Michael Clemens' paper on barriers to emigration was featured in the Economist's Democracy in America blog.
From the Article
LAST week in the New York Times,
Neal Gabler argued
Ideas just aren’t what they used to be. Once upon a time, they could ignite fires of debate, stimulate other thoughts, incite revolutions and fundamentally change the ways we look at and think about the world.
As I see it, Mr Gabler's complaint is at bottom a lament about the rise of mass literacy and the decline of oligopoly mass media. When literacy was the privilege of a small educated elite, the typical book or periodical was relatively high-toned compared to the typical periodical or book in the age of universal literacy. That the "big ideas" which rivet the highly educated now make up smaller portion of all media content is a totally predictable consequence of the democratisation of education combined with the late-century proliferation of new forms of media and the wild proliferation of choice in the old media. As my colleague suggested yesterday, nostalgia for mid-century America is so often a veiled complaint about the loss of privilege that follows more or less definitionally from the progress of social equality. Mr Gabler's nostalgia for the age of the Mailer-Vidal beef is really no different.
Mr Gabler contends, "If our ideas seem smaller nowadays, it’s not because we are dumber than our forebears but because we just don’t care as much about ideas as they did."