Difference between revisions of "11: Sam Harris - Fighting with Friends"

"Eric"  And well, it's four, it was four countries. It was China, India, Taiwan and Korea. And China went from zero to 60 in like, no, they were sending us nobody, and then I think there were like over 25% of all graduate students. And of course, graduate students aren't students, they're workers. So, there's a cryptic labor economy inside of the universities. And what the university system figured out was, is that in order to get this work done, we'd have to have this, these misclassified students who do the work. important. It is foreign workers. And what we would do is we would take the economic analysis, which they secretly did in 1986 and they'd subtract off the demand curve and they'd just do a supply analysis based on the demography of the baby boom going into the baby bust, which is our generation, Gen X. And that demographic alarm was sounded to get the immigration act of 1990 passed, which has like the H1B is one of its most famous features. So that's, that's a whole story about how the actual workings, I'm the guy who uncovered that and I chased that all the way down to the person who wrote that secret study that was never released, never dated, never authored.  

Eric I don't even know how to go into all of the things that are like really funny and wrong about this. Like one of which is, well are you afraid to compete with somebody from India? Well, maybe I'm afraid to compete with a hundred people from India. You know, like the issue is what is your your price point...

Sam  No, but you still...

Eric We're not interested. That would be a Coase, that's called a Coasean solution.  

 

Sam  Right.  

 

Eric  And the funny part about it, the, the hysterically funny part about it is that no capitalists who claim that they're interested in getting rid of the inefficiency that comes from being forced to use your own labor are interested in the model in which you actually pay people for their securitized rights. Because the real thing they're interested in is not the tiny inefficiency, which is called the Harberger triangle.