order to benefit others?

Anon, are you an advocate of open borders, who believes that any state restriction on international migration is an illegitimate use of force? Because your argument appears to be premised on that view.

What if you don’t like your home country or are temporarily sick of your country or like your host country just as well or just want to experience another country for a while? What if you just want to work with the best in your field, make lots of money and have a nice first-world life?

Sorry, I find this incredibly patronizing.

It’s also impractical, especially for those advanced degrees in technical subjects you mention. What’s somebody with a PhD in physics or chemistry supposed to do in a country that lacks the resources to make use of his knowledge and probably doesn’t even need his highly specialized skill-set. And even if there is a need in his home country, would it really be served well by someone straight out of university with no practical experience in the field?

Shouldn’t we just send all engineers, doctors, etc., for a two-year mandatory stint in the developing world?

Sounds good to me. Combines the best features of higher education, the egalitarian possibilities of the draft, the noblesse oblige of the Peace Corps, and a certain faith-based program I’m highly familiar with…

is it even correct to say that the Friedman/Yglesias policy makes sense when viewed in the narrow terms of US benefit?

I had thought that for years the NAFTA people were telling us that is was good for the US, in narrowly selfish terms, to adopt policies that improve the economy of Mexico and points south. One rationale being that a more stable and diversified economy south of us would reduce the impetus to come north.

And setting aside Mexico, is it not good for the US, in narrowly selfish terms, to adopt policies that create wealthy trading partners with diversified economies?

I mean–I had thought this sort of analysis was just par for the neo-classical free-trader course.

what changed?

Soru, I don’t think there is any free education involved here.

We are talking about Fulbright Scholarships, right? At least some of those are tuition-free.

According to Soru’s link

The program was established to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and other countries through the exchange of persons, knowledge, and skills.

…as opposed to draining other countries’ talent.

Harry, I’m no libertarian and I’ve spent a fair bit of time in developing countries myself, but I’d still be a bit queasy about shipping people off to the ass end of nowhere against their will, outwith some national emergency, even if they are middle class.

Anon – Fair enough if you believe in open borders; that’s a very big issue that I don’t want to try to argue here. One small point, though: don’t you think there is a significant difference between forcibly preventing someone from coming to a particular place on the one hand, and forcibly moving him to and confining him in a particular place on the other?

…in practice, there tend not to be Americans clamoring to get graduate schooled in technical disciplines

How much of the lack of interest is due to external factors, such as lack of funding?

Since it seems important the thread, I favor a regional open boarder policy while maintianing the current citizenship process.

Anon – I’m sympathetic to the equity considerations which seem to be motivating your answer, but it doesn’t address the point I was trying to make. From the point of view of the freedom or rights of the individual concerned don’t you think there is a difference between the two cases?

Mr. Anon,

Adding labor to an already over-full labor market is almost as bad.

The plain fact is that these countries cannot employ the educated people they already have.

However the very fact that incomes of skilled workers are higher in US than what they would be in home country suggest that the problem is institutional.

Sure it’s institutional. Suppose a doctor of country X is a part of the national healthcare system and a doctor of country Y is a part of something like a medical extortion racket. Then to solve the problem country X, obviously, has to convert its healthcare system into extortion racket too, because it’s more profitable for the doctor.

Several commenters have posted on underemployment in immigrants’ home countries. I am in grad school currently and there are a lot of Nigerians and other Africans here who plan to stay in the US after they graduate – because they might be selling trinkets on the street back in their home countries.

There are certainly situations where people can bring their US educations back to their home countries to the benefit of those countries – but then there are nations with such poor infrastructure, opportunities, etc. that the human capital would be wasted. Of course, this is a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation – could very poor countries get a critical mass of human capital in order to start an upward spiral of improvement, thus making immigrants want to go back? I surmise this is happening in places like India and China. I think, also, this has to do with the level of corruption in some countries – nothing makes it into the economy but is skimmed off by corrupt elites, which leads to poor infrastructure, few to nil opportunities for educated people to make their marks, and more incentive for said educated people to permanently emigrate.

This is a real problem, isn’t it? — moral distinctions based on nationality or citizenship seem fundmaentally ilelgitimate, and yet there is seemingly no alternative to them as a basis for rights enshrined in law. Goes right back to the French Revolution adn the “Rights of Man and Citizen,” as if the two were interchangeable.

Anon’s position seems logically consistent, but while he writes

Legal discrimination based on the country that one is born in seems like something pretty much everyone should be opposed to

The reality is, it’s something that pretty much no one is opposed to. So there must be some good reasons we continue linking various rights and obligations to nationality, no?

Surely Henry is not proposing “send all back for 2 years regardless of the country and regardless of the circumstances” any more than I took it that I was endorsing “send all qualified americans to a developing country regardless of the effects and circumstances”. The idea is just that for some countries there is a real cost to having their elites working in the US (and a real cost to not being able to draw on qualified foriegn labour). Some countries have lousy infrastructures, others have pretty good infrastructures and lose talent which is not obviously compensated by the income from abroad that they generate.

Saying to a member of an educated elite “you must go back for 2 years” isn’t patronising to them. Is it patronising to their countries? Maybe — I’d like people to spell out exactly how a bit more, before commenting on that.

It also doesn’t seem to me that Henry’s suggestion imposes a cost on the educated person that is unaccepable, at least relative to all other foreigners who the US is not willing to admit at all, under any circumstances (an aside — I am not bashing the US at all by making that last comment — it seems to me that by rich world standards the US is extraordinary generous about immigration).

All this is easy for me to say. Like Henry I benefitted from a US graduate education, and unlike him I didn’t have to go back to my home country for 2 years, and if I had had to do that it would have amounted to a pretty severe interruption at the time. Mark you, I had every intention of going back for good, and was derailed from that intention by marriage.

Anon and michael sullivan — matt’s teasing me, because he knows that I have odd views about what I’m entitled to do for my kids relative to other kids. I would say, though, that even though I chose to have kids, I no more chose these ones than they chose me. I had no idea which ones I was going to get, which is typical, really.

Harry: I understand that Matt isn’t trying to offend you or anything, but his comment was in the context of a (as I read it) serious attempt to refute the justice of anon’s position. I’m not offended by what he wrote or anything, but I do think that it’s a bad argument.

I’m not sure if you meant your comment about not getting to choose the particular kid (rather than “to have kids”) was meant to provide insight into Matt’s argument, but if it was, I don’t get how.

Michael,

You’re right that my argument wasn’t quite right. So how about this: Harry’s kids do pretty well for themselves materiallly, I gather- not rich, but far from bad. They also have parents that care for so so all things considered they are doing massively better than most of the world. But down the street is another family somewhat better off yet- a fancier home entertainment system, better brands of clothes, and so on. Now, Harry’s kids didn’t choose to have their parents and that other guy’s kids didn’t choose him. So on anon’s account they Harry’s kids should have equal right to the things at the other guy’s place along with his kids. So there’s no wrong committed by Harry’s kids when they go in and take or use the things. But that’s absurd So the argument must be wrong. (Anon seemed later to think that all forms of partiality are wrong. That can’t possibly be right, though, so I hope he or she didn’t really think that.)

Now, the story is somewhat different for kids unlike Harry’s who don’t have enough to have a decent life. Something serious is clearly owed to them. It’s not clear that Harry has to come let them live at his house, but something is owed to them. But the majority of people who are likely to move to the US in most cases are more like Harry’s kids than those who have nothing. (Thomas Pogge has a quite nice paper on this topic though the name is slipping my mind. I don’t often agree with him and he’s got some problems in the paper but it’s the best published one I’ve seen on immigration and the global poor.)

Let’s note here that on the large majority of _actual_ visas that require a 2-year return to one’s home country (one type of J visa) two things are the case. First, the education made possible on the visa is paid for by US government funds or, in a few small cases, with home-country funds in an agreement with the US government. Secondly, it’s a condition of getting the visa and the funds that one must return at the end of the period. Since no one has a right to these funds or visa no one is wronged by this condition. What would be patronising would be to claim that people taking them were not competent to make the decision to do so. (This is besides the point that such programs might be bad policy for any number of reasons. But it’s not patronizing to make people live up to their obligations.)

To ensure that labor mobility produces benefits for developing nations it is imperative that the regime be designed in a way that generates incentives for return to home countries.

It strikes me that I could equally as well be argued that it is the home country’s responsibility to make themselves attractive to their students who study overseas, thus putting pressure on them to improve their policies, not just economically but in terms of political rights and the rule of law.

If we imagine a klepotcratic government, who is out for all they can steal from their local population, then increased migration away is good as it reduces the kleptocrat’s power and thus creates a strong incentive for them to decrease the level of stealing from each particular person so they can steal more overall. Given the difficulty of targeting things like the rule of law only to people who otherwise might go overseas, an improvement in government would likely benefit everyone in developing countries.

Of course this argument is a bit different for medical people where the government is paying their salaries out of its own pocket. But even there I suspect developing countries’ governments can do a good deal to make their own countries more attractive to medical workers by improving the government.

No, you’re not saying anything about what’s best for them; but about what is best for their country. What if, as is sometimes the case, everyone—host country, home country, and immigrant—agree that their going back is best for their country? (but the immigrant doesn’t want to do it because he wants what’s best for him, not his country).

Well, if the immigrant also agrees, then there is no problem in this case.

Anyway, I must have misiunderstood your position. Because in my post, I was assuming that the host country has no problem with the immigrant’s stay. That’s why I wrote that someone else telling the immigrant that he should go home because that’s good for his home country is being patronising. And paternalistic.

And I didn’t mean to imply that this was Henry’s position.

Michael b., sure, I don’t know if US could accomodate a billion (though actually 50 million in two decades doesn’t scare me at all). But first, I don’t think they’d actually come – there are HUGE psychic/non-pecuniary/cultural costs involved in migration (under some sketchy assumptions the non-pecuniary cost is somewhere between a quarter and half a million $ if you’re gonna put a $ figure on it). The people that we see immigrating are the most “rootless” ones for whom this cost is smaller – young males in particular. So I think migrants would hit the margin at which point the non-pecunicary costs outweight pecuniary gains pretty fast. Second, even if that’s not true, the experience of Britain (and if one thinks about it honestly, US) basically shows that 3-5% of population is nothing. We could easily absorb several more million with hardly any effect. While this is not an argument for a completly open borders policy (based on practical considerations) it does mean that all the hoopla about immigration in US is overblown and until we hit, I dunoo 10% or so, it’s really nothing to worry about. Let them come.

Crystal,
Many of the cases you mention would qualify for asylum under US law, at least if the harm feared is not just inconvenience but of a particularly serious nature. (Homosexuals have been granted asylum in the US many times. The case of women in misogynistic countries is a bit harder but not impossible.) Jews from the former Soviet Union (and to a lesser extent the other Eastern Block countries) were given refugee status by statute in the US even though their sitution almost never rose to the standard of persecution otherwise required. Jews from Iran and other such places are also often granted asylum. Grants of asylum are some of the few exceptions to the J visa return requirement. So, there is a system to meet your worries even though it, of course, functions less well than we would want.

“The home country in question isn’t going to benefit very much from its most economically productive citizens (which category doesn’t include me; I was always likely to be a net drain on the Irish economy) going to the US to study, if they don’t ever come home.”

That’s arguable. It’s certainly been to the advantage of India to have a sizable chunk of its highly educated diaspora in tech centers like Silicon Valley for getting FDI.

“Wow. It is really hard to overstate the parochialism and complacency behind a comment like that.”

How so, Chris? Are you asserting that one shouldn’t improve one’s lot by living in a country with a stronger rule of law and economy, if emigrating is part of that strategy? And who would you advocate that view to?

(oops, forgot how tags work here — the second paragraph is also a quote, only the third one is me.)

As a profesor at an engineering college in the US, the reason why there are a large number of foreign graduate students in engineering is pretty simple. The amount I can pay my graduate students (depending upon what all one counts $15,000-$25,000) is considerably less than what they can earn working in industry (our graduates this year averaged $57000+ starting salary with 100% placement). We get a few students but miss out on many more that would like to go to graduate school. We did get a fair number of Americans when my field wasn’t hiring in the early 1990s.

In a way, my concern here is not with equity but freedom on a more granular level. If I’m talking with a student from an African nation and he asks me, “Should I feel obliged to return home and contribute to my country’s progress even though I like it much better here?” I say, “No, I don’t think you have any obligation in moral or ethical terms. Chase the best life you can for yourself: that’s what I do, too. Part of that is living in the society I know best and was born to, but if things were terrible here, I’d want to go elsewhere.” So if Henry comes along and says, “But it should be a matter of policy to force him to do the ‘right thing'”, I can’t get behind that. Why should this student get to stay when his many countrymen do not get to freely travel and live here? Because: he’s already here, he has skills that have a market value, and there aren’t very many like him. Because he says he wants to be here, he’s certain of what he’s doing by saying so. I’d be interested in further liberalization of immigration and migration on a global scale, to be sure, but this seems to me to be a fair enough start in that direction.

Let me push Henry’s views further. It hurts many smaller rural communities in the United States when the most skilled or educationally accomplished young people in their communities leave to go to bigger cities far from where they grew up. If we should compel a highly skilled person from Togo to stay in Togo because it’s for the good of Togo, why shouldn’t we have forms of compulsion to force people who come from depopulating communities and towns to keep skills in those areas? There are very few doctors, vetrinarians and so on in parts of the interior US West and Midwest; it would make a huge difference to the quality of life of people living in those communities if there were more professionals living there. What makes Togo different from southeast Wyoming? Just because it’s a nation, while the other place is a region within a nation?

As for what it would take for my home country to lure me back, it isn’t all that much. I would just need a job that pays at least 60% of what I earn in the US, financial support to travel to professional meetings, and access to an online database in my field. At home, I would be a star, whereas in the US I am not, nor shall ever be one.

But I am certain my home country has little use for a PhD in my area, and it does have some use for the money I am bound to inject into the local economy over the years.

One more point: brain drain is a problem that affects disproportionately societies that are in such disarray that humanitarian concerns for the “brains” make it very difficult to send the latter back home, that is, unless you describe these people as claiming to have the right to live in the place they are educated, etc.

pedro — sure, about neuroscientists and cosmologists. But doctors, teachers, engineers, nurses… ordinary, boring, professionals, with skills that are needed pretty much eveywhere; in poor countries which function moderately well (which is where most foreign studnets coem from) they would be useful.

Harry B.-

I wholeheartedly agree (and I suspect Timothy does too) that we have obligations towards others. It is just not so clear to me that our obligations need to be nation-specific. Consider the analogy of parents and children. You would not, under any circumstances, force a kid who has been living under your roof, to go back to his or her biological parents, who treated him or her quite badly, to pay back the debt he or she owes for the years before the kid finally split off from the parents.

I understand that this analogy is strained, because my obligation is disempowered fellow citizens, not with the government of my country. Still, I have a hard time accepting any obligation to go back to a country simply by virtue of an arbitrary link, namely nationality. I have solidarity towards the dispossessed, and being the rootless cosmopolitan I am, I let that solidarity bloom where I am planted. And I do have good reasons and incentives to help out those in my own country of nationality, simply because the local knowledge that I acquired during my years there help me make more informed choices and maximize the impact of my efforts.

But I am not sympathetic with measures that can destroy a person’s–nay, in cases, a family’s–livelihood for abstract paternalistic considerations in favor of countries, not people. I also assure you that many of the countyrmen I’ve met here in the US have acute social conscience, and they have become a force for good in my home country, while many of those who do return become voiceless.

I sympathize with the desire to send engineers and doctors and teachers to the third world. But I do not sympathize with the perpetuation of the sort of nationalistic essentialism that Henry’s proposal helps perpetuate.

Harry: we have obligations towards others. What’s interesting in this case is that you seem to conflate “obligations towards others” with “obligations towards the nation-state of your birth”. A Catholic priest from Nigeria who services a U.S. community is living a life of obligation to others. A Zimbabwean-born nurse who is living in norther Ontario and working as a hospital there is living a life of obligation and service to others.

The premise here seems to be in part that it is the absence of trained professionals from underdeveloped nations that creates or causes underdevelopment. Every person born in Zimbabwe with professional skills who now lives abroad could catch a flight home tomorrow and live there forevermore without altering the developmental trajectory of Zimbabwe one iota. There aren’t positions for doctors and nurses to be filled in crumbling hospitals that have no supplies. A doctor can have all the medical skills in the world, but if he can’t even get a hold of a band-aid, his mere presence alone is not much of a tonic for the sick. Every Zimbabwean with legal training could go home and find themselves with nothing to do, given the state’s contempt for law and legality. Every Zimbabwean with engineering training could go home and have nothing to do.

It is not the absence of professionals that underdevelops Zimbabwe or Gabon or Equatorial Guinea or Somalia. The absence of professionals is a symptom of underdevelopment, not a cause.

If it’s about service to others, a Zimbabwean-born doctor can heal and help far more individuals by living somewhere else. Not to mention, in all likelihood, living a personally satisfying and rewarding life.

I thought he was making the same point as bad, bad abb1 at 27—that it’s quite a leap to assume that the reaction to a loss of educated professionals will be stronger rule of law and economy, or more generally that what’s attractive to foreign-educated professionals is automatically good for the country as a whole.

I am trying to think of a country that treats foreign-educated professionals badly but is a good place to live for home-educated locals who never got past primary school. I’m having problems thinking of any. Any suggestions?

Foreign-educated professionals are human just like the rest of us. Speaking broadly, they want comforable lives, safe, interesting work, low crime, somewhere to bring up their kids, somewhere you can support a politician and still keep your livelihood if that politician is in opposition (there are of course always some exceptions, for example there are some people with low boredom thresholds who appear to like living in countries where there’s a significant risk of being shot in the streets, I am only talking generally). Some things are just good for everyone.

I was probably wrong in implying that a country will definitely resort to the rule of law and a stronger economy as a result of foreign-educated professionals, but it certainly is a possible response, and it strikes me as a less morally problematic.

“forgiving student loans for doctors and teachers etc who work in high need communities (ie, taxing the rest of us to make that happen), or providing other forms of subsidy (paid for by taxing the rest of us), sure.
Are you thinking something like this could happen in the US? I think open borders has more chance of getting political traction.”

But this in fact does happen already so it cannot possibly be unworkable. It doesn’t happen on as large of a scale as we’d like but doctors and pharmacists are given forgivness for student loans for being willing to work on Indian reservations and many other poor and isolated places that have trouble attracting help. The “teach for america” program, despite its clear flaws, is another form of this. So we do have versions of these things even if they are not as good as we might like.

There’s gotta be a balance here, Tracy.
Suppose (god forbid) there a terrible pandemic of some sort in New Zealand, people dying everywhere and it’s getting hard to get a good meal in restaurants. Should all the NZ doctors quickly migrate to Australia or UK in pursuit of comfortable lives and good food? Should the NZ, Australian and UK governments make it easier for them to flee, give them some special instant visas and hand them free one-way tickets? See, it’s not as simple as you think.

Well practically in the case of a pandemic the borders would be closed and the country quarantined to stop all those doctors and professionals bring the disease along with them. (Leaving aside that there are dozens of flights a day out of NZ, so a quarantine would almost certainly be too late).

As for your scenario of the Australian and British governments issuing instant visas, and free one-way tickets:
– New Zealanders do not need visas to migrate to Australia, or vice-versa. I can hop on a plane and move over there without getting any permission from the Australian government. This is regardless of my level of education, age, etc (there are some limits on things like people with unpaid fines and children in split parental custody). So issuing an instant visa would add increased complexity to current migration procedures between the countries.
– The cost of an airfare between NZ and Australia is so low relative to incomes that no NZ doctor is going to be put off migrating because they have to pay for their ticket.

New Zealanders and Australians have migrated back and forth in reaction to economic events or personal events ever since European settlements. The gold discoveries in NZ led to a massive movement of labour into NZ, some of it out of Australia. Whenever there is an economic depression in NZ migration to Australia goes up. This has not led to a dearth of doctors in NZ.

So to answer your question, in the case of a pandemic, one of two things would happen
– NZ would be quarantined and no one, including doctors, would be allowed to leave legally, or
– Australia would have it too, due to air travel, so there would be no point in leaving.

In the case of an economic decline, which I think is the more relevant scenario to the questions Henry raised:
– People leave gradually. There may have been jokes in the end of the Muldoon era about “Can the last person to leave the country please turn out the lights?” but there were still millions of NZers at the end of 1984, including doctors, nurses, engineers, etc. Family connections, familiar landscapes, the ease of operating in a society you already know, these keep a lot of people in place for a long time. A number of white farmers in Zimbabwae stayed for amazing lengths of time even though there were violent gangs of thugs around, a few bad meals in restaurants are not going to lead to all NZ medical staff evacuating at once (I’m now imagining a voice over Auckland hospital’s intercom saying “Dr Smith just got food poisoning down at the Viaduct – everyone to Australia now!” :) ). This leaves plenty of time for a goverment to start correcting its policies.
– NZ being a democracy, the government gets voted out.

If NZ collapsed into dictatorship, everyone leaving strikes me as being very simple and smart. I’d be on the plane to Australia, why would I want to deny that right to any doctors? Let the dictators order themselves around and treat their own medical problems.

Legal ones? In the US? Really?

Yes, really. The fraction of legal ones is lower in construction than some other occupations, but there are still plenty. Many feel the opportunities are better and threats fewer for their kids, so vast numbers at least try to go through the legal immigration process.

I am trying to think of a country that treats foreign-educated professionals badly but is a good place to live for home-educated locals who never got past primary school. I’m having problems thinking of any. Any suggestions?

This was absolutely the case for the Soviet Union and other former East Bloc countries.

Um, when? I’m just reading a history of the Stalinist purges. Professionals, foreign-educated or not, were of course more likely to be killed or imprisoned than peasants, but millions of peasants were killed or imprisoned too. I would not have called the Soviet Union in the 1930s a good place to be a home-educated local who never got past primary school, it was a terrible time and place to be any sort of human.

Once things settled down a bit, how many foreign-educated professionals were there, given the Communist rules? We are after all talking about a system of government that built the Berlin Wall to keep people in. I don’t recall ever hearing about large numbers of people being sent from the Soviet Union to study at university in the West. People *escaping* from the Soviet Union and later on studying at a Western university, yes.

Sure. And/or, they want affordable & deferential household servants, an assurance their kids will inherit their relative status, an inside track to political office & influence, politicians who will do what they’re paid to, and an exit option if their own society goes down the tubes. Just like the rest of us.

Most of the things you list are far more available for a foreign-educated professional in their own country than if they stay in the US:
– inexpensive and deferential household help are a feature of third-world countries.
– politicial corruption is far larger in third-world countries. (See http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/cpi/2006)

Oh, and personally I think everyone should have an exit option if their own society goes down the tubes. Millions of lives would have been saved if people could have gotten away from Nazi Germany.

You probably think that by elevating individual rights and interests far above everything else you are positioning yourself as far away from Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany as possible, but no, I don’t think it works like this; it’s just another extreme.

Dear abb1, I love this. At one extreme we have Stalinist Russia, at the other we have NZ in the 21st century. But hey, according to you NZ’s just another extreme – beautiful :)

Indeed it is (on average, anyway). Have you given any thought to why that might be?

Yes. This is a topic I could bore you on for days if I had the time. Rather than doing so, I’ll give you some of the writings and ideas I think are particularly interesting:
– Guns, Germs and Steel
– Understanding Prosperity and Poverty: Geography, Institutions and the Reversal of Fortune
– The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
– the resource curse (just do a google search)
– Douglas C North’s work on institutions
– the Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some are So Rich and Some So Poor
– Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism
– more other articles than I can remember
– the differences between North and South Korea, and East and West Germany
– English history
– Scottish history
– the difference between the mass killing the communist revolution in Cambodia unleashed and the lack of same in Vietnam
– the difference between Germany’s performance after WWI and West Germany’s performance after WWII.

I also did a course on it at university with a professor who would state some theory and then with a sneer point out that this implies that the rate of return on capital in the Phillipines is 3 times that of capital in the USA, or whatever.

Somewhere out of this I formed a view that wealthy countries is like recessions, they don’t have any one single cause. I may be wrong though. It’s not like anyone can do controlled tests to determine the exact real causes.

But I do think the evidence, especially from things like the resource curse and the European colonisation institutions hypothesis, is that governments respond to incentives and politicians do have choices. Raise the costs to them to get educated people, some of them will respond.

(Or are we going to hear more about how if only those countries would sort themselves out their skilled people wouldn’t want to leave.)

Personally I’m hoping to hear an answer to my questions as to why I’m being parochial and complacent in thinking that many world governments could do much better.

re 83. Thomas Pogge’s work on poverty and his critique of “explanatory nationalism” would be a start. See “this review”:http://www.cceia.org/resources/journal/17_2/reviews/1028.html by Leif Wenar (esp the penultimate para) for a summary

Also, I’d add that I think Pogge’s account is, at least, not fully convincing. I tend to find Mathias Risse’s critique of Pogge’s argument almost completely convincing. You can find Risse’s papers on his web page here:
http://ksghome.harvard.edu/~mrisse/papers_Philosophy.htm

Most relevent “Does the Global Order Harm the Poor?” and “Do we Owe the Poor Assitence or Rectification”? I don’t agree with all of Risse’s views (I think his argument that we infact are co-owners of the world and that interesting things follow from this is crazy, for example) but I think his critique of Pogge is right on and devistating.

You’re right, Chris- no one rightly thinks (and Risse doesn’t claim- if I did I’d not like his argument) that it’s a lack of willpower or a (special) moral depravity that causes some countries to be corrupt and others not. (That’s a point made well w/ a sociological framework in the other article I point to.) But I think the moral Pogge takes from this nearly banal point is quite wrong and that Risse has it almost exactly right against him. (Having lived in a country where corruption both petty and high is rampent I’m sensitive to how things work but think that Pogge’s account is wrong both noratively and descriptively, and think that he, as is typical for him, ascribes a view that no real philosopher holds to his adversaries.)

Tracy: I read your comment 43 as suggesting that it was the responsibility of such countries to put their houses in order. Making such remarks in a preachy manner whilst neglecting the very real obstacles they face struck me as parochial and complacent. If I’ve got you wrong, then I apologise.

I was suggesting that it was the responsibility of such countries to put their own houses in order. I’m pretty darn convinced that prosperity and human rights are good universally and that every country should aim for those objectives. You may call me preachy if you like for believing that, but I don’t think my beliefs on that point are parochial or complacent. From my point of view they rather feel motivated by desperation that everyone should have such a good life as I have and despair that so many people’s lives have been so bad.

I didn’t mention the very real barriers they face because it was a comment on a blog post, not an entire book. But why didn’t you ask me to explain this point, rather than dismissing my comments as parochial or complacent? My reason for believing that governments can improve if the costs of being corrupt and self-serving are high is that this seems to be what has driven some governments to develop good institutions in the past, eg when the Europeans couldn’t exploit the local population they built good institutions, if a country has good natural resources it’s more likely to be poor and that’s apparently because the elite can just live off the natural resources rather than labour taxation so they don’t have to nurture the local population. Just because a country faces “very real barriers” doesn’t mean they are insurmountable – Scotland faced “very real barriers” (the kirk, the English parliament), Japan faced “very real barriers” (eg the power of the samurai), England faced “very real barriers” (Oliver Cromwell, Charles I, Henry VIII), etc.

Out of curiousity, Chris, do you think it’s possible for a poor country to improve its institutions?

Abb1 – if believing that governments should exist to serve their citizens, governments are capable of improvement, and everyone should have an bolthole if their country starts going down the drain makes me an extreme ideologue in your eyes then that’s fine with me.