Jeune Street

If you’ve noticed a lot of posts about migration on this blog, it’s because that’s what my work currently involves. I’m working on my boss’s book on the past, present and future of migration and one of the main ideas of the book is that migration stimulates innovation. This is something that many governments probably know already, and they have tried to tailor their migration policies to attract the most highly skilled migrants (while keeping out lower skilled labourers). While intuitively appealing, however, cherry-picking migrants may not be the most sensible public policy option.

This afternoon we were talking over one of the book chapters and Ian recommended reading The Difference, by Scott Page. Using some pretty nifty modelling tools, Page makes the case the problem solving is more effective in diverse teams than in homogenous expert ones:

When solving problems, diversity may matter as much, or even more than, individual ability. From this we can infer that organizations, firms, and universities that solve problems should seek out people with diverse experiences, training, and identities that translate into diverse perspectives and heuristics. Specifically, hiring students who had high grade point averages from the top-ranked school may be a less effective strategy than hiring good students from a diverse set of schools with a diverse set of backgrounds, majors, and electives.

There are all kinds of implications for this research, such as migration policy (which admittedly takes it to a macro scale). Wouldn’t it be better if rich-country governments opened their borders to a cross-section of humanity, rather than only the best and brightest from the developing world? This would increase the diversity of the population at all levels. While more liberal policies could produce some social strains in the short-run, it could also stimulate productivity in new ways. That is, if you need an economic justification for greater diversity.