YouTube and Google and communicated with each other by mobile phone and Facebook. As Niall Ferguson has succinctly argued, the West got ahead by inventing a series of “killer apps” such as competition that reorganized their societies, but now these apps are
readily downloadable and are being downloaded around the world. 1
Potentially, emigration of the talented from the countries of the bottom billion creates a sense that “life is elsewhere.” Indeed, such a sense is fundamental to the incentive and role model effects on talent that offset the brain drain. At its worse, a sense that life is elsewhere is debilitating, captured by Chekhov in the poignant refrain “Moscow, Moscow!” But for a small society that has long been stagnant and impoverished, life, in the sense of opportunity, really is elsewhere, and its young people are fully aware of it. Even without emigration, technology and globalized youth culture expose them to an inviting world just beyond their reach. Given the technology, the portals of this world are merely basic literacy, which is why the cultural backlash from radical Islam is so scared of education: the Boko Haram terrorist movement in Nigeria translates as
LEFT BEHIND? 223
“Western education is sinful.” But like all terrorism, Boko Haram is a strategy doomed to failure. Even were migration to be curtailed, exposure would continue unabated: the success and vibrancy of life elsewhere cannot be erased or hidden. The prospect of migration and connections with relatives abroad are as likely to soften the frustration of exclusion as to intensify it.
“Life is elsewhere” is potentially debilitating, but it can be countered. A triumph of postmodern culture has been to decenter: excitement is increasingly distributed, and there is no longer a unique pecking order. A challenge for great leadership in the societies of the bottom billion is to promote a credible vision of the excitement of catching up, joining the increasingly diverse group of societies where life is here and now. This is surely the spirit that has embraced modern China and, to varying degrees, Africa. It has little to do with international migration.
So emigration from the bottom billion is neither a menace nor a catalyst for the people left behind. It is a lifeline: a decentralized aid program. Like other aid programs it will not be decisive, but it most surely makes life better for millions of people living in conditions that are radically inappropriate in our globalized and prosperous century. But like the aid debate itself, the key issue regarding migration is not whether it is good or bad, but how best, at the margin, it can be improved. There is reasonable evidence that for the bottom billion, migration has been beneficial overall. But at the margin it is detrimental, draining talent and reducing remittances.
Migration as Aid
Virtually all host countries have aid programs for the bottom billion: addressing poverty in these countries is rightly seen as a global public good. Aid programs are an expression of the character of a
224 THOSE LEFT BEHIND
society, an act of generosity toward societies that are desperately in need. Whether or not they are very effective, they exercise our humanity and thereby deepen it. Just as individual acts of kindness cumulatively come to define not just how we appear to others but how we are to ourselves, so collective acts of kindness come not just to reflect a society but to shape it.
The ethical basis for aid looms particularly large at present. The severe and prolonged recession across the developed economies is leading to deep fiscal retrenchment. Where in the priorities for spending should the aid budget be positioned? All aid budgets are tiny relative to overall government spending, and so whether they are cut deeply or fully protected makes only a trivial difference to the alarming fiscal challenge. But a time of budget cuts wonderfully concentrates the mind: it is a time for hard choices, publicly debated.
What priority do the poorest societies have relative to the needs of our own society? Conversely, periods of fiscal laxity reveal little about a society’s true priorities: if money is easy, all sorts of nice-to-have spending takes place. As I write, each rich society is revealing something about its true priorities, and what is revealed is starkly different country by country. Nor are priorities well predicted according to the crude characterizations of the political spectrum. In Britain a government of the Right is fully protecting the aid budget; in America a government of the Left is slashing it. Nor are these merely eccentric deviations of public policy from democratic pressures. The British public appears to be quite relaxed about revealed priorities. Recently, the right-wing magazine The Spectator, itself virulently antiaid, held a public debate on whether Britain should cut its aid budget. I was enlisted to speak at the event and went along with some trepidation: if there was any audience in Britain likely to favor cutting the aid budget, this was surely going to be it. But we won the debate by a large majority. My own argument was not that
LEFT BEHIND? 225
aid is supereffective, for I doubt that it is, but rather that our decision about aid would inevitably reflect the sort of society we aspired to be. In the election both parties of the ruling coalition had committed to protect, and indeed increase, the aid budget, and we should honor our commitments to the world’s poor. I feel rather proud to belong to a country that, at a time of adversity, reaffirms its sense of generosity.
I doubt that Americans as people are any the less generous spirited.
After all, at the time of the earthquake in Haiti, half of all American households made individual donations to the earthquake appeals, an astounding proportion. Perhaps the American reluctance to provide aid reflects the heightened suspicion of government that currently characterizes much American public debate: public aid is government squared, as money passes through first the US government and then that of the recipient country.
As part of policy coherence, where different policies affect the same goal, governments should try to reinforce their achievement of the goal by coordinating the policies. At a minimum, governments should avoid striving to achieve a goal with one policy instrument while undermining it with another. So the migration policy adopted by a host country will have effects on a country of origin that either complement or undermine its aid policy depending upon the effects of out-migration. Since the net effect of emigration on countries of origin is beneficial to those left behind, and rich societies see it as ethically right to have aid programs to help the poorest countries, migration policies should be viewed, in part, as adjuncts to aid programs. Of course, migration has other effects that the governments of host countries will also legitimately want to take into account, but the effect on those left behind should be a consideration.
The two big economic transfers between the rich countries and the poorest generated by migration are remittances and the brain drain. Remittances are a hidden form of aid from the rich to the
226 THOSE LEFT BEHIND
poor, whereas the brain drain is a hidden form of aid from the poor to the rich. Let me try to bring them out of hiding.
Directly, remittances are financed out of the posttax income of migrants, and so they as individuals are the donors. But ultimately, the high productivity that enables migrants to earn the incomes that finance remittances is not predominantly attributable to migrants themselves. After all, in their home societies these same people would be radically less productive. In moving to high-wage countries they are the beneficiaries of the public capital in its many forms that collectively make the rich societies rich. That public capital has been accumulated by the indigenous population of the host country.
As I discussed in part 2, while there is an ethical case for the indigenous population to claim this productivity premium, as a practical matter it would be ill advised since it would relegate migrants to second-class status. Nevertheless, it is entirely reasonable for the indigenous population to claim joint credit with migrants for the remittances that benefit those left behind in countries of origin.
Migration enables the indigenous population to make a substantial financial contribution to these poor countr
ies: it is an aid program administered by migrants. And of course, an attractive feature of this particular aid program is that it costs the indigenous population nothing: it is financed out of the windfall productivity gain that migration generates.
The brain drain is financed by the education spending of the
governments of countries of origin. Their investment in the education of children who then migrate to high-income countries is an inadvertent aid program to host countries. The host societies are receiving in taxes on the income of immigrants, a flow of revenue that is a return on education that the host society has not itself financed. No reasonable person could justify such a transfer, so there is a case for compensation. The governments of host countries
LEFT BEHIND? 227
should make payments to the governments of countries of origin reflecting those tax receipts that are a return on the investment in education. An approximate benchmark for compensation is the
share of education in the budget of the host-country government.
For example, if education accounts for 10 percent of public spending, then a tenth of the tax receipts from immigrants might be deemed to be just compensation for the fact that the host society had received an influx of educated labor that some other society had paid for. Suppose that tax revenues account for 40 percent of national income in the host country, that immigrants constitute 10
percent of the population, and that they pay a share of tax that is proportionate to their share of the population. In this case the appropriate compensation for tax revenues generated by the windfall supply of educated workers would be 0.4 percent of national income. Of course, the numbers I have used are meant to be merely illustrative. However, if the numbers indicate orders of magnitude, they have an interesting implication. The United Nations target contribution for aid budgets is 0.7 percent of national income. So a substantial proportion of this target might be accounted for merely to offset the implicit aid provided by countries of origin to host countries. In fact, most high-income countries provide far less than 0.7 percent, typically around half of that target. So conceivably the left hand is providing aid while the right hand is receiving it: aid is not a donation but a repayment.
This page intentionally left blank
PART 5
Rethinking Migration Policies
This page intentionally left blank
CHAPTER 11
Nations and Nationalism
England for the English?
Somewhere in England an elderly man reverts to the behavior of disaffected teenagers and daubs a slogan on a wall. He writes
“England for the English.” The perpetrator is tracked down by the police and rightly prosecuted and convicted: the sentiment is clearly intended as racial abuse. More generally, in much of the high-income world the concept of the nation-state has become unfashionable both with educated elites and with the young. Modernity strings identity between one pillar of individualism and another of globalism: many young people see themselves both as fiercely individual outsiders in their surrounding society, and as citizens of the world.
Modern individualism has deep roots. Around the time of the
birth of the modern concept of the individual, Descartes was deriv-ing our knowledge of the existence of the world from his undeniable experience of his own thoughts: cogito, ergo sum. Many modern
232 RETHINKING MIGRATION POLICIES
philosophers now think that Descartes got things back-to-front. We cannot have knowledge of ourselves except in the context of an awareness of a society of which we are a part.
Hence, right at the foundations of philosophy, there is a tension between people as individuals and people as members of
society. These different perspectives permeate through politics and social science. Politically, there is a spectrum from socialism through to individual libertarianism—politicians such as Margaret Thatcher with her brilliantly focused remark “There’s no such thing as society,” and thinkers such as Ayn Rand, who regarded social organization as a conspiracy of the slothful majority
against the exceptional minority. In social science the individual-maximizing perspective of economics has long been pitted
against the group analysis of sociology and anthropology. People are both individuals and members of a society. An adequate theory of human behavior has to incorporate both aspects of our nature, much as progress in physics depended upon the realization that at the subatomic level matter behaves both as particles and waves.
The balance between people as particles and people as waves
can shape how we see a country. At the particle end of the spectrum, a country is an arbitrary geographic-legal entity inhabited at any one time by some particles. At the wave end of the spectrum, a country is a people, sharing a common identity and bound together by mutual regard. The country-as-people end of the
spectrum involves two distinct steps: the notion that community rather than just individual is important, and the notion that a country is a key unit of organization for community. A potential source of confusion is that the former is an idea usually associated with the political Left, while the latter is an idea usually associated with the political Right.
NATIONS AND NATIONALISM 233
Community or Individual?
First consider the notion that the community rather than just the individual is important. Recent developments in philosophy, psychology, and economics have pushed back from the individual as all. In philosophy, Michael Sandel has shown how over the last generation the individualist assumptions built into economic analysis have shifted key goods from collective provision to being met by
the market. 1 The march of the market has had substantial distribu-tional repercussions, with an unprecedented increase in social inequality. Some philosophers now question free will, the bedrock of individualism. Their critique is based on the new evidence from
social psychology of the power of imitation. 2 People adopt role models of behavior from a limited range of available choices, and thereafter their responses to situations are set by their role model: personal responsibility is not eliminated, but it is weakened when seen from such a perspective.
In psychology, Jonathan Haidt and Steven Pinker have shown
how attitudes and beliefs that affect behavior toward others evolve over time and have major consequences for well-being. Haidt
argues that a sense of community is one of the six fundamental
moral tastes that are virtually universal. 3 Pinker attributes the dra-
matic decline in violence in Western society since the eighteenth century to an increased sense of empathy: especially through the growth of literacy and the popular novel, people became better able to put themselves in the position of others and imagine themselves as the victims of the violence done to others. Even psychoanalysis, traditionally the ultimate self-regarding mode of analysis, now roots personal problems in relational attitudes such as shame.
Economics has long been the bastion of selfish, maximizing individualism. Its foundations were laid by Adam Smith in The Wealth
234 RETHINKING MIGRATION POLICIES
of Nations, where he famously demonstrated that such behavior generates social benefits. But Smith also wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments, about the foundations of mutual regard. Belatedly, that
work is receiving its due recognition. 4 It is being expanded by the new subdiscipline of neuroeconomics, in which the regard for others is neurologically grounded. 5 Experimental economics has found that a propensity to trust is both valuable and varies between societies. Studies of happiness find that what really matters is social, not material: how we relate to others, and how we are regarded by others. But even judged by the narrow metric of income, a group within which there is high regard and trust for others will be better off than one of selfish individualists. A controversy is currently raging as to whether sociobiology could explain the genetic emergence of a predisposition toward trust. While the competition be
tween individuals cannot explain trust, both competition between genes and competition between groups may be able to do so:
mutual regard within groups may be hardwired. 6
For all these scholars, behavior is in part derived from a sense of community and the attitudes shared by the community. People
have a predisposition for mutual regard within a group; but these sentiments can be undermined by individual selfishness, as they were over the past generation with the encroaching domain of the market.
Is a Nation a Community?
Community is important, as a primary value for most people, as a key determinant of happiness, and as a source of material benefits. So what units of organization are most important for community: family, clan, locality, ethnic group, religion, profession, region, nation, or world? People are perfectly capable of multiple identities, and many
NATIONS AND NATIONALISM 235
of these are noncompeting. How important is the nation in this array of possible clubs?
Nationalism was condemned by Einstein as “measles,” and it has become fashionable in Europe to suggest that the nation has been superseded. Nations are challenged from below by regional identities: Spain is currently threatened with the secession of Catalonia, and Britain with the secession of Scotland. Nations are challenged from above both formally by the transfer of power to larger entities such as the European Union and culturally by the emergence of globalized educated elites that mock at national identity. Yet that identity is enormously important as a force for equity.
Nations are overwhelmingly the most important institutions for taxation. Only if people feel a strong common identity at this level are they willing to accept that taxation can be used for the redistributions that partially offset the vagaries of divergent fortunes. Take that Catalonian desire to exit from Spain. Catalonia is Spain’s richest region, and exit is being driven by reluctance to continue transferring 9 percent of Catalan income to other regions. A stronger sense of Spanish nationalism would be highly unlikely to trigger warlike intensions against Portugal but would, perhaps, reconcile Catalans to helping their poorer neighbors. In other words, modern nationalism is less like a mass infection of measles than a mass injection of oxytocin. 7
Paul Collier Page 22