Famed Physicist Stephen Hawking Embraces the "Push/Pull" Model of Migration to Explain Alien Invasion Patterns
In the midst of the ongoing economic crisis, renewed faith in Keynesianism, and wild stock market dynamics, I have worried about economics' ability to explain and predict human behavior but today the Los Angeles Times offers good news. As reported in this story , basic economics may be able to explain which space aliens will visit Earth.
Recall from Sjaastad's well known 1962 JPE paper with almost 2000 cites that migration represents an investment decision. The rational migrant recognizes that there is fixed cost of moving (selling your home where you live, packing your stuff, leaving your social network at your origin) and there is a variable cost of moving a far distance (transportation cost). In addition, you lose out on your origin location's stream of wages and opportunities that you would have earned had you remained there. The rational migrant compares this to the expected present discounted value of opportunities at each potential destination and moves if the maximum across the possible destinations in terms of expected benefits exceed the costs.
With this setup, we can now discuss space aliens. You can think of inter-planetary travel as a type of migration and basic economics should also explain such intergalactic patterns. According to Stephen Hawking, space aliens are not altruists. They will only arrive on Earth if their quality of life on their original planet stinks. He voices a Jared Diamond style claim of "collapse" that these green aliens have exhausted all of their home planet's natural resources and now that they are starving , they are angry and ready to kick some earth ass. Hawking believes that they are here to colonize us and grab out stuff. My son would not hand off his legos without a fight. Will you work with my young Napoleon to save Earth?
If Hawking is right, then this is a funky Roy model, Earth will only be visited by angry ETs because the happy aliens will be happy enough at their origin to not pay the costs to travel all the way here and thus they won't bother to come visit. This is a fundamental negative self selection case.
Switching subjects, I have just returned from a 36 hour trip to San Francisco. I had fun meeting some successful graduates of UCLA. They seemed mildly interested in my research. The next day, I gave a seminar at UC Berkeley and this was a chance for me to see many of my friends. Fridays are usually a pretty quiet day at universities but I had the chance to speak to a number of friends. My presentation was well received but I slightly shocked the audience by presenting 6 different papers and my new book's key themes all in 1 hour. I refuse to be boring and I believe that we should focus on the big ideas in our work -- too many seminars get dragged into 3rd order issues. Its not a wise strategy for a new assistant professor but I'm not that young anymore. I've decided that from now on I will only give "big think" seminars. If you don't want to hear such stuff, then don't invite me baby!
Recall from Sjaastad's well known 1962 JPE paper with almost 2000 cites that migration represents an investment decision. The rational migrant recognizes that there is fixed cost of moving (selling your home where you live, packing your stuff, leaving your social network at your origin) and there is a variable cost of moving a far distance (transportation cost). In addition, you lose out on your origin location's stream of wages and opportunities that you would have earned had you remained there. The rational migrant compares this to the expected present discounted value of opportunities at each potential destination and moves if the maximum across the possible destinations in terms of expected benefits exceed the costs.
With this setup, we can now discuss space aliens. You can think of inter-planetary travel as a type of migration and basic economics should also explain such intergalactic patterns. According to Stephen Hawking, space aliens are not altruists. They will only arrive on Earth if their quality of life on their original planet stinks. He voices a Jared Diamond style claim of "collapse" that these green aliens have exhausted all of their home planet's natural resources and now that they are starving , they are angry and ready to kick some earth ass. Hawking believes that they are here to colonize us and grab out stuff. My son would not hand off his legos without a fight. Will you work with my young Napoleon to save Earth?
If Hawking is right, then this is a funky Roy model, Earth will only be visited by angry ETs because the happy aliens will be happy enough at their origin to not pay the costs to travel all the way here and thus they won't bother to come visit. This is a fundamental negative self selection case.
Switching subjects, I have just returned from a 36 hour trip to San Francisco. I had fun meeting some successful graduates of UCLA. They seemed mildly interested in my research. The next day, I gave a seminar at UC Berkeley and this was a chance for me to see many of my friends. Fridays are usually a pretty quiet day at universities but I had the chance to speak to a number of friends. My presentation was well received but I slightly shocked the audience by presenting 6 different papers and my new book's key themes all in 1 hour. I refuse to be boring and I believe that we should focus on the big ideas in our work -- too many seminars get dragged into 3rd order issues. Its not a wise strategy for a new assistant professor but I'm not that young anymore. I've decided that from now on I will only give "big think" seminars. If you don't want to hear such stuff, then don't invite me baby!
posted by Matthew Kahn at 5:25 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home