“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else.
Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.” — J M Keynes
I agree that economists have a lot of value as political philosophers. But that's largely not how economics operates nowadays, the field is mostly trying to operate as a hard science.
You expressed your opinion in a rather rugged way but I think many people share the same general sentiment, in that unlike physics or chemistry, economic and literature works are highly subjective and are often source of endless bickering.
The reason why I put economists in quoatation mark it's precisely because most modern economists, that lean to any school, hammer their models to fit their theories, and have pretty much no practical value when you try to apply that in a real scenario with infinite variables.
Unlike the hard sciences you mentioned, where every theory and model is subjected to intense scrutiny.
Economists in the public sphere are a fraction of practising economists and are often bought and paid for to push narratives. Or, as you said, hammer their models to fit their theories.
Economics as a field though does create good models and predictions, but most of those are in the private sector, where money matters and weeds out faulty models.
I think you should do a little research on the contributions of some of the Nobel laureates in economics. They have used novel economic theory to reduce world hunger, reduce childhood mortality by increasing vaccination rates, come up with clever methods to allocate public goods like the frequency spectrum and that's just the last 3 years.
You should actually read up on some of the work of some of these prize winning economists - lots of them actually have very insightful and useful contributions to society.
I cannot recommend enough the book "Who Gets What and Why" by Alvin Roth, a former Nobel Prize winner. Among other things, he created the world's first successful Kidney exchange program for donors. The book eloquently lays out how to design functional markets of exchange when money is not a resource available.
His work is easy to understand, eloquent, and literally saves lives. This is exactly the kind of thing worth celebrating.
The title is wrong, there's no such thing as the Nobel Prize for Economics, it's the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2021. Nitpick? Perhaps, but wrong nevertheless.
If the Nobel Foundation endorses a prize in his honor, then you can call it a prize in his honor, that doesn't mean you can call it a Nobel Prize. No Swede, nor any reputable newspaper or the Nobel Foundation would ever call it a Nobel Prize since it has never been recognized as one by the foundation, why would we call it that on HN?
The family actually protested pretty much immediately, not knowing that Sveriges Riksbank was trying to make another Nobel. That's why the name 'Nobel' was stripped from the prize in 1971 while it was working it's way through the court system.
So no, the Nobel family isn't going to approve another because they didn't really approve of this one and aren't likely to sign anything anymore that's trying to sneak one in.
He likely would have endorsed it - it was a field that did not really exist at the time but did fit in well with Nobel's other awards and his person legacy.
But the award and prize are today managed by the same governing body?
This seems incredibly nitpicky. We wouldn't say a Harvard degree in physics is not a real Harvard degree just because it wasn't offered by John Harvard himself.
You're right, but it was endorsed as a prize in his honor, not as a Nobel Prize with all that entails. Therefore it's incorrect to call it such. It's never called (or at least very seldomly) a Nobel Prize in Sweden as that isn't true.
It seems like that governing body should get to decide what it's called, and while this distinction is news to me it appears that they indeed do not call it a Nobel Prize.
The Foundation uses the longer name when being formal, but regularly includes the Economics Prize as a 'Nobel Prize' in headers & lists - such as their top-level menu 'Nobel Prizes' (which includes the 'Prize in Economic Sciences'), and their master list of 'Nobel Prize laureates'.
So headlines calling it a 'Nobel' match the Nobel Foundation's usage in similar summary/header contexts.
There are big questions about the amount of gravitas that mainstream economists are afforded by people in power.
Misnaming the econ prize as a "Nobel" prize and placing it's winners on the level of great physicists, chemists etc risks in exacerbating this problem.
Much of the research done by econ memorial prize winners is walked back or proven false later. It isn't hard science. Much of it is politically driven and advice and practitioners are used by politicians to justify certain actions, many of them dysfunctional or corrupt.
A Nobel-in-Chemistry went to an enthusiastic creator of chlorine gas chemical weapons (Haber). A Nobel-in-Medicine went to the inventor of the lobotomy (Moniz). Another Nobel-in-Medicine was awarded for false research about roundworms-causing-cancer (Fibiger). A Nobel-in-Peace went to the architect of secret carpet bombing that likely killed over 100,000 civilians in a non-combatant country (Kissinger).
The Econ prize's shorter, more modern history has a better record!
If the Economics prize is OK with the Nobel Foundation, which administers the prize along with the others, that should be good enough.
(Did you know that the "MacArthur Fellows" – sometimes called "Genius Grants" – were also invented by the board of the MacArthur Foundation after John MacArthur's death?)
The current title ("Nobel Prize for Economics") is simply false. The official name is "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2021", which can be shortened to "Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences".
Note that this is meaningfully and on purpose unlike the Physics or Chemistry prize situation.
What's more, even the current name is controversial, seeing as it misappropriates the Nobel name with the goal of elevating the social status of some economists. Peter Nobel, for one, seems to be furious about it, and it definitely isn't done according to the wishes of Alfred Nobel.
For those not in the know on econ research (like me!) I believe this comment refers to the fact that Alan Krueger was deeply involved in this work, but that the Nobel committee only honors living scientists.
Edit: downvotes suggest some context may be needed. Pearl win the Turing award for casual inference but has been critical of the current Nobel recipients' methods.
Gotta love it when the prize document itself highlights the pitfalls of the methodology used by the winners...
> Despite the enormous increase in labour supply, Card found no negative effects for Miami residents with low levels of education. Wages did not fall and unemployment did not increase relative to the other cities.
> while people who immigrated at an earlier time are negatively affected. One explanation for this is that the natives switch to jobs that require good native language skills, and where they do not have to compete with immigrants for jobs.
If this isn't terrible methodology I don't know what is.
Literally using bad data to say immigration doesn't affect the labour market, then saying it does for same-language jobs. So it obviously does but language is a barrier to entry for some jobs. Literally invalidates the first point.
I don't understand how this is bad data? It seems to me that you are asserting a claim "immigration doesn't effect the labor market" that was never made.
> Card found no negative effects for Miami residents with low levels of education. Wages did not fall and unemployment did not increase relative to the other cities.
Additionally, the claims about specific types of effects on the labour market that you quote were from follow up studies and also don't conflict with the results of the earlier study.
Low-income residents on average, had no negative effects but follow up studies split up that low income group and found that one subgroup benefits and another subgroup suffers.
The line above the first I quoted:
> Despite the enormous increase in labour supply, Card found no negative effects for Miami residents with low levels of education.
Then a few lines down (my first post), it said there were negative effects for previous immigrants with low levels of education. They made the assertion, then disproved it in the same paragraph, supposedly this is a highlight of the award?
It literally says an increase in immigration negatively affects the labour market for previous immigrants/workers who speak the same language. This != no negative effect...
The previous conclusion ignores a bunch of other factors.
You seem to be asserting that you can't make a statistical claim about a larger group unless that claim applies to every single possible subgroup? That is a rather ridiculous standard that would invalidate pretty much every single statistical claim ever made...
> The previous conclusion ignores a bunch of other factors.
Which ones?
Edit: You significantly edited your comment during my response. My response to your edits follows:
> They made the assertion, then disproved it in the same paragraph, supposedly this is a highlight of the award?
There is nothing disproving the original claim. The follow up studies performed more detailed analysis that looked at effects on subgroups to increase our understanding of the effects of immigration beyond what the original study found. This is a highlight because the original study was valuable not just for its results but for the methedology that facilitated a bunch of further research.
> To examine how this huge influx of workers affected the labour market in Miami, David Card compared the wage and employment trends in Miami with the evolution of wages and employment in four comparison cities.
> Despite the enormous increase in labour supply, Card found no negative effects for Miami residents with low levels of education. Wages did not fall and unemployment did not increase relative to the other cities. This study generated large amounts of new empirical work, and we now have a better understanding of the effects of immigration.
Look at the conclusion: "Card found NO negative effects for Miami residents with low levels of education." NO negative effects is quite the statement.
Now, the follow up studies:
> or example, follow-up studies have shown that increased immigration has a positive effect on income for many groups who were born in the country, while people who immigrated at an earlier time are negatively affected. One explanation for this is that the natives switch to jobs that require good native language skills, and where they do not have to compete with immigrants for jobs.
Now that's a negative effect. He made the assertion of NO negative effects.
In second year economics my prof would have failed me for such a basic conclusion. Look at influx of people, compare unemployment rates to other cities, make conclusion from that.
When immigration happens there's things happening on both sides of the supply/demand curve. Immigrants bring money, they also are labour. Different groups bring varying amounts of supply/demand. They compete for various jobs depending on their level of education (including language). There's also undocumented employment.
Anyhow, there's no mention of the wealth of the immigrants (often western nations are recipients of capital flight), no mention of aggregate demand, it says wages didn't fall but no mention of inflation and wage growth (ie. real wages), etc...
And if a study is so easily invalidated (sorry, elaborated upon), what's the point? Anyhow, it stuck out to me because it's an oft-cited study despite being incredibly basic and flawed (and many studies since more or less disproving it).
Anyhow, it's bad data (well, bad methodology from start to finish) because it draws a conclusion based on correlation between immigration and unemployment/wages without considering a ton of factors in between. It's like taking a chart of AAPL, GOOG, saying one depends on the other because they both go up during the same timeframe, ignoring everything else that's happening in the economy and tech industry.
Edit - it should also be mentioned, that literally the last ~5 or so years of politics in the west have centred around inequality, the plight of uneducated workers in the western world, globalism's effect of living conditions in the western world, etc... Populism on both the left and right is a thing because of it. It's pretty clear that a significant segment is being left behind. Wage stagnation IS a thing, and we know it because there's a lot of hindsight in the last 30 years. And Covid exacerbated inequality, with educated workers increasing their net worth drastically while lockdowns wreaked havoc on large segments of the economy. The cited study says absolutely nothing about the labour market, except that in one time and place, unemployment and wages didn't go down.
>> In second year economics my prof would have failed me for such a basic conclusion.
This is a hilarious comment. You are saying that your economics professor would have failed you for making a claim akin to what one of these three EconomicsNobellaureates claimed in a very well known, classic article in the labor literature? I'm an economics professor and I would be delighted to see work like this from an undergrad!
>> Now that's a negative effect. He made the assertion of NO negative effects.
What you and later studies have identified is that there may be heterogeneous causal effects across groups. There is a large literature on this topic!
>> if a study is so easily invalidated...
I'm not worried about this. You have not "invalidated" this study with five minutes of thinking!
>>> it's bad data (well, bad methodology from start to finish) because it draws a conclusion based on correlation between immigration and unemployment/wages
1. It is not bad methodology. That is literally what half of the prize which went to Imbens and Angrist is about. This is a methodology which permits making causal claims in the absence of an experiment!
2. It is not drawing a conclusion based on a correlation.
For more information about what they actually did and how it works (and this is a big interesting topic!) you might benefit from the Nobel Foundation's scientific background paper on this prize, here: https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2021/10/advanced-economic...
So an appeal to authority? The same organization that thought a US President that destabilized the middle east and assassinated people via drones deserved the Nobel Peace prize?
I'm not sure what point you are trying to make, but you may be under some misapprehension about how the prizes are awarded.
The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded by the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, which is appointed by the Norwegian Parliament. They decided Obama was worthy.
The Nobel Prize in Economics (or, as everyone is fond of pointing out: "the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Science in Honor of Alfred Nobel") is awarded by the central bank of Sweden.
> It's like taking a chart of AAPL, GOOG, saying one depends on the other because they both go up during the same timeframe, ignoring everything else that's happening in the economy and tech industry.
That's funny because the reason these researchers are so lauded is precisely because they found novel methodologies to avoid doing exactly the sort of purely correlative analysis that you describe.
To put it extremely, extremely politely this is a minority opinion in the economics profession. (More accurate would be to say no one thinks this.)
I don't do reduced-form causal inference work myself, but I recognize that it is widespread and extremely influential throughout the profession.
You can of course argue that someone else should have received the prize. My own preferred candidates did not win. But this work was going to win eventually for sure and to argue that there's a lot of work from the last decade which deserved to win is not credible.
Every human has needs and desires that translate into demand for work. Immigration not only supplies more work it also results in more demand for work. You earn $15 per hour and you spend it all. People trade their time because they want other people's time. Nobody is really worse off here. If employers abuse their power to pay the immigrants less then the surplus ends up with the employer. It's the employers turn to spent all his money. If he doesn't there won't be any opportunities for regular citizens.
The original nation of the immigrant loses workers and consumers. Some workers in the host nation lost bargaining power. There's lost efficiency as the newly arrived immigrants generally accept a worse job than they had back home (see all the immigrants with degrees working menial jobs).
Free movement is a great idea, but it's essentially colonialism version 2. We take the best and brightest from developing nations and make them servants.
That birthdate difference sounds like the difference in NHL kids' success that's based on how early in the year you were born. Statistically the earlier born kids get more mass and muscle and get moved to better teams faster.
71 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 184 ms ] threadA notable example: Krugman.
Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.” — J M Keynes
http://www.equitablegrowth.org/the-general-theory-of-employm...
Meanwhile, real economists, with a proven track record: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_School_(economics)
Economics as a field though does create good models and predictions, but most of those are in the private sector, where money matters and weeds out faulty models.
I cannot recommend enough the book "Who Gets What and Why" by Alvin Roth, a former Nobel Prize winner. Among other things, he created the world's first successful Kidney exchange program for donors. The book eloquently lays out how to design functional markets of exchange when money is not a resource available.
His work is easy to understand, eloquent, and literally saves lives. This is exactly the kind of thing worth celebrating.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
When someone says "North Korea", do you inform them that the correct title is "The Democratic People's Republic of Korea"?
So no, the Nobel family isn't going to approve another because they didn't really approve of this one and aren't likely to sign anything anymore that's trying to sneak one in.
"There are some things money can't buy."
"Like what?"
"A Nobel prize, for example."
"We'll see about that."
IMHO, the correct title should be “The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2021”.
Rationale: A prize for economics was not part of Alfred Nobel’s will. This prize was founded in the 1960’s by Riksbanken (The Central Bank of Sweden).
This seems incredibly nitpicky. We wouldn't say a Harvard degree in physics is not a real Harvard degree just because it wasn't offered by John Harvard himself.
Thus, it's more like the comment you were replying to — creating a new degree program within Harvard University that John Harvard didn't authorize.
Your analogy would be more accurate if this were not in fact created, endorsed, and run by the Nobel Foundation.
https://www.thelocal.se/20211011/trio-share-nobel-prize-for-...
Umm Brookes
So headlines calling it a 'Nobel' match the Nobel Foundation's usage in similar summary/header contexts.
Misnaming the econ prize as a "Nobel" prize and placing it's winners on the level of great physicists, chemists etc risks in exacerbating this problem.
Much of the research done by econ memorial prize winners is walked back or proven false later. It isn't hard science. Much of it is politically driven and advice and practitioners are used by politicians to justify certain actions, many of them dysfunctional or corrupt.
> Much of the research done by econ memorial prize winners is walked back or proven false later. It isn't hard science.
This is not just true. Econ price almost always well earned, like now. Maybe there is some, but I can't think anyone who don't deserve it.
A Nobel-in-Chemistry went to an enthusiastic creator of chlorine gas chemical weapons (Haber). A Nobel-in-Medicine went to the inventor of the lobotomy (Moniz). Another Nobel-in-Medicine was awarded for false research about roundworms-causing-cancer (Fibiger). A Nobel-in-Peace went to the architect of secret carpet bombing that likely killed over 100,000 civilians in a non-combatant country (Kissinger).
The Econ prize's shorter, more modern history has a better record!
The prize in Physics is the "Nobel Prize if Physics", and so are the other ones. The difference is intentional.
A self-respecting discipline starts its own prize instead of buying legitimacy.
Computer Science has the Turing Award, not the ACM Prize in Computer Science in Memory of Alfred Nobel.
(Did you know that the "MacArthur Fellows" – sometimes called "Genius Grants" – were also invented by the board of the MacArthur Foundation after John MacArthur's death?)
The current title ("Nobel Prize for Economics") is simply false. The official name is "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2021", which can be shortened to "Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences".
Note that this is meaningfully and on purpose unlike the Physics or Chemistry prize situation.
What's more, even the current name is controversial, seeing as it misappropriates the Nobel name with the goal of elevating the social status of some economists. Peter Nobel, for one, seems to be furious about it, and it definitely isn't done according to the wishes of Alfred Nobel.
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Econom... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_controversies#Econ...
Also see Monocasa's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28830961
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/10/th...
Check out Angrist's book: "Mastering 'Metrics: The Path from Cause to Effect" https://press.princeton.edu/books/ebook/9781400852383/master... https://www.masteringmetrics.com/
"2021 Economics Nobel: Natural experiments help answer important questions" (an in-page header)
...or...
"2021 Economics Nobel: Card, Angrist, & Imbens"
...or even if it fits...
"2021 Economics Nobel to Card, Angrist, & Imbens for natural experiments"
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2118030
Edit: downvotes suggest some context may be needed. Pearl win the Turing award for casual inference but has been critical of the current Nobel recipients' methods.
> overlook[s] the two Fundamental Laws of causal inference.
1. The law of Counterfactuals and 2. The Law of Conditional Independence
You can find preprints from Pearl online or even some presentations that cover these definitions. His books as well.
I don't know how this applies to the work by the economists. I think Gelman at Columbia talks about Pearl and SCMs and the whole thing.
> Despite the enormous increase in labour supply, Card found no negative effects for Miami residents with low levels of education. Wages did not fall and unemployment did not increase relative to the other cities.
> while people who immigrated at an earlier time are negatively affected. One explanation for this is that the natives switch to jobs that require good native language skills, and where they do not have to compete with immigrants for jobs.
If this isn't terrible methodology I don't know what is.
Literally using bad data to say immigration doesn't affect the labour market, then saying it does for same-language jobs. So it obviously does but language is a barrier to entry for some jobs. Literally invalidates the first point.
> Card found no negative effects for Miami residents with low levels of education. Wages did not fall and unemployment did not increase relative to the other cities.
Additionally, the claims about specific types of effects on the labour market that you quote were from follow up studies and also don't conflict with the results of the earlier study.
Low-income residents on average, had no negative effects but follow up studies split up that low income group and found that one subgroup benefits and another subgroup suffers.
The line above the first I quoted: > Despite the enormous increase in labour supply, Card found no negative effects for Miami residents with low levels of education.
Then a few lines down (my first post), it said there were negative effects for previous immigrants with low levels of education. They made the assertion, then disproved it in the same paragraph, supposedly this is a highlight of the award?
It literally says an increase in immigration negatively affects the labour market for previous immigrants/workers who speak the same language. This != no negative effect...
The previous conclusion ignores a bunch of other factors.
You seem to be asserting that you can't make a statistical claim about a larger group unless that claim applies to every single possible subgroup? That is a rather ridiculous standard that would invalidate pretty much every single statistical claim ever made...
> The previous conclusion ignores a bunch of other factors.
Which ones?
Edit: You significantly edited your comment during my response. My response to your edits follows:
> They made the assertion, then disproved it in the same paragraph, supposedly this is a highlight of the award?
There is nothing disproving the original claim. The follow up studies performed more detailed analysis that looked at effects on subgroups to increase our understanding of the effects of immigration beyond what the original study found. This is a highlight because the original study was valuable not just for its results but for the methedology that facilitated a bunch of further research.
> To examine how this huge influx of workers affected the labour market in Miami, David Card compared the wage and employment trends in Miami with the evolution of wages and employment in four comparison cities.
> Despite the enormous increase in labour supply, Card found no negative effects for Miami residents with low levels of education. Wages did not fall and unemployment did not increase relative to the other cities. This study generated large amounts of new empirical work, and we now have a better understanding of the effects of immigration.
Look at the conclusion: "Card found NO negative effects for Miami residents with low levels of education." NO negative effects is quite the statement.
Now, the follow up studies:
> or example, follow-up studies have shown that increased immigration has a positive effect on income for many groups who were born in the country, while people who immigrated at an earlier time are negatively affected. One explanation for this is that the natives switch to jobs that require good native language skills, and where they do not have to compete with immigrants for jobs.
Now that's a negative effect. He made the assertion of NO negative effects.
In second year economics my prof would have failed me for such a basic conclusion. Look at influx of people, compare unemployment rates to other cities, make conclusion from that.
When immigration happens there's things happening on both sides of the supply/demand curve. Immigrants bring money, they also are labour. Different groups bring varying amounts of supply/demand. They compete for various jobs depending on their level of education (including language). There's also undocumented employment.
Anyhow, there's no mention of the wealth of the immigrants (often western nations are recipients of capital flight), no mention of aggregate demand, it says wages didn't fall but no mention of inflation and wage growth (ie. real wages), etc...
And if a study is so easily invalidated (sorry, elaborated upon), what's the point? Anyhow, it stuck out to me because it's an oft-cited study despite being incredibly basic and flawed (and many studies since more or less disproving it).
Anyhow, it's bad data (well, bad methodology from start to finish) because it draws a conclusion based on correlation between immigration and unemployment/wages without considering a ton of factors in between. It's like taking a chart of AAPL, GOOG, saying one depends on the other because they both go up during the same timeframe, ignoring everything else that's happening in the economy and tech industry.
Edit - it should also be mentioned, that literally the last ~5 or so years of politics in the west have centred around inequality, the plight of uneducated workers in the western world, globalism's effect of living conditions in the western world, etc... Populism on both the left and right is a thing because of it. It's pretty clear that a significant segment is being left behind. Wage stagnation IS a thing, and we know it because there's a lot of hindsight in the last 30 years. And Covid exacerbated inequality, with educated workers increasing their net worth drastically while lockdowns wreaked havoc on large segments of the economy. The cited study says absolutely nothing about the labour market, except that in one time and place, unemployment and wages didn't go down.
This is a hilarious comment. You are saying that your economics professor would have failed you for making a claim akin to what one of these three Economics Nobel laureates claimed in a very well known, classic article in the labor literature? I'm an economics professor and I would be delighted to see work like this from an undergrad!
>> Now that's a negative effect. He made the assertion of NO negative effects.
What you and later studies have identified is that there may be heterogeneous causal effects across groups. There is a large literature on this topic!
>> if a study is so easily invalidated...
I'm not worried about this. You have not "invalidated" this study with five minutes of thinking!
>>> it's bad data (well, bad methodology from start to finish) because it draws a conclusion based on correlation between immigration and unemployment/wages
1. It is not bad methodology. That is literally what half of the prize which went to Imbens and Angrist is about. This is a methodology which permits making causal claims in the absence of an experiment!
2. It is not drawing a conclusion based on a correlation.
For more information about what they actually did and how it works (and this is a big interesting topic!) you might benefit from the Nobel Foundation's scientific background paper on this prize, here: https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2021/10/advanced-economic...
The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded by the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, which is appointed by the Norwegian Parliament. They decided Obama was worthy.
The Nobel Prize in Economics (or, as everyone is fond of pointing out: "the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Science in Honor of Alfred Nobel") is awarded by the central bank of Sweden.
That's funny because the reason these researchers are so lauded is precisely because they found novel methodologies to avoid doing exactly the sort of purely correlative analysis that you describe.
I don't do reduced-form causal inference work myself, but I recognize that it is widespread and extremely influential throughout the profession.
You can of course argue that someone else should have received the prize. My own preferred candidates did not win. But this work was going to win eventually for sure and to argue that there's a lot of work from the last decade which deserved to win is not credible.
The original nation of the immigrant loses workers and consumers. Some workers in the host nation lost bargaining power. There's lost efficiency as the newly arrived immigrants generally accept a worse job than they had back home (see all the immigrants with degrees working menial jobs).
Free movement is a great idea, but it's essentially colonialism version 2. We take the best and brightest from developing nations and make them servants.