Key Takeaways:

• Faculty member Robin Dhakal, PhD. shares his own journey from Nepal to the U.S. He reflects on leaving a country torn by civil war, finding a sense of belonging in America, and how those experiences shaped both his life and his work as an economist. 
• The blog argues that strong institutions matter more than people often realize. The author explains how things like trust, fair rules, and reliable public systems create opportunities for people and help economies grow over time. 
• Feeling like you belong can make all the difference in higher education. Looking back on his own college experience, the author credits professors who believed in him and says that same sense of support is something he now tries to give his own students. 
• Immigration has played a major role in America's success. The author points to research showing that immigrants have helped drive innovation, start businesses, and strengthen the U.S. economy because they're often willing to take risks and pursue new opportunities. 
• Investing in people early pays off later. The blog makes the case that supporting children through education, health care, and family resources creates better outcomes for individuals and for the economy as a whole. 
• As America marks its 250th anniversary, the author says the country can't take its strengths for granted. He believes maintaining strong institutions, expanding opportunity, and continuing to invest in people are what will keep the country moving forward.

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Two Hundred and Fifty Years of Becoming: How I Discovered Economics by Migrating to America

The Weight of a Birthday 

I have celebrated the Fourth of July for the past 20 years but probably not in the way most Americans do. Not because I lack gratitude for this country. I have more reason to be grateful than most. But because my relationship to America began not with fireworks and cookouts, but with a one-way ticket out of Nepal, a country where staying had become, in ways I could feel and the data would later confirm, untenable.

I was 19. Nepal was 17 years into a civil war that had normalized things no society should normalize: bodies on roads, soldiers at checkpoints, the quiet understanding that a bribe was the price of doing anything: buying groceries, crossing a district line, keeping your son out of the Army. My younger brother had just died of cancer. I was not well myself. The doctors I could afford told me, without saying it directly, that staying was a gamble I would likely lose. Leaving was not an adventure. It was triage.

"This country is not what it claims to be. And it is still the best thing we have. That is not a contradiction. That is economics."

So, I came to America. Not to a coastal city or a familiar diaspora community, but to a tiny work-college in the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina called Warren Wilson College, where I washed dishes, sorted mail, read economics in the library at midnight, and met the woman who would become my wife. The people there — faculty, staff, students who came from their own broken places — did something I didn’t know I needed more than a visa or a degree. They made me feel like I was supposed to be there.

What those professors gave me was not charity. It was an investment in human capital that had nowhere else to compound. They gave me institutional trust: the signal that this system, unlike the one I had left, would reward effort rather than connections. That signal changed the entire present value of my life’s trajectory.

This year, America turns 250. As someone who studies how institutions shape outcomes and who would likely not be alive without the ones this country built, I want to say something honest and complicated: this country is not what it claims to be. And it is still the best thing we have.

That is not a contradiction. That is economics. Every institution involves trade-offs, and every institution decays without maintenance. The question at 250 is not whether America has failed to live up to its ideals. It has, repeatedly. The question is whether the institutional infrastructure is still strong enough to keep generating the compounding returns that drew people like me here in the first place. I believe it does. But not automatically. And not without work.

What Kathmandu Taught Me About Institutions

To understand why I am an economist, not just by training but by conviction, you have to understand what Kathmandu looked like in the years before I left.

The civil war had been grinding for over a decade by the time I was a teenager. But the war was only the most visible layer. Underneath it was something more corrosive: the systematic failure of institutions that are supposed to make economic life possible. Property rights existed on paper but not in practice. Contracts were only as good as the patronage behind them. Starting a business meant navigating a maze of bribes so predictable they functioned as an unofficial tax code. Corruption was not a bug in the system. It was the system.

Economists call the cost of enforcing contracts, verifying quality, and resolving disputes “transaction costs.” In a well-functioning economy, these costs are low enough that markets can operate and people can take risks. In Kathmandu under civil war, transaction costs were so high they strangled economic activity at its source. Why invest in property if the title meant nothing against a bribe? Why save if the currency’s value could be wiped out by the next political crisis? The entire incentive structure was inverted: the rational move was not to produce, but to survive.

My brother died during this period. The treatment he needed existed. Somewhere, in some hospital, in some country where the system worked well enough to deliver it. But not where we were. His death was not just a family tragedy. It was, in the language of economics, a failure of public goods provision — the kind of failure that does not show up in GDP statistics but destroys human capital all the same.

Douglass North, whose work anchors so much of institutional economics, defined institutions as “the rules of the game in a society,” the formal and informal constraints that shape human interaction (North, 1990). His central insight was that economic performance depends less on resources or technology than on whether those rules are predictable, enforceable, and applied broadly. When they are, investment flows and compound growth takes hold. When they are not, the entire economy operates under a shadow of uncertainty that suppresses everything.

I had lived inside North’s theory before knowing his name. When I arrived in North Carolina, the contrast was not primarily about wealth. It was about trust. I could trust that the professor who said office hours were at 2 would be there at 2. I could trust that the financial aid package would not be reneged upon because someone more connected needed the slot. These sound like small things. They are not. They are the entire foundation on which economic life is built.

America at 250 is not Kathmandu under civil war. That comparison would be absurd, and I am not making it. But the institutional economics framework I carry — the one written into me before I ever cracked a textbook — tells me that the strength of a country’s institutions is not a permanent condition. It is a maintenance project.

The Economics of Belonging

I did not arrive in America and immediately thrive. The narrative of the immigrant-as-instant-overachiever is comforting, and I understand why people tell it. But my version is messier, and the mess is where the economics lives.

Human capital theory, which is the backbone of how economists think about education, would predict that I would stay in school. The return on investment was enormous: a U.S. college degree, earned at a fraction of cost thanks to Warren Wilson’s work-college model and financial aid, would pay dividends for the rest of my life. The rational choice was obvious. But human capital theory has a blind spot: it assumes the student will complete the investment. It does not fully account for the dropout decision- — the moment when the present cost of continuing (isolation, invisibility, the feeling that you are performing a role rather than living a life) exceeds the discounted future value of the degree. I was at that moment. More than once.

"When I stood in front of my own classroom for the first time in 2013, I made a promise I have kept ever since: I will be for my students what those professors were for me. I will see them. Not because it is efficient — although the data on belonging and retention suggests it is — but because I know what it costs when no one does."

What changed was not a scholarship or a policy intervention. It was people. One professor and then several others did something that was economically irrational by any narrow definition. They invested time and attention in a student who had no connections, no pedigree, and no obvious return on their investment. They treated my experience in a war zone not as a deficit to overcome but as a perspective with value. They made me feel like I was supposed to be in that room. That I mattered.

When I delivered a virtual keynote at the 5th Internationalization of Higher Education Conference in Oujda, Morocco, in April 2026, I told the audience what I am telling you now: that belonging is not a soft concept. It is the mechanism through which human capital formation actually happens. The research confirms this. Retention and degree completion, which are the points at which the human capital investment either succeeds or is lost, are strongly predicted not just by academic preparation but by whether students feel they belong in the institution (Walton & Cohen, 2011).

I also met my wife at Warren Wilson. This is not a detail I include for sentimentality alone. It is an economic fact. Roots change the calculus. When I decided to stay in America, it was no longer a purely human-capital calculation. It had become relational. And that personal and economic fusion is, I would argue, how most consequential economic decisions get made.

When I stood in front of my own classroom for the first time in 2013, I made a promise I have kept ever since: I will be for my students what those professors were for me. I will see them. Not because it is efficient — although the data on belonging and retention suggests it is — but because I know what it costs when no one does.

What the Data Says at 250

Human Capital and Immigration

There is a finding in labor economics that rarely makes it into the immigration debate, and it is this: the decision to migrate is not random. People who uproot their lives, leave behind everything familiar, and cross an ocean to start over in a country whose language and systems they do not yet understand are, by definition, a self-selected group. They are disproportionately risk-tolerant, ambitious, and driven, not because these traits are evenly distributed and immigrants got lucky, but because migration selects for exactly these characteristics. Economists call this the Roy model of self-selection, formalized in the immigration context by Borjas (1987).

"I believed in the meritocratic promise of America before I had ever set foot here. My own life has, against considerable odds, partially validated that belief. A kid from a war zone, with no connections and no money, walked through the institutional front door and found it open. That happened. It is not fiction."

The implications are significant. When America accepts immigrants, it is not accepting a random draw from other countries’ populations. It is attracting among the most motivated and adaptable people the world produces. The data bears this out: immigrants account for approximately 23% of U.S. patents despite representing about 14% of the population, and they are responsible for roughly a quarter of all economic value generated by U.S. patents from 1990 to 2016 (Diamond et al., 2020). More than 40% of Fortune 500 companies were founded or co-founded by immigrants or their children (American Immigration Council, 2025). And among the most strategically important industries like semiconductors, communications equipment, information technology, immigrants authored or co-authored 30–44% of all patents from 2000 to 2018 (Economic Innovation Group, 2025).

Consider the math of my own life. America invested in me through financial aid at Warren Wilson, through public university funding at the University of South Florida where I earned my doctorate, and through the institutional infrastructure that made it possible for a kid from Kathmandu to become a program chair and published researcher. What did that investment cost in the grand scheme of a multi-trillion-dollar economy? Negligible. What has it produced? Decades of teaching, curriculum development, research on policy outcomes, hundreds of students served, and the compounding contributions of every student I have helped persist to graduation.

America’s openness to immigration is not charity. It is the most successful human capital acquisition strategy in the history of the world. But that strategy depends on a signal to the most driven people on earth that America wants them and will give them a fair shot. Research by Moser and San (NBER) found that the restrictive 1924 Immigration Act caused a 68% decline in U.S. patents in immigrant-led fields, suppressing not only immigrant innovation but native inventiveness as well. Human capital is fluid. When the signal narrows, the talent flows elsewhere, and compounds in someone else’s economy.

Institutions and Trust

My dissertation research on the effects of India’s reservation system on minority educational outcomes taught me something that applies well beyond South Asia: institutional design has long-run economic consequences that are easy to underestimate in the short term. When access policies generate perverse incentives, fail to address pipeline effects, or erode the perceived legitimacy of the institution itself, the intended beneficiaries often bear the costs alongside everyone else. Institutional credibility, once damaged, is extraordinarily expensive to rebuild (Dhakal, 2017).

This is America’s deepest competitive advantage at 250: not its military, not its natural resources, but a 250-year-old institutional infrastructure that global capital trusts deeply enough to accept near-zero risk premiums. The U.S. dollar’s reserve status exists because foreign governments trust the Fed will not behave arbitrarily. Contract law here is enforceable in ways it is not in most of the world. The rule of law is imperfect, but it is predictable enough that a 19-year-old immigrant with no connections could arrive, earn a degree, build a career, and never once face a situation where the rules were rewritten against him.

"My students at UAGC are among the most motivated learners I have encountered — working adults, many of them first-generation college students, military-affiliated, from underrepresented backgrounds. They are not people who lack talent or drive. They are people whose talent has been given fewer opportunities to compound."

Trust is a stock variable. It accumulates slowly through consistent, fair institutional behavior over long periods, and it can be drawn down quickly. When institutions are perceived as captured by special interests, when the rules appear to apply differently to the powerful and the powerless, each instance erodes the trust stock. The economic costs are real and measurable: higher risk premiums demanded by investors, suppressed long-horizon commitments that drive productivity growth, and reduced human capital inflows from abroad. North (1990) understood this: institutional decay is not dramatic. It is the slow accumulation of small compromises and deferred maintenance that eventually adds up to a system that functions well for some and barely functions for others.

I could feel institutional failure in Kathmandu before I could name it. And I could feel institutional trust at Warren Wilson before I could value it. The data on declining public trust in American institutions — in government, in courts, in the basic fairness of the economic system — is not abstract to me. It is the early warning signal of the same gradient I once fled. America at 250 remains the most institutionally credible large economy on earth. But “remain” is doing heavy lifting in that sentence.

Mobility and Meritocracy

I believed in the meritocratic promise of America before I had ever set foot here. My own life has, against considerable odds, partially validated that belief. A kid from a war zone, with no connections and no money, walked through the institutional front door and found it open. That happened. It is not fiction.

But I am also an economist, and economists are professionally obligated to look at the data rather than the anecdote. Chetty et al. (2014) analyzed the records of over 40 million children and found that the probability of a child born in the bottom income quintile reaching the top quintile is approximately 7.5%, compared to roughly 13.5% in Canada and considerably higher in the Nordic countries. The country I chose because I believed it was the land of upward mobility turns out to be less mobile than several peer nations. Compounding this, children whose parents are in the top 1% of the income distribution are 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy League college than those from the bottom income quintile (Chetty et al., 2017).

"A country I had never seen gave me a chance, and the people inside its institutions gave me the belief I needed to make something of it. Everything I have — my career, my wife, my students, my writing, my life — is downstream of that investment. I can never repay it directly. I can only pay it forward, one student at a time, one class at a time, one small act of institutional maintenance at a time."

I see the fraying every day in my classroom. My students at UAGC are among the most motivated learners I have encountered — working adults, many of them first-generation college students, military-affiliated, from underrepresented backgrounds. They are not people who lack talent or drive. They are people whose talent has been given fewer opportunities to compound. They navigate an educational system not designed with their constraints in mind: the 80-hour work week, the childcare gaps, the financial precarity that makes a single unexpected expense feel like a crisis.

Here is how I frame it as an economist: if talent is randomly distributed across populations, as virtually all evidence suggests it is, then unequal outcomes do not reflect unequal ability. They reflect unequal access to the institutional machinery that converts ability into output. When a first-generation student drops out not because she cannot do the work but because she cannot afford to keep doing it, that is a failure of institutional design with a cost measurable in foregone productivity and foregone human capital that will never compound because it was never allowed to. You do not need to believe in any particular vision of justice to agree that wasting human capital at this scale is economically irrational.

The Cost of Underinvestment in People

Across my research portfolio — examining child maltreatment, domestic violence policy, and minority educational outcomes — a single finding recurs with uncomfortable consistency: human capital is destroyed early, quietly, and at scale when social systems fail. And because the destruction happens in childhood, in households, in spaces that economic indicators do not routinely measure, it remains largely invisible until the costs surface years later as lower productivity, higher public spending, and diminished innovation.

The economics here are well-established. Nobel laureate James Heckman’s research has demonstrated that high-quality early childhood programs yield a return of approximately 13% per child per year, which is higher than typical returns on equity markets, through better outcomes in education, health, and employment (García et al., 2017). Each dollar invested in quality early childhood programs for disadvantaged children returns between $6 and $17 in long-run social and economic benefits (Heckman Equation, 2025). The reason is straightforward: cognitive and non-cognitive skills compound. A child who enters school ready to learn acquires skills faster, which makes further learning easier. A child who enters school hungry, traumatized, or without adequate stimulation starts behind and tends to fall further behind with each passing year, not because of any deficit in innate ability, but because the compounding never begins.

America at 250 invests heavily in higher education but systematically underinvests in the early childhood infrastructure such as prenatal care, nutrition, early learning, and family support that determines whether students arrive at college ready to benefit from that investment. The return on a dollar spent on a four-year-old in a quality program is multiples of the return on the same dollar spent remediating skill gaps in a college freshman. The economics is not ambiguous. The investment pattern is.

The asset side of America’s 250-year ledger is genuinely impressive: unmatched innovation, the deepest capital markets in the world, institutional infrastructure that other nations seek to emulate. But the liability side — the underinvestment in people, the gaps in access, the failure to convert randomly distributed talent into proportionately distributed outcomes — is larger than Americans typically acknowledge. And because human capital destruction is front-loaded while the economic costs are backloaded, the accounting is always delayed. By the time the cost is visible, the investment window has often closed.

What I Wish for America at 250

I did not come to America because I had a political vision. I came because I wanted to survive and because I believed with a 19-year-old’s unearned confidence that the institutional machinery here would give my effort a fair return. That belief was validated. But it was validated inside a system that has always been more fragile and more contingent than its mythology suggests.

Here is my wish list for America at 250. It is an economist’s wish list, grounded in evidence.

1. Stay open. The human capital flows that have powered 250 years of American economic dynamism are not self-sustaining. They depend on a signal. A signal to the most driven, most talented, most risk-tolerant people on earth that America wants them and will give them a fair shot. Weaken that signal, and the compounding stops. It is that simple and that consequential.
2. Invest in the scaffolding. Education, health care, rule of law, the institutional infrastructure that converts human capital into economic output are not line items to cut when budgets tighten. They are the foundation on which every other return is built. I have lived in a country where that scaffolding was collapsing, and I have lived in a country where it held. The difference is everything.
3. Close the gap between the promise and the data. The meritocratic narrative is one of America’s greatest assets but only if it is moving in the direction of truth. The intergenerational mobility numbers will not improve on their own. They require deliberate institutional investment in the people and places the current system serves least well. The cost of leaving productivity on the table, of wasting randomly distributed talent through systematically unequal access, compounds just as surely as the returns to getting it right.
4. Maintain what you have built. Institutional credibility is America’s deepest competitive advantage, and it is not free. It requires the same kind of daily, unglamorous maintenance that every complex system demands. It requires citizens and leaders who treat institutional health as a shared responsibility, not a partisan football. North (1990) was right: institutional decay is incremental. So is institutional renewal.

I was 19. I had almost nothing. A country I had never seen gave me a chance, and the people inside its institutions gave me the belief I needed to make something of it. Everything I have — my career, my wife, my students, my writing, my life — is downstream of that investment. I can never repay it directly. I can only pay it forward, one student at a time, one class at a time, one small act of institutional maintenance at a time.

America turned 250 this year. It is the oldest continuing experiment in democratic self-governance the modern world has known, and it has produced more prosperity, more innovation, more human freedom than any comparable undertaking in history. It is also imperfect, unfinished, and in many ways struggling with the gap between its ideals and its realities, a gap I know personally because I have lived on both sides of it.

I am not an uncritical patriot. I am an economist who has seen the data and a human being who has lived the case study. And what both tell me is this: America’s greatest strength has never been that it is finished. It has always been that it is still becoming.

At 250, that is exactly what makes it worth believing in.

If you are interested in economics and want to learn more from faculty like me, talk to an advisor today about what degree would fit your goals best.

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References

Borjas, G. J. (1987). Self-selection and the earnings of immigrants. American Economic Review, 77(4), 531–553.

Chetty, R., Hendren, N., Kline, P., & Saez, E. (2014). Where is the land of opportunity? The geography of intergenerational mobility in the United States. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 129(4), 1553–1623. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qju022

Chetty, R., Friedman, J. N., Saez, E., Turner, N., & Yagan, D. (2017). Mobility report cards: The role of colleges in intergenerational mobility (NBER Working Paper No. 23618). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w23618

Dhakal, R. (2017). Education and health impacts of an affirmative action policy on minorities in India [Doctoral dissertation, University of South Florida]. USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations.

Diamond, R., Kerr, W. R., & Koenen, M. (2020). Immigrants and the making of America. SIEPR Policy Brief. Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

Economic Innovation Group. (2025). Immigrant inventors are crucial for American national and economic security. https://eig.org/immigrants-patents/

García, J. L., Heckman, J. J., Ermini Leaf, D., & Prados, M. J. (2017). Quantifying the life-cycle benefits of a prototypical early childhood program (NBER Working Paper No. 23479). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w23479

Heckman Equation. (2025). Invest in early childhood development: Reduce deficits, strengthen the economy. https://heckmanequation.org/resource/invest-in-early-childhood-development-reduce-deficits-strengthen-the-economy/

Moser, P., & San, S. (2020). Immigration, science, and invention: Lessons from the 1920s immigration quota acts (NBER Working Paper). National Bureau of Economic Research.

Nearly Half of Fortune 500 Companies in 2025 Were Founded by Immigrants or Their Children - American Immigration Council. (2025, August 25). American Immigration Council. https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/report/fortune-500-companies-founded-by-immigrants-2025/

North, D. C. (1990). Institutions, institutional change, and economic performance. Cambridge University Press.

Walton, G. M., & Cohen, G. L. (2011). A brief social-belonging intervention improves academic and health outcomes of minority students. Science, 331(6023), 1447–1451. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1198364