Thomas Sowell Brings the World into Focus through an Economics Lens

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Channel: HooverInstitution

Views: 265,476

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Keywords: Economics, inequality, taxes, Harvard, employment, Friedman, free markets, Marxism, rich, poor

Id: cdBn7MUM3Yo

Length: 49min 50sec (2990 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 19 2014

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Thomas Sowell, a highly noted (libertarian) economist from the Hoover Institution at Stanford University on why discussing immigration in the abstract is senseless, with interviewer Peter Robinson. Largely relevant to the United States however some food for thought in the immigration debate.

Selected quotations from the discussion (and for those using smartphones with limited data as the video is quite long):

"When only two percent of immigrants from Japan to the United States go on welfare, while 46 percent of the immigrants from Laos do, there is no single pattern that applies to all immigrants. Everything depends on which immigrants you are talking about and which periods of history." T.Sowell, Basic Economics, 5th Edition

"One of the things about the immigration debate is they talk about immigrants in the abstract and there are no immigrants in the abstract as that passage (quoted above) indicates and we don't know who those people are that are here. They may all be PhDs from the University of Chicago in which case they should all stay, or they may in fact be people who major in sociology at Berkeley in which case get them all outta here, as soon as possible. But we don't know, thats one of the problems of so called immigration policy, we don't have an immigration policy unless we control the border. It doesn't matter what our policy is, if anybody who wants to cross the border can cross then our policy is just a bunch of words on paper."

"There are no abstract people, 100 years ago people understood that and so when there was a debate about immigration there was a multivolume set of tones about the characteristics of the immigrants from various countries [1]. How did their kids do in school... ... what is their crime rate, what is their disease rate, all of those things that matters. They [US Govt] brought out all of these kids [2], and you know kids grow up, and they have other kids. We don't know maybe thats a good thing, maybe its a bad thing we don't have a clue."

[1] Reference to the multivolume (41 volume) set of reports by United States Congress Joint Immigration Commission

[2] Recent articles from T.Sowell on this subject

Bordering on Madness, 22/07/14

Is Thinking Obsolete?, 05/08/14