Phil Gramm and Robert Topel, writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, make the case for more open immigration. Three slices:
In a country with widespread use of quotas, preferences and set-asides, we seldom see unadulterated merit, especially in academics. As board members of a foundation that awards scholarships based on merit and financial need, we have seen what merit looks like. The findings are important enough to share.
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When awarding scholarships, the foundation ignores applicants’ race and sex. We review high-school transcripts, but given the level of grade inflation, for all practical purposes, our applicants have near-perfect grades and have taken many advanced-placement courses. So transcripts and grades are of limited use in choosing among candidates. The same is true for the obligatory college essay. Other factors are more informative and distinguishing, such as extracurricular activities and whether an applicant worked while in high school. All applicants have stellar recommendations, but some letters stand out. Relative performance on standardized tests is the key differentiator among this pool of high-achieving candidates. That’s why the foundation requires all applicants to take the SAT or ACT. The average SAT score of last year’s 43 scholarship recipients was 1450, which is at the 96th percentile, and the highest score was a perfect 1600.
Once we make our selections, we ask for more biographical information as part of our counseling support. When the process is complete each year, the most common characteristic among recipients is that both parents were born in a foreign country. This was true of 62% of the recipients in 2024, about three times the share that would be expected if the students were drawn at random from the nation’s schools. Another 9% had one foreign-born parent, while only 29% had both parents born in the U.S. Parents of this year’s recipients came from China, Guatemala, India, Korea, Kuwait, Laos, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan and Vietnam. Not surprisingly in Texas, 20% of foreign-born parents were from Mexico.
These extraordinary numbers raise the question: Why did a majority of high-school seniors chosen on merit come from families with immigrant parents? Part of the reason is that foreign-born parents are on average poorer and more likely to meet the foundation’s income requirement. But there’s more to it. Based on research from the Institute for Family Studies, immigrant households are more likely to have both natural parents in the household. Also, their children were less than half as likely to have recorded behavioral problems at school, and were much less likely to have ever been expelled.
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Preventing the best and bravest from coming to our shores is a recipe for national decline. Ambition and dreams are powerful. The Finis Welch scholarship recipient this year with a perfect 1600 SAT score and foreign-born parents was asked on the scholarship application about his goals. His response: “to cure cancer.”
Stefan Bartl reminds us how rich we are today. A slice:
The remarkable leap from horse-drawn carriages to mass-produced automobiles highlights a broader phenomenon called “The Great Enrichment.” Economist Deirdre McCloskey coined ”The Great Enrichment” as a period of unprecedented economic growth and innovation that began around the Industrial Revolution. She notes that this period of prosperity was not about capital accumulation, but rather, “human creativity liberated by liberalism.” In other words, people free to innovate and build creatively drove our society to new frontiers. It was not the amount of horse drawn carriages that mattered, but the first three-wheeled vehicle that sputtered at 16 km/h, or 10 mph.
Russ Roberts talks with my Mercatus Center colleague Alain Bertaud about cities.
GMU Econ alum Dominic Pino offers an example of why the public was less than enchanted with Bidenomics. Three slices:
To bewildered Democrats who can’t imagine why an entire presidential term based on ever-larger government spending wasn’t popular with voters, here’s a good example of why Bidenomics didn’t catch on.
In 2021, Amtrak was given $66 billion in the bipartisan infrastructure law that Biden immediately claimed as his own after he signed it into law. For an idea of what that money was supposed to do, let’s go back to news coverage at the time.
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Yet service reliability on the Northeast Corridor has gotten worse, and the Christmastime travel rush this year has been a disaster.
According to the Department of Transportation, in the past three quarters, on-time performance for the Acela, Amtrak’s flagship service, has declined from 83 percent to 69 percent. On-time performance for non-Acela trains on the Northeast Corridor, Amtrak’s most-used services, went from 86 percent to 74 percent. In July, only seven of Amtrak’s 47 services had on-time performances higher than 80 percent, which is supposed to be the minimum federal standard.
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If you’re going to hype something as the largest investment of all time and talk incessantly about how “historic” and “transformational” it is, then three years later, you should be able to point to some results. If people think the service still stinks and has barely changed, they won’t thank you for spending their money. They’re going to conclude that you wasted it.
[DBx: Serious questions for proponents of industrial policy: Are experiences such as the one reported by Dominic relevant for your case? If not, why not? If so, what reason have you to think that such problems will not scuttle your plans?]
George Will remembers Rickey Henderson. A slice:
Baseball fans, debating the all-time best team, select three outfielders from a pantheon that includes Henry Aaron, Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Stan Musial, Willie Mays, Frank Robinson and Roberto Clemente. Only two of those 10 should be in the starting lineup. Rickey should start in left field and bat first: He homered in the first inning a record 81 times.
