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Here is my attempt to conclude the h1b debate given the takes in on have been just bad.
The H1B debate seems to have died down in the same way every other debate dies down: things remain the same. Trump does what a liberal from the 90s does, and MAGA people claim victory over lip service. Academic Agent wrote a very succinct write-up on this issue, and my take on this is mixed.
I would not have wanted migrants in the millions to a country I was a native of, period. White-collar migrants are even worse since you are making college admissions and jobs even harder for your kid but you are also ensuring votebanks, unstable coalitions. They may be stable sometimes on the right but they will eventually break away. Sriram, the trump appointee who started all of this was a Kamala donor up until a month before the election and was not a good programmer by his own admission, certainly not an AI guy like Ian Goodfellow either. The h1b meltdown took Elon down too as he ended up losing arguments, banning anyone named Groyper and then publicly admitting defeat somewhat to calm people down, though things are unlikely to change by a lot. Elons issue was covered by eternal Pariah and sometimes really insightful Chuck Johnson so do check it out, he also detailed Srirams issues in this post.
Vivek Ramaswamy too burned some of his social capital like former MLM peddler Patrick Bet David by asking the youth to follow cram school routines like I did and compete with the rest of the world in terms of labor and uni admissions despite the very obvious issues of them cheating and having excessive ethnic prejudices to begin with. I have first hand experience with cram schools which funnily enough neither of them does and that explains why they glorify it and those who went through it cant forget the ordeal fast enough.
I would never want such large-scale movement of any people into my own nation but otoh I will not call most Indian migrants scheming scamsters or ethno-nationalists either. I might try to move to the west in 2025 and likely temporarily to see what Rome of today is like but I am a self-respecting person and a nation choosing its own people and demographics over hard to prove claims about the benefits of 20 billion Americans is a very sane outcome. There are plenty of good Indians, them leaving is explicit iq shredding and people back home gloating about how tech firms have Indian CEOs is a massive sign of insecurity.
Political change and human endevaors work on ingroups and outgroups, coalitions, the tech bro aligning with that gets its memes from identitarians was not going to last that long and the results will not be that different from 2016. People choosing to move to the west, starting a family there and if they are really good at what they do is a massive plus as long as the number does not exceed thousands as demographic changes are nearly impossible to overturn. Many posters here are honest hardworking white collar employees who work on visas and I would not want them to be called names anytime they log in. There are no good answers here, including Trump's which is handwaving, inaction, minor lip service and then letting things happen as they already are.
Biocapital is very real, society here runs not just on caste but also on class and there is a keen awareness amongst people of both. Indian biocapital is bottom of the barrel and clustering helps eek out better performance than what it could have otherwise but topsoil erosion won't last forever, I reckon most of it has already been used up. Indians move because they do not like most Indians, they do not wish to associate with them but being in a liberal democratic world reduces your identity down to the lowest common denominator. If I ever move out permanently, it would be because political power back home is not a possibility and I would rather live as a nerd in the big leagues than in the little leagues. The future here is incredibly bleak btw and I know many posters here who have similar backgrounds and moved out. I think they did the right thing.
I wanted to conclude this post with some reasonable course of action but that is highly unlikely. People here have a hard time believing that upper castes bottled India so badly that the nearly extinct remnants of their elite genepool is gone like their ability to gain any power yet they just sat down and took it, and now you have an ever-worsening system that chugs along without ever collapsing.
A collapse may never come, it did not for the past 2 thousand years, the US too would still "survive" even if Yglesias's harebrained schemes of one billion Americans came true though surviving like India or worse Pakistan or Bangladesh or Afghanistan is humiliating. My interest in politics began because of affirmative action here and how people would allow explicit laws like the SC ST act, once I saw the rest of the world I realised that things are far more universal than I thought they would be. Anyways i dont think there is a lot more to the debate, there are plenty of good people living here, under normal circumstances, I would in fact prefer if they did not move out but if I dont have an ingroup back home soon enough, I do think they should do what the Zoroastrians did when they came here, in both cases, people should kick out and sue the living shit out of Indian IT sweatshops and be far harsher migration wise but then again nothing ever happens.
I feel a sense of deep unease writing this, I do not want to offend friends I have made here and fuck my career over, I do not want them to be called names either. I am semi-anonymous here because this forum is the only place I can be honest and muting myself here like I do irl is bad, lying is even worse. Lying to yourself is how you get takes like Bryan Caplans on India.
The longer version of Bryan Caplan's take still seems reasonable to me:
https://www.betonit.ai/p/reflections-on-india
There are serious problems with Indian governance. And the Soviet style experiment that you think can easily be shaken off is still influencing them to have awful agricultural policies.
The difference between the worst poverty in the world and one of the richest countries in the world is not biocapital it's government policy. It's most clearly visible in Korea, where the DMZ separates two governments, not two people. And the difference between them is as stark as things get.
This is a common fallacy in the nature v. nurture argument.
Just because it is possible to mess up a high IQ society does not mean it is possible to redeem a low IQ society.
Communism can ruin North Korea. But good government can't fix India. At least, not if the Indians are allowed to vote.
Consider this analogy. You could raise Lebron James in a cave and starve him of nutrients and thereby ruin his athletic potential. But that doesn't mean you can take an average person and turn him into an NBA player with great training. Nature determines your potential. Nurture helps you realize it.
Are the English a high IQ society? I'd consider them middling at best. Germany and Switzerland are both probably better off, and most Jewish sub communities within Europe, like in Hungary were easily way higher.
The industrial revolution started in England. It was undoubtedly good policies and culture that got them there, because their smart neighbors had to play catch-up rather than leading the way. And they were arguably filled with a bunch of malnutritioned low-IQ idiots breathing smoke and drinking alcohol constantly while they accomplished the whole thing, its possible they were much worse off in "biological" potential than India is today.
In your analogy you are talking about a zero sum competition: "being an NBA player". There are limited spots and not everyone can do it. But I don't think that applies to having a high standard of living and a working civilization. In the analogy it would be more like "can you learn to play basketball at all". I think a 4ft tall not very bright child can learn to play basketball. And I think having a working civilization requires about a similar level of biological potential.
The reason it doesn't happen more often is that getting the culture and the policy correct is the actual really difficult part.
Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms suggests eugenic selection pressures as the primary reason behind the industrial revolution starting in England.
One can always quibble with an analogy. I can easily break a glass cup by throwing it. It's much more difficult to assemble a bunch of glass shards into a cup. Dropping a baby would be an easy way to lower its expected IQ, not so easy to improve a baby's IQ beyond the basics of housing, feeding him or her, sending him or her to school or homeschooling. As dictator you can at your leisure lower the IQ of your country by Pol Potting the smart fraction, not so obvious how to improve your country's IQ, or a segment of your country's IQ. Stateside progressives have been trying for decades with taxpayer money, resources, and children.
Clark's point raises the question "why Britain in the late 1700's?". The selection effect he talks about has been in place just about everywhere in history. The rich upper class reproduced in high numbers and crowded down the poor into subsistence and eventually starvation. Why not a continental European country? Honestly take your pick and they probably looked similar to England.
I don't think I was "quibbling" with the analogy. I do think that happens sometimes, when you can stretch the analogy to make a point that doesn't make any sense in reality. But my point stands outside of the analogy: a working civilization does not require a high IQ population. It requires good culture and policy. Reproducing those things is hard, but does not require high biological potential.
Is there one—or better yet, multiple you can pick—or any arbitrary continental European country(ies) I can pick and you demonstrate as such like Clark did with England?
To circle-back to a basketball metaphor, this does not sound too different from from the claim height isn't required to be good at basketball, it just requires good skills and feel for the game. It dodges the empirical finding that height, is in fact, quite vital and overwhelmingly so to being good at basketball, and crowds out other factors, despite height not being ex-ante necessary nor sufficient for being good at basketball.
France.
And I'm tempted to just rewrite exactly what I wrote above. Working civilization is not a zero sum game like competitive basketball. It's not about being better than everyone else, it's about being good enough to cross a threshold. More like can you shoot a basket, rather than can you win a game of basketball.
Okay, and France how so? Along the lines of the evidence of what Clark described.
Please provide more than argument by assertion. I shouldn’t have to ask. Nor am I wedded to Clark’s hypothesis.
And it’s noted that you tried to dodge your previous claim of “Honestly take your pick and they probably looked similar to England,” and the basketball metaphor in general, skipping over the possibility that I select the country or countries to be evaluated. Maybe I was too charitable in leaving you a potential out.
Ditto… one can always re-assert.
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