I am currently enrolled in a Macroeconomics class. There is a research paper due in about 2 weeks. It can be about any macroeconomic topic (as opposed to microeconomics). Suggested topics were: fair tax, gold standard, effects of illegal immigration, effects of oil prices, etc. The paper should separate the economics from the politics (though the politics are definitely intertwined).

I want to write a paper from a Nationalist, but not openly racist perspective (mild racism = possibly OK). Also, many of the other students are covering the illegal immigration issue, and I don't want to repeat any of their topics, so I would like to avoid that subject unless I can find a unique angle.

I am open to suggestions.

Some random ideas:
The (ill) effects of the Federal Reserve Bank
The (ill) effects of illegal immigration
The (ill) effects of "affirmative action"

How about open borders between industrialized nations and the Third World? Difference in wages, effects on the industrialized, etc. There are several thoughts to expand on:


--It is argued that Third-World immigration with its lower productivity but cheaper labor will use the money to improve, until the point where labor is as skilled as Westerners, which will enable them to demand higher wages, and a balance is struck.

I wonder: if the lower productivity/lower wages offset each other, then why do companies choose to use them at all? You could just stay in the West where you pay higher wages but get higher productivity. So I don't think there is a proportional connection between lower productivity and lower wages. Therefore, I think they will keep attracting Western companies with low wages even when their productivity rises.


--It is said the West can specialize in management, economics, engineering, etc; all the stuff around the actual production. But that is only from an egalitarian viewpoint where everybody is interchangeable: in reality, not everyone can be an academician. Some will have to be workers even if higher education would be free of charge. Quite many, in fact. The effects that free trade has on these could be described.

You could go to VDARE (http://www.vdare.com/) and search for "free trade" in the search engine. From there on, all you have to do is copy and paste. There is this article (http://www.vdare.com/roberts/second_thoughts.htm) by Paul Craig Roberts, who criticizes David Ricardo's idea of comparative advantages; he says the critical factors today are capital, technology and ideas, which can be moved freely around the world. The Third World is just so big that it will never even out; we'll get all the unemployment while they get all the industry. (Paul Craig Roberts was assistant secretary of the Treasury for economic policy in the Reagan administration.)

"I was brought up, like most Englishmen, to respect free trade not only as an economic doctrine which a rational and instructed person could not doubt but almost as a part of the moral law," wrote John Maynard Keynes in 1933. And indeed, to this day, nothing gets an economist's blood boiling more quickly than a challenge to the doctrine of free trade.

Yet in that essay of 70 years ago, Keynes himself was beginning to question some of the assumptions supporting free trade. The question today is whether the case for free trade made two centuries ago is undermined by the changes now evident in the modern global economy.

How about the subject of third world immigration dragging down advanced industrial societies ? How the US was the great automotive and electronics innovator until it embraced integration and diversity ? How mono-racial societies excel economically , like Japan , Korea , Denmark ?

The more you expand on any of the above subjects , the lower your grade will be . :(

Pontiac, thanks for your response and the links. I plan to do my paper on "free trade/open borders" and the impact on the value of the dollar and different sectors of the economy. Or something like that. :cheers:

Thanks to the other posters who responded, as well.