Why Erasing All The World's Borders Would Double GDP

[SoCalDem]

http://www.good.is/posts/why-erasing-all-the-world-s-borders-would-double-gdp/?utm_medium=tdg&utm_source=email&utm_campaign=ltitle&utm_content=How%20a%20Border-Free%20Globe%20Would%20Double%20Your%20Salary


Learn in Global Citizenship, Environment and Education
May 16, 2013 at 9:00 AM
Why Erasing All The World's Borders Would Double GDP


Economists have estimated that opening the world’s borders to migration could double world GDP. To get the gist of that number, imagine that your boss walked into your office tomorrow and said, “we’re doubling your salary”—and the same thing happened to everyone else, too.
What would we all do with the money?

Buy better food, more cars, better educations for our children, medical care, books, vacations, and other entertainment. We’d take more leisure and patronize the arts more, enjoy more of the charm of life and more of the latest technology, and lead happier, more fulfilling lives.

In short, higher standards of living.

These estimates, though admittedly speculative, are actually rather conservative. If the whole world population migrated to the U.S. and earned what Americans earn, world GDP would multiply more than four-fold. That isn’t actually possible, and researchers take that into account in various ways, thus bringing estimates of the impact of open borders down to a mere doubling of world GDP. Poor countries aren’t poor because their people are defective individuals. The proof of that is that when they migrate to rich countries, they usually close most of the earnings gap quickly. Some countries are cursed by geography—it’s hard to be productive in malarial, landlocked regions of Africa—while poverty partly reflects a lack of capital, public (e.g., roads) and private (e.g., structures and equipment). Predatory, corrupt and/or foolish governments bear some of the blame. Many places are improving, but fixing countries is usually harder than moving people.

Open borders would be far more disruptive than everyone just getting a pay raise. They would probably lead in fairly short order to epic mass migrations. In the burgeoning cities of the United States and western Europe, there would be far more visible poverty than there is today. Of course, open borders would not create that poverty. In fact, they would improve it. But they would also make it visible to the rather complacent middle classes of America and Europe, for whom the border serves as a convenient blindfold.

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