NEW POLICY BRIEF from @JeremyLNeufeld: Economists have long touted the material benefits of immigration. But less work has been done on how immigration impacts subjective well-being.
Objective measures of income like gross domestic product (GDP) and GDP per capita are imperfect indicators of welfare. While material well-being can certainly set the stage for happiness, it doesn’t tell the whole story. 2/
Happiness research asks individuals about their happiness directly. This allows economists to compare the relative importance of various well-being factors, allowing them to paint a more complete picture. 3/
Some of the factors associated with higher average national happiness include:
✅Higher average income
✅Greater social support
✅Higher life expectancy
✅Greater equality
✅Higher perceived freedom to make choices
✅Less perceived corruption 4/
Empirical research indicates that migrants tend to show substantive gains in welfare. “Happiness research has suggested migrants find material improvements more satisfying and conducive to their well-being than non-migrants” 5/
Material gains aside, immigrants seem to become happier when they migrate to happier countries.
And immigration can increase overall happiness among native-born inhabitants too. See the positive relationship between native/foreign-born inhabitants of a country below. 6/
“Natives, like migrants, stand to benefit from increased objective well-being. The economic literature on the objective well-being of natives is large, but in short, it suggests that on average, natives will benefit…” writes @JeremyLNeufeld 7/
But in addition to reinforcing what economists have long known, happiness research can inform immigration policy in the United States. 8/
A few additional implications of the research:
✅Keeping families together matters more than permanence of immigration status
✅Legal rights afforded to migrants beyond work authorization may be unimportant if these migrants cannot bring their families with them. 9/
In a word, happiness research largely reinforces what economists have long known about migration: Migration has enormous potential to improve the lives of migrants themselves, natives in receiving countries, and those whom migrants leave behind. 10/
Policymakers would do well to study happiness research in order to craft specific solutions to the immigration process that afford the greatest satisfaction to native and non-native-born residents alike.
.@heritage publishes regular iterations of its “Mandate for Leadership” with an agenda for the next Republican administration. The prior Trump admin implemented nearly 64% of its recommendations in its 1st year.
First, the Mandate would effectively close many avenues of legal immigration by:
❌Halting H2 visa programs
❌Closing the H-1B visa program to most recent grads
❌Leveraging entire visa categories as collateral in foreign policy negotiations
It would sabotage U.S. humanitarian relief by:
❌Repealing all TPS designations, stripping almost 700,000 of legal protection + work authorization.
❌Forbidding use of DHS staff time on DACA, Uniting for Ukraine, etc.
❌Prohibiting refugee vetting, ending refugee resettlement.
NEW PAPER: Manufactured housing is an affordable option in rural areas where land prices are low. They even promise to ease the housing crunch in coastal cities where land prices are high!
To clarify, we’re not talking about vacation trailers, or 1970’s-era mobile homes. Modern manufactured homes have strict standards for structural integrity and safety. They often look like homes built on-site, but they were assembled in a factory, like a car or an airplane.
Benefits of manufactured homes include: (1) They’re safer and more efficient to make, their materials don’t have to be exposed to the elements until the house is fully assembled, and (3) they can help improve quality of housing while driving costs down.
Before we enact any reform, we have to understand the political economy of our system: whom it empowers, whom it enriches, etc.
Answering these questions will rally opinion shapers around reform, protect reforms against backlash, and help avoid unintended consequences.
Here's how the conventional wisdom explains the political economy of housing: single-family homes and large lot sizes restrict the availability of housing to buyers who will pay at least as much in local taxes as they consume in public services, such as schools.
THREAD: The cost of building public transit is out of control. We can do something about that:
Stop relying on outside consultants to do the work of government agencies. slate.com/business/2023/…
In the name of cutting costs, we’ve hollowed out government agencies, asking full-time employees to handle impossible tasks.
The result? Chaos. And lots of wasted taxpayer dollars. (After all, government contractors arguably cost even more money).
.@alon_levy produced a report for us outlining some solutions:
(1) The federal government should require that state/local transportation agencies demonstrate they already have the capacity to oversee big infrastructure projects before releasing funds. niskanencenter.org/report-so-you-…