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Open borders – for immigrants as well
The annual Telders Lecture, presented by Johan Norberg, at the Teldersstichting, Leiden, the Netherlands, 25 September 2003
Mankind has never before seen such a dramatic improvement of the human condition as we’ve seen in the last decades. We have heard the opposite view repeated so many times, that we take it for granted, without examining the evidence. But in a generation, the average income in developing countries has doubled. As United Nations Development Programme has observed, in the last 50 years global poverty has declined more than in the 500 years before that. The number of absolute poor – people with less than $1/day – has according to the World Bank been reduced by 200 million in the last two decades (Update: the latest figures say almost 400 million), even though world population grew by more than 1.5 billion during the same time. And there are convincing arguments that this actually underestimates the poverty reduction that has taken place.
GDP per capita of the developing countries taken as a whole (not as individual countries) grew by 3,1 per cent 1980-2000, up from 2,1 per cent 1960-80. Open poor countries are now repeating our industrial revolution, only faster. From 1780, it took England almost 60 years to double its wealth. A hundred years later, Sweden
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