Joshua's Blog

A common argument that is used both in favor and against immigration is the economic impact of immigration. Through research I have found that while it is near impossible to definitively state whether immigrants in large quantities are helpful or harmful the united states economy, their effect in either direction does not have a substantial impact in most aspects of the economy. While there are significant differences in first generation immigrants and native residents their overall impact does not have significant effect on the average American. Arguably the most important is on population. Immigration in recent years has reached levels of the early 1900's except now most immigrants are from Asia and Latin america instead of Europe. According a US census survey, growth in american prime working age individuals is mostly contributed by immigrants having a ~ 2% growth in prime age immigrants with native citizens losing prime age population at ~ -0.5% growth. I was unable to find s

Opportunity Luck Hard Work Skill While all four of these factors are invaluable to achieving economic success opportunity is by far the most  important. This is because all three of the other factors are useless without opportunity. Hard work becomes meaningless without a somewhere to direct it, the same reasoning applies to skill. Luck and Opportunity can be looked at as the same. The more opportunity you have for success the more likely you are to achieve it. Luck reaches the same end but without the ability to control how many chances you have. Hard work and skill are also similar in the same way as luck and opportunity. Having either in excess fulfills the same need. However, Hard work is more valuable than skill for 2 reasons: without any hard work skill limits itself and, more importantly, hard work can generate opportunity which make hard work far more valuable. Quote source

The University of Chicago study 'Pro-social behavior in rats is modulated by social experience' experiments on how rats of different stains would behave when a rat was trapped with another rat having the ability to free the enclosed rat. The study found that how familiar the rats were with the strain was a greater factor in whether or not they would open the cage then self identity. In one experiment a rat was placed in foster with almost entirely rats of another strain. The rats were far more likely to help the strain of rats they were familiar with rather than rats of their own strain concluding self identity was not an important factor in the decisions of the rats. foster experiment