Study breaks taboo, suggests that illegal immigration related to productivity slowdown

from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog...gration_related_to_productivity_slowdown.html

March 10, 2017 Thomas Lifson

Political correctness has taken another hit in a new study that violates a taboo.

At the heart of the bonanza of that market economies offer their constituents is productivity growth. Only competition in the marketplace can reliably produce innovations that produce more with less on a mass scale. Yet, the rate of productivity growth in the United States has slowed dramatically in the last few years, increasing social and political tensions as people scramble for a piece of the pie in a near-zero-sum situation. Gain-sharing is much more pleasant that pain-sharing, after all.

I imagine that already the term “rrracist!” is being thrown at a new study that points to the increase in illegal immigration as one source of our productivity problems. Marketwatch reports this morning: (hat tip: Ed Lasky)

All sorts of reasons have been trotted out to explain why U.S. productivity growth has slowed so markedly, from mismeasurement to stalling innovation to weak capital investment.

Oxford Economics has a new research note adding another theory: unauthorized workers....

...And who does that benefit, by the way? Not Republicans.

Make no mistake, political correctness is a tool of social and political control.


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Being so politically incorrect this article should really kick the ol' hornet's nest. Rhetoric aside, here are the hard facts:

• About 8 years ago the number of employed foreign born was at a decade low and productivity spiked.
• Since than the number foreign born employed's been growing steady to a record high and productivity's ground down to an unprecedented slump
• and it's so bad it's causing inflation and forcing the Fed to raise rates.
• Add to that is the fact that for many decades productivity of American workers is way higher than that of the rest of the world.

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As to whether this is proof that foreign workers are wrecking the U.S. economy, that's what this forum's for.

 

If the author would look into the economic history of the US, he'd find the answer. But, no - like so many others he's fixated on the future.

Uncle Sam has gone through the worst recession since the last one nine decades ago. It lasted from 2008 to about 2014 when jobs started to be created in the economy once again. See the BLS data demonstrating that fact here. Job creation is a key component of any productivity estimation.

Like it or not, repairing the damage done by the Sub-Prime Mess created Great Recession is going to take a great deal of time. Why?

Because it happened at precisely the wrong moment. That is, at a time in history that is unique and still with us. We are changing from the Industrial Age to the Information Age, and in America particularly the evolution has been rude. Base-level jobs have been lost by the millions having been shipped to the Far East. (Because American consumers liked the lower cost products coming from there - I hasten to add.)

America and Americans simply must wake up to the fact that the world we now live in is not the world of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, when he promised unlimited growth and income abundance for everyone. A load of BS that we swallowed hook, line and sinker.

And the challenge of tomorrow is not going to be met by cockamamie "Make America Great Again" promises. As a nation, we must look for real productivity that comes not spiked by Demand but the ability to promote higher-level jobs for people with the right educational credentials. With higher incomes earned, higher levels of Consumer Demand occur automatically.

What high-school graduates do upon graduating will determine how well they will live their lives. Those who move on to postsecondary education AND obtain a degree will do far, far better than those who do not ...

 

The employment/population ratio's useful, perhaps even more useful if we go back further and see how 2014 really did not bring in much of a rebound. In fact looking also at GDP growth rates and part time employment %'s suggests that whatever happened in '09 still hasn't stopped happening yet.

My bet is whatever impact foreign workers generate has to be weighed along w/ a lot of other policies that have come into play. That, and blaming all this on "the Sub-Prime Mess" is a bit of a stretch. mho.

 

The recession is only relevant in so much as it constrained borrowing. GDP is driven by consumption, not production. As people consume less, manufacturers will produce less because warehouses of unsold product is an unnecessary expense for them. Median household income has fallen, the banks tightened down on credit, and the Congress refused to increase spending to levels that would have reinvigorated consumption at the main street level. The combination of the 3 simply keeps us flat-lined. Ultimately, increasing household income is the only way to create sustainable growth, and I have trouble seeing that happening significantly under the current administration's policies.

 

For me that doesn't quite make sense. Some how it would seem that GDP is production, being that the letters stand for "Gross Domestic Product". Like, how can we have 'product' w/o 'production'?

 

GDP = Consumption + Private Investment + Government spending + Exports – Imports

Largely all those except government spending are driven and measured by consumption.

 

OK, b

Fine. We all understand that production and consumption are basic human activities, neither remains w/o the other, and the rest of us will work w/ say the OECD's definition of GDP:

...as "an aggregate measure of production equal to the sum of the gross values added of all resident and institutional units engaged in production (plus any taxes, and minus any subsidies, on products not included in the value of their outputs).”

http://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=1163​

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Use whatever definition you want, but it does not change that people do not produce a lot of goods and services without someone consuming them.

 

Exactly, and people don't consume a lot of goods and services without someone producing them; that's the long way of saying--

It's good we're in agreement. Cheers!

 

For the purpose of calculating GDP, they increasingly do.

 

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Production is not restricted to hard goods. Services is by and large the far greater part of GDP.

And that sector employs far, far more workers than either government or manufacturing ...

 

Exactly, the

 

Exactly, the GDP has to be 'driven by' production because it is production. The extreme left tries to say we can have a great GDP w/o production doing the 'driving' but that's flat out impossible.