Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

And I say “Mea culpa”

Philip Greenspun (via Newmark): With so many of America’s best and brightest making the personal choice to go into fields that, at best, transfer money from one pocket to another, I thought “Thank God we have immigrants, since if we had to rely on these folks for economic growth, we’d be toast.” (See also the […]

Philip Greenspun (via Newmark):

With so many of America’s best and brightest making the personal choice to go into fields that, at best, transfer money from one pocket to another, I thought “Thank God we have immigrants, since if we had to rely on these folks for economic growth, we’d be toast.”

(See also the comments to that blog post.)

6 Comments

  • A good point, over all, but I’d say he STRONGLY undermines himself.

    He maks no effort to show that the people he’s referring to are “America’s best and brightest”. In fact, he rather suggests that they AREN’T (‘where “A” is for “average”‘).

    I’d say that they are “America’s richest and most silver-spooned” (to mangle a metaphor or 2). Such people are, generally, not what really drives this country, anyway (though their spending of money does help).

    • By Deoxy

  • But while yesterday’s immigrants did things like build the Brooklyn Bridge, today’s are low-skilled to unskilled and are more likely contributing to the overlawyered phenomenon themselves. See the work of (speaking of) Harvard’s George Borjas on this point.

    It is concerning that our “best and brightest” seek fields that involve moving money from one spot to another instead of more original wealth creation. Our culture glamorizes politics and law, not always without reason – the conflicts inherent make for more dramatic story lines than the design of a new supercar or the management of a farm. One problem is that a globalized economy means less of an industrial focus for the United States. Another is that we devalue the trades, insisting that a young man who wants to be a plumber is a “loser” who needs to go to State U for liberal indoctrination. Still another, obviously, is the high cost and heavy bother of litigation and regulation.

  • We changed over to a service economy about 10 years ago and as David said above we have lost much of our industrial base. Without it I fail to see how real wealth can be created with or without immigration. Moving it from one pocket to the other is bound to catch up with us. I don’t think it will be pretty when it does.

    • By Dave

  • “But while yesterday’s immigrants did things like build the Brooklyn Bridge, today’s are low-skilled to unskilled and are more likely contributing to the overlawyered phenomenon themselves.”

    As a highly skilled immigrant, I should take offense to this broad generalization. But ignorance no longer offends me.

    • By Jan

  • I haven’t seen any out cry against immigration lately. What I have seen is an out cry about ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION. I have no problems with immigrants and agree that we need them. I do have a problem with illegal immigrants though. I’m getting a little sick of Liberals twisting my dislike of illegals into an attack on all immigrants. If we need changes to our immigration laws then fine, change them, but I am against people who break our laws just because they don’t agree with them. I’ve been watching the news about a search for some Egyptian students who entered the US under false pretenses, but in that same time a couple of hundred people have probably crossed our Southern Border without raising the slightest bit of interest.

  • “As a highly skilled immigrant, I should take offense to this broad generalization.”

    Generalizations aren’t ipso facto false, especially when statistically verifiable. I’m fairly certain I’m borne out here. Here is the Rector report from Heritage on this issue:

    http://www.heritage.org/Research/Immigration/bg1936.cfm