Victimhood Is Costly: Don't Warp Policies to Favor Special Groups

Politicians who find it convenient to portray locals as victims of 'outsiders' tend to ignore the economic cost of nativist policies

- RAGHURAM G. RAJAN

For an enterprising politician, perhaps the easiest political strategy nowadays is to tell unhappy voters that they are victims—of the biased policies of incumbent elites, of the schemes of other groups, of cunning foreigners.

This is especially true when the unhappy group is a distinctive and (usually) large segment of the voting population, and when those being blamed either don't vote or constitute a small share of the electorate. As long as someone else can be blamed, the enterprising politician need not demand anything from unhappy voters; simply promising an end to their victimization would be enough.

Yet, as the American essayist H.L. Mencken famously quipped, "For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong."

In most cases, the victimhood argument fits this description, which helps to explain why supposed fixes often make things worse.

For example, in many growing Indian cities today, local politicians are proposing minimum employment quotas for the locally born, arguing that too many of the new high-quality private-sector jobs are going to migrants from other parts of the country. What they fail to see is the vibrant local conditions that have attracted the best and the brightest from elsewhere. The fact that immigrants fill more of the quality jobs need not be (and is most likely not) the result of discrimination; it may simply reflect their greater merit.