Sunday, June 23, 2013

Bill Black — The Heritage Foundation: Where 7.8% Growth is “Moderate” and 4.4% is “Spectacular” [Where? Ecuador]

Heritage Foundation is run by Jim DeMint, the former Tea Party legislator. Heritage promptly demonstrated the impact of its new leadership with its purported study of the benefits and costs of immigration that ignored the benefits and inflated the costs. Even other conservative groups were appalled – and that was before one of the co-authors of its studies’ past writings on the inferiority of certain minorities that purportedly made assimilation fail became public. Heritage is one of many anti-think tanks where anyone with a progressive thought is shown the door.
I wondered how the new Heritage was handling Ecuador. Ecuador is a particular problem for entities like Heritage. Heritage has an “economic freedom index.” “Freedom” has a specialized meaning to Heritage – financial regulation and regulation to protect workers’ health and safety tends to be treated as a decline in freedom. Simply having the government spend money – even if the spending dramatically increases health, safety, and education – can be treated by the index as making a nation less “free.” Like the competitiveness indices created by the World Economic Forum, the Heritage indices represent faux empiricism in the service of ideological dogmas.
New Economic Perspectives
The Heritage Foundation: Where 7.8% Growth is “Moderate” and 4.4% is “Spectacular”
William K. Black, Associate Professor of Economics, UMKC


1 comment:

Ralph Musgrave said...

Any country will derive vastly more benefit from immigration if it carefully selects who to let into the country. For example far and away the most productive immigrants to the UK are from the US, Canada, Australia and Ireland, with immigrants from Muslim countries and Portugal being the least prouductive.

See tables 5.1 and 5.4 here:
http://www.ippr.org/publication/55/1598/britains-immigrants-an-economic-profile