Commentaries (some of them cheeky or provocative) on economic topics by Ralph Musgrave. This site is dedicated to Abba Lerner. I disagree with several claims made by Lerner, and made by his intellectual descendants, that is advocates of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). But I regard MMT on balance as being a breath of fresh air for economics.
Wednesday 22 August 2018
Swedish leftie and Bloomberg reporter discovers that GDP varies with population size.
The Swedish leftie in question is Rafaela Lindberg, and in this Bloomberg article she claims immigrants have improved Swedish GDP.
Well it’s pretty stark staring obvious that immigrants raise GDP – unless every single one of the immigrants sits around doing nothing!!!! To illustrate, if one hundred immigrants arrive, ninety nine of whom do no work, with just one doing a job with an output of $X a week, then GDP will rise by …… wait for it…… $X a week! Bet that surprised you.
What Rafaela dummie Lindberg needs to explain is why having the population of Sweden rise from say 9 million to say 10 million as a result of immigration makes Swedes better off: I mean are citizens of the UK better off than citizens of Sweden simply because the population of the UK is about six times that of Sweden? If so, that’s news to me.
In short, Lindberg fails to consider the fall important factor here, namely OUTPUT PER HEAD: she simply considers total output, or GDP.
But never mind: she’s very photogenic, and appearances are all that really matters in this world. She is also female, which is good for Bloomberg’s “diversity credentials”: again, a factor which is much more important than the actual content of articles.
And finally, this is nowhere near the first time economic illiterates have failed to distinguish between GDP growth and GDP growth PER HEAD: the Labour Party made the same mistake in its submission to the House of Lords select committee on economic affiars inquiry into the economic and fiscal impact of immigration in 2007.
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While we're on the issue of people who do not make a worthwhile contribution to GDP, we should mention children. Seriously, children are totally useless for about the first twenty years of their lives. Food, health care,education, etc., it's all take and no give.
ReplyDeleteYet, we think it worthwhile to have children. You know, because they're an investment for the future.
So like children, those immigrants are initially a burden on society. But as they gain skills, they and their children become contributing members of society.