 Thanks a lot for being here, Pete. Thanks a lot for the invitation. It's an honor. It's nice to see a former colleague in the audience. So I study, I'm an economist, and I study migration and foreign aid, among other things. So I'm going to focus on particular aspects of this book. And you can understand everything I thought when reading this brilliant and really rich text by coming with me on a little journey to 1857. This woman is named Lucy. She lived in Massachusetts. The kid on the left is named John. He lived in North Carolina. And the question that the book begins with and explores from beginning to end is what does Lucy owe to John? John is poor and far from Lucy in every social geographic sense. Not what would be virtuous if Lucy did for John, but what would be things that would violate justice if Lucy did not do them for John. What is she obligated to do for him? And I'm going to walk through four proposed answers to this question, among many that are in the book. And Lomas Quintesson discard one by one the first three that I'm going to talk about and arrive at the fourth as one of the ones that they find legitimate. So the first answer you might give is nothing. Lucy owes nothing to John at all. Why? Because you might be one of a subschool of followers of John Rawls and believe that justice is defined within groups of citizens. And remember this is 1857, so just a few months ago, the Supreme Court declared that John is not a citizen. In fact, they declared that all persons of African descent, free or not, were not citizens. So if that is indeed the defining criterion of the spheres within which justice happens, then really nothing that Lucy does or doesn't do for John could have any just or unjust content. It would be an ill-posed question. So Lomas Quintesson attacked that view to me completely convincingly and much more sophisticatedly than I could have. I have never been able to accept the completely anti-cosmopolitan position for the more amateurish and simplistic reason that it can't account for acts of expatriation like this. If we feel that there was anything unjust at all about Scott vs. Sanford decision in 1857 or about the Republic of South Africa just declaring that people who lived in homelands like Baputatswana and Venda weren't citizens, then there must be something about justice that extends beyond citizenry. Not necessarily at all on completely equal terms, but certainly not zero. So the answer of nothing, Lucy owes nothing at all to John is not satisfactory. A second answer that they propose, that they explore at great length is that Lucy owes John large coerced transfers of money. So the responses to that that they explore, look, Lucy's really rich, John isn't. Isn't that unjust on its face and shouldn't there be redistribution from her to him? First of all, Lucy's not responsible for his poverty. The main reason John is poor is that he's enslaved. Historians are pretty sure that in this photo he's enslaved at the time. And Lucy, historians among you might recognize that this Lucy is Lucy Stone, who is a well-known abolitionist. So it would be hard to declare that she is personally responsible for the local political and economic institution that is principally responsible for John's poverty. So as a form of restitution, it's not easy to justify. Another problem is that suppose she were to be obliged to transfer money to the Thomas Bragg regime. He was the governor of North Carolina at the time. We can guess that he might not have used much of that money to benefit the population of North Carolina that was of African descent given that he went on to become the attorney general of the Confederacy. We might have good reason to believe that transfers to the Bragg regime would strengthen the very local political and economic institutions that were keeping John poor. If she could somehow get transfers in kind or in cash directly to John and bypass the regime, many forms of lasting change that she could have done for him like trying to give him schooling would have been actively subverted by the local political and economic institutions. The more education kids like John got, the more threatened the local power structure was and we can reasonably assume that they would actively try to keep those schools either closed or ineffective. To me, a profound contribution that the book makes is to make this link between questions of justice and questions of fact. So I point out this extreme example just to hopefully accurately portray the case that if we believe, and this is a factual claim, that global poverty is primarily caused by local political and economic institutions, then that has direct implications for the obligations that we have towards the distant global poor. You don't necessarily have to accept the first premise to believe that that is a connection, that that's an if-then. As a development economist and an economic historian, I think that they get the literature exactly right. So I'm talking about Darona Jamolu, Jim Robinson, Avner Greif, Stanley Engerman, Kenneth Sokoloff, and it almost goes without saying, the great recently lost Douglas North, that there's really a close to a consensus among the leading economic scholars of this issue that local political and economic institutions are the principal determinant of long-term economic growth and power re-relection. Now, you could debate about the effects of outsiders on those local political and economic institutions. It's certainly not zero, Nathan Nunn at Harvard has documented long-term effects of slavery in Africa. It would be hard to argue that the activities of colonizers in the Belgian Congo were irrelevant to the local political and economic institutions that DR Congo has right now, but it would likewise be difficult to argue that the extraordinary wealth and prosperity of Hong Kong has nothing to do with colonization either. And of course there are countries like Ethiopia, which is one of the poorest places in the world and was never colonized. So this is not a simple relationship at all. And you could debate these factual claims, but I think they make a very balanced assessment of the literature and certainly it is a defensible claim that there is the primacy of institutions and the ambiguity of the effect of foreign interventions on those institutions is such that there is not a clear responsibility of people in today's rich countries for that poverty across the board. Certainly not across the board. Now, how about a third proposal? Lucy owes it to John to forcibly prevent kids like him from coming to Massachusetts, block them by the border, maybe stop them from leaving. She owes that to him. Lo mas cantes on go through a variety of arguments for why people could hypothetically believe that to be true and demolish all of them in sometimes spectacular fashion. You could argue for example that Lucy owes it to her white neighbors to preserve their freedom of association because they prefer associating with white people in Massachusetts. And I hope I don't even need to comment on that one, but Lo mas cantes on do take these things very seriously and they point out among many other things that such an obligation would violate Lucy's right to associate with black people if she wants to. And there are many, many other reasons why her obligation to preserve others' freedom of association is problematic at best. Another reason why you might think that Lucy owes it to kids like John to prevent people from like him from coming from North Carolina to Massachusetts is the fact that in 1852 Massachusetts got compulsory public schooling. So as of 1857 if a kid like him who certainly has zero schooling shows up in Massachusetts they're going to get schooling and that's going to impose a cost on other people. Now Lo mas cantes on takes this very seriously. They're very skeptical of coercive taxation. They make the core point that forcibly stopping people at the border is only one of many ways that you could address that fiscal problem. Maybe I differ slightly with the range of policy tools that they talk about. For example they discuss and pretty much rule out as unsustainable ways to have immigrants have a delayed period before which they can benefit from social services or mechanisms for them to pay for social services themselves. I wouldn't rule those out for the simple reason that we have such things right now and they work okay social security. You cannot get any of it until you have paid into the system for 40 quarters. So minimum 10 years probably longer unless you work every quarter. That's a compromise. That's saying we understand that if you come at 63 and you don't work for 10 years you're not going to have any public protection for your retirement and you might end up starving on the street but that's too bad because we are making a compromise between the free riding problem and the accessibility problem. I think there's maybe more room for compromise than the book talks about. The book is much more skeptical of the persistence of most kind of social services I would say but I think it's not the only answer you could come to which doesn't affect at all the core point that stopping John from coming to Massachusetts is just one of a variety of ways you could address the issue of taking money from other Massachusettsians, other base staters I should say, to school him. Finally, there's an entire chapter on brain drain that to me because I work on this is just worth the price of admission itself. So a third reason that you could hypothetically say Lucy owes it to kids like John to trap kids like him in North Carolina and not let them into Massachusetts is that getting to the north is difficult. It's costly. You have to have a lot of smarts and drive and savvy in order to make it in the north particularly if you haven't had a good education and that means that some of the smartest, most energetic kids are going to be the first ones to leave and that somehow black communities of North Carolina at this time would lose from his migration. Now they go through a range of answers to this proposal, ultimately ruling it out. I think it's just brilliant. One of the things they talk about is, well, you could be concerned that if there was education that he received, it was black communities who were paying for it themselves and their investment is lost when he goes. And I think that's not a serious objection. I got primary schooling in Salt Lake City, Utah and then left and it was not a financial investment that they made in the expectation of a cash return. It was a, that was paid for so that I could pursue my dreams wherever they took me and I was never asked to pay it back and I should never be asked to pay it back. They also talk about the idea that natural endowments, not the expenditure on schooling, but the natural smarts of kids like John could be lost to black communities of the South if they're allowed to leave. They go through a detailed treatment of the question, do you own your natural talents? Do you own your brain? I would go even further than they go in the book and just point out that if you actually believe that people should be blocked from leaving or taxed because of their natural talents, then it would be interesting to read a paper by Greg Mankiew where he proposes a tax on height that is actually enormous. And for some of the people in this room would mean tens of thousands of dollars a year going to the federal government due to the natural endowment of your height which has been shown by I think it's Ann Case and a co-author to affect your income. Among many other things, for example being born in a rich country, if you really believe that the things you acquired at birth should be taxed away just because you have them like brains, like height, like your citizenship that you received at birth, then you're signing up for a very large tax to be redistributed to the world. I would go even further than they do. Five more minutes? Is it okay? On brain drain, the very phrase brain drain is a hobby horse of mine. It was coined in 1963 by tabloid journalists in Great Britain to talk about the departure of British scientists for places like the US. It's a pejorative term. There's no way I could tell you that your country is experiencing a drain and have that be good news. It's a pejorative little rhyme. And it really embodies the assumption that the departure of skilled people does harm. It harms development, causes harm. And what I've pointed out before that if I say that the departure of skilled people from Haiti, for example, causes under development in Haiti, that is synonymous with saying that stopping skilled migration by any means is sufficient, not just necessary, but sufficient to cause greater development. Because cause implies all else equal. And all else equal in the case of departure includes my reasons for departure. So if my reasons don't change and my activities do, if my desire to give Pete my wallet doesn't change but he ends up with my wallet, that's coercion. So it is to say skilled migration causes under development is logically synonymous with saying that forcing me not to migrate as a skilled person is sufficient to cause development. Those are the same statement. And when rephrased in that way, sometimes just rephrasing a sentence can make it clear like Carl Hempel and other philosophers of science like to do, there's no evidence for that at all. And I really mean none ever. There is no poor neighborhood that has been shown to have been improved or developed by preventing smart people from leaving there. There's no poor region of any country and there's certainly no nation that has ever been shown to get better medical care or conduct more innovation or have more entrepreneurship or have anything else good happening in it due to having coercively stopped smart people from leaving there. It's really entirely conjectural that that could even happen and maybe too conjectural to even use phrases like brain drain. So I tried to come up with a similarly rhyming cute little phrase and failed utterly. My co-author, Lance Pritchett, proposed cortex vortex, which I think is just a failed attempt with all due respect to land. I just call it skilled migration. So how about a fourth and final proposal for what Lucy owes to John? That Lucy owes John non-interference. That if John wants to go to Massachusetts, she actually owes it to him not to stop him and if she does stop him, she is doing something that is unjust. And this to me is just beyond question. In this case, there were certainly cases where even the police department of good old Boston stopped, detained, held, runaway slaves, forced them to go home and there were huge demonstrations and riots against this. It was considered something gravely unjust. Retrospectively, I think it's pretty obvious that it was unjust, but even at the time it was recognized that this was terribly unjust. And the fundamental mental transformation that Lomas Quintesson invited us to on this particular point, and I think it's just tectonic in its effect on your thinking, is that migration barriers are active, not passive. Stopping somebody from moving is stopping them from moving. People don't like to think about this, but here is a two sentences from Adam Smith that made it clearer to me than I could say. Every man is much more deeply interested in whatever immediately concerns himself than in what concerns another man. To hear perhaps of the death of another person with whom we have no particular connection will give us less concern, will spoil our stomach, or break our rest much less than a very significant disaster has befallen ourselves. So certainly we place much less weight on people who are distant from us. Next sentence, But though the ruin of our neighbor may affect us much less than a very small misfortune of our own, we must not ruin him to prevent that small misfortune, nor even to prevent our own ruin. That is, there's something fundamentally asymmetrical that does not require anything like starry-eyed full cosmopolitanism of Lucy equally caring about John with her own sister to believe that she has a responsibility not to stop him from escaping something that causes his poverty, that is to ruin him, not even to prevent her own ruin. Who is doing the act is critical. And there's something that puzzles me always about how people talk about migration and it's phrases like this, Donald Trump's companies have sought visas to import workers. Notice the transitive verb. Import has a direct object. It's something that somebody does to somebody else. Rich States told to stop poaching doctors. Again, transitive verb, direct object. Michigan wants visas to bring immigrants to Detroit. Transitive verb. This book from University of Minnesota Press. Migrants for export. Export, transitive verb, direct object. This is a fantasy. It's actually objectively wrong. And it's like a woman going to work at a firmful of men and saying, well, what happened there? Well, the men brought her in. If you doubt that, I'm sure there are many people from other countries in this room. After the talk, just ask them, what was it like when the U.S. brought you here? What happened? Tell me about what the United States did to you in order for you to be here. They'll probably be kind of puzzled and say, well, I did that. It's not an accurate representation of that event to call it something that a country did to somebody. So why would people do this? Well, it certainly changes the ethical calculus completely. I should say it changes the calculus of justice completely. In that, if I've had people say to me many times, well, what's my responsibility to solve the poverty of the world? Why do I need to bring Haitians here? Well, you don't need to bring Haitians here. But that has nothing to do with migration. Migration is either you allow the Haitian to come or you actively stop them or hire somebody to do it with violence. But there's no other option. There was a time when we shackled up people and put them in ships and sent them places, but that doesn't happen anymore except in extremely limited cases. You either block it or you don't. And that's the calculus of justice in this case. It has nothing to do with this. And this fantasy might exist for the purpose of letting people reach a different conclusion on what is just or unjust than the one that is brilliantly and I think richly defended in this book. With that, I want to move on to other subjects and thanks a lot.