
Martin Wolf interviews Lant Pritchett: Is mass immigration inevitable?
About this episode
Mass immigration is demographically essential but politically impossible – so argues Lant Pritchett, development economist and visiting professor at the London School of Economics. As populations age in the rich developed countries, immigrant workers will be needed to help with the burden of providing for the elderly. Removing the barriers might also be the quickest way to raise living standards for people in the developing world. But doing so would require swimming against a rising tide of anti-immigrant populism. Pritchett thinks he has a solution – allowing immigrants to come and work temporarily on strictly time-limited contracts. But does his idea stand up to scrutiny?
Martin Wolf is chief economics commentator at the Financial Times. You can find his column here
Subscribe to The Economics Show on Apple, Spotify, Pocket Casts or wherever you listen.
Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Get every episode summarized
Each time The Economics Show publishes, we email you a written briefing from the transcript — the topics, who appeared, and any specific claims, with the ad reads skipped.
Email me new episodesFree for 3 shows. No card needed.
Hosts & guests
No transcript yet
This episode has not been transcribed. Request it and it moves to the front of the queue.
More episodes
More from The Economics Show

Memory chip mania isn’t going away, with Dan Kim
The Economics Show

Kevin Warsh spoke — what did we learn? With Torsten Slok
The Economics Show

From "The Story of Money": How a stock market crash gave birth to modern antisem...
The Economics Show

From "Trumponomics": Can the US Actually Tax Billionaires?
The Economics Show