Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Citizenship Buyouts

Freakonomics is freakenout about a Japanese solution to the downturn-- citizenship buyouts:
The program applies only to unemployed people of Japanese descent who were born abroad but now live in Japan (they’re known as nikkei). The plan pays out-of-work nikkei $3,000 to return to their country of origin, not to return until economic conditions improve in Japan.
Okay, set aside the fact that it isn't really a "citizenship buyout:"--just a jerry-built whangdoodle to get get some folks off the unemployment rolls. And set aside cheesiness: $3,000 wouldn't be much more than the price of a plane ticket back to, oh, say, Brazil (where, I surmise, most of these most of these nikkei come from). Still they're going to have to explain to us why they call the idea "weird." In a world economics is supposed to explain everything, is it (a) "uneconomic" or simply (b) inexplicable?--and if (b), isn't it time to concede that maybe economics does not explain everything. The Canadians and others have been doing buy-ins for years. Why not just do the same thing only multiplied by minus one?

Fn.: Doesn't help that they dress the piece up with a cross ref to an earlier piece in which they evidently fell for a subtle cross-cultural prank.

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