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Notes -
Has anyone read Garrett Jones’ “The Culture Transplant” yet? (I haven’t)
I don’t read Scott’s actual blogposts much anymore, but I do read the links, and wanted to discuss Cato Institute Researcher Alex Nowratesh’s recent reviews of the book (1,2). They’re both just blogposts and not overly long so I’d recommend reading them, but I'll summarize the main points.
Jones argues that the “deep roots” of a culture determine economic growth, and that immigrant groups take those roots with them and thus shape the economies they travel to. Deep roots can be measured by SAT*, or “the length of time they have lived under a state (S), lived with settled agricultural (A), and their level of technology at a point in the past (T), [this formula] well predicts their GDP today". (“T" has an * because it’s more important and thus given more weight). However, there’s a lot of ways the deep roots position doesn't predict the things we would expect.
“As Bryan Caplan pointed out, there are three big outliers in the deep roots literature: China, India, and the United States. China and India should be much richer, and the United States should be poorer. Three outliers usually aren’t an issue, except these are the three most populous countries in the world.” How useful is the SAT* model if it fully fails to account for a third of the planet?
This is particularly bizarre when it comes to the United States, which is in the middle of SAT* rankings despite also being the richest country in the world. This suggests that the US would reap significant economic benefits from pulling in immigrants from countries much less developed and educated, such as Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Russia.
Jones tries to salvage these three outliers by bringing up the importance of institutions, which is fair to say. But if Jones is arguing that the deep roots of immigrant culture shape institutions for the better or the worse, then if they can change institutions for the better at any time this is a huge point against his position: “Does China’s liberalization after the 1970s prove that deep roots were right all along, or does China’s current regression [to economic planning] show it was wrong?” Likewise, several European countries (Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain) fairly suddenly adopted authoritarian regimes with statist economies then a few decades later turned into democracies with significantly liberalized economies, during periods where they did not experience much immigration. Things can change fast!
We see the same difficulties when we observe Chinese immigrant groups abroad. Hong Kong and Singapore both have significantly less trust than mainland China (trust is one of Jones’ most important measures for how immigrants should impact culture and growth) but are of course both vastly richer. Hong Kong has near complete Chinese population dominance (96%), just like China, such that the effect of their deep roots should really be what defines their institutions, but instead Hong Kong is much richer than China. Singapore has less Chinese people (75%) than Hong Kong, but has a GDP per capita 76% higher! This is despite the fact that Singapore has a whopping foreign born percentage of 47%, and that their immigration has overwhelmingly come from countries with lower SAT* (which corresponded Singapore’s famous huge increase in growth).
There are other odd ways the SAT* expectations don’t seem to add up. A deep roots paper Jones uses for building his theory calculates that an immigrant from China (high SAT*) would have a very slight negative impact on Britain whereas an immigrant from Sub-Saharan Africa (lowest SAT*) would have a slight positive impact. Likewise, Jones claims immigrants from Italy and Spain ruined the economy of Argentina, but both groups came from countries with higher SAT* than Argentina.
Extending from this, one popular argument (I think I heard first from Bryan Caplan) was that immigrants might bring economic growth, but also vote for socialist economics which would cripple long run growth. But in Argentina, recent research suggests that the labor movement Jones credits with tanking the economy was not primarily a matter of immigration, but was driven more strongly by native urban workers. Nowratesh also points out that despite popular accusations of disproportionate immigrant participation in the early twentieth century American socialist movement (as measured by foreign language socialist magazines), “the greatest electoral success of the socialist party prior to World War I were in states like Nevada, Oklahoma, Montana, and Arizona - ethnically homogenous states with few foreign born residents”. Likewise, Jones himself has argued elsewhere that the rise of western dirigisme (Brexit, Trump, Le Pen, etc), were backlashes against immigrants by native voters. All of these suggest the major examples of statism were driven by natives, and immigrant predilection towards socialism shouldn’t be our concern - we can still reap economic growth as long as we don’t pick bad policies ourselves.
I’ll add my own objections:
In the latter 1800s anglo-saxons in nonconformist sects were much more common in the economically interventionist Republican party, and ethnic white immigrant Catholics and Lutherans were much more common in the laissez faire democrat party. By the New Deal, those political parties continued to draw on majorities of those same ethnic groups, but they had switched policies, such that the Republicans were less economically interventionists and the immigrant-flush New Deal Democrats were extremely interventionist. Shouldn’t deep roots suggest more consistency in policy preferences?
England remained overwhelmingly native British until relatively recently, yet went from a significantly laissez faire economy to an incredibly statist one, then back and forth again. You can argue that the larger, earlier transition from the 1800s to the 1900s was a matter of expanding voting rights, but the transition from mid-century labor dominance to Thatcherism to Brexit all happened with a fully enfranchised population.
In conc: if the percentage of high performing ethnic groups or SAT* does not actually reliably correspond to economic growth, and if ethno-cultural groups can change their policy preferences and institutions immensely in short spans of time, doesn’t this all point to a world where deep roots and immigration matter far less than your institutions?
Nowratesh also offers broader critiques about Jones missing relevant literature, mostly encompassing studies that hurt his thesis but also a few that agree with him. Nowratesh also points out that Jones depends a lot on measures of “trust”, but substantive research into building economic models for how trust actually impacts the economy is generally lacking. Not having read any of the literature, or Jones’ book, I can’t really offer much opinion or analysis here, but interested to hear from others who have. I don’t actually have a particularly strong opinion on immigration one way or the other.
I think any such studies that doesn’t include things like corruption, culture, and attitudes toward work and education are at least somewhat suspect. Corruption — which I would define as the government through either policy or practice favors one group over others — is a huge factor in growth. It tends to impede entrepreneurship and thus innovation as any such effort that doesn’t benefit the right people will be hampered. A cultural attitude of work, prizing achievement and educational attainment is likely to over-perform what it “should.” High social trust would be huge as well, as trade and thus growth requires trust.
Agreed, though the deep roots position is that things like corruption, entrepreneurship, and innovation are all manifested out of culture. Idk whether they try to measure those qualities independently, or just take it for granted that if a country has low technology and state capacity that this contains the information that the culture has corruption baked into it.
Trust, likewise, is one of Jones’ important measures of how immigration should impact economies, but it doesn’t hold up that well, ie Hong Kong and Singapore both are about 30% less trusting than China but are quite a bit wealthier.
In fairness I haven’t read Jones’ book (and am not naturally already sympathetic to it) so there’s a limit to how well I can defend his argument.
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Both these places are kinda cheating, as the secret to both of their success (contrary to LKY fanboys' assertions) is "Dude just be a microstate built on the geographical lynchpin of the world's most important trade routes". No government policy / deep-rooted culture explanation needed to account for their prosperity - a retarded monkey can get rich if his monkey tree sits right on top of a pot of gold, and this is exactly what happened in these two cases.
Singapore and Hong Kong should really get thrown in with the petro-states when discussing prosperity, because like Qatar or whatever, they're rich by an accident of geography, not because their rulers discovered This One Weird Trick.
Like Testing123 I both agree and think you’re overstating it a little. Singapore did draw a hot hand but both Indonesia and Malaysia also got the luck of deep harbors on the Malacca strait and haven’t managed to develop shipping / port industries anywhere near as advanced as Singapore’s. Their strength in finance as well I don’t think can be chalked up to geography either.
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You’re making an important point but overstating it. Both Singapore and Hong Kong have robust, complex economies beneath their trade routes. Both have major international financial institutions which have found success competing against the world (as well as some manufacturing and other industries). Qatar and the rest of the oil baron states have virtually no other competitive companies outside of oil.
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History is not scientific in the sense that there are controlled experiments available! We should expect outliers, we should demand outliers! Luck of the draw and geography play a huge part! History makes fluid dynamics and quantum physics look like child's play, there are hundreds of millions of moving parts.
Point in proof! Germany had a statist and a free market economy at the same time, for nearly 50 years. This isn't puzzling, it was the result of an extremely bloody war.
On the specific topic, few nations had a less pleasant experience than China in the 19th and 20th centuries. They got force-fed drugs, they got colonialism, they got civil war, civil war and civil war (with the Cultural Revolution as another pseudo-civil war on top), coups, banditry, ruthless invasions, biowarfare, more wars, Great Leap Forward... Of course China is going to be poorer than it should be, due to all these historical factors.
The US had an all but stress-free experience in the same time period. One measly civil war. Crushed its incredibly weak neighbors and got to dominate an entire hemisphere for free. Joined in WW1 and WW2 late, took the lion's share of the spoils while others (like China) did all the bleeding and dying. The US was just left alone to develop peacefully for over a 100 years! They got the most oil in the entire world, huge amounts of coal, plenty of great farmland, good access to 2/3 of the important oceans. The US got the absolute best starting position of all time, bar none.
India had a middling experience (up until Partition where things went south) but was never as well-organized or united as China. There are so many languages and ethnic groups in India, compared to China. 950/1300 million Chinese spoke Mandarin as their first language, Hindi only got 528/1200 million as first speakers. India wasn't as resilient to colonization as China was, institutions play a huge role here. China was nearly always a stronger country, a stronger state, a more united state.
For instance, I read a paper that found well-organized Indian unions refused to work as hard as Japanese workers (this was under the Japanese Empire when union activity was suppressed), so Japanese productivity in textiles grew massively (they were measuring the number of machines supervised by each worker). India had anemic economic growth under socialism up until about the 1990s but now they're doing fairly well.
In a boat race between three ships, there are various factors that influence the outcome. The quality of the ship and crew is one thing but the number of storms and waves is another factor. If you see one ship that gets a tailwind plus calm seas and another that gets sixty hurricanes in a row, of course that will affect the result of the race!
I agree on all accounts, geography, war, and countless other factors play a huge role - but all of these are things the deep roots model argues should take a backseat to culture or should be driven by culture itself - I don’t think this holds up to a ton of scrutiny though.
For instance, civil war would be a manifestation of Chinese cultural tendencies towards conflict - but in reality China immigrant populations are not constantly embroiled in conflict, nor is modern China all that tumultuous.
Likewise in India, the aforementioned predilection towards ludditism and wildcat strikes should hamper economic development in any country where Indian immigrants travel to. In reality, Indian immigrant populations in the west are in disproportionately capitalist roles and by some measures contribute the most in tax revenue in the US.
There’s an argument to be made that this is because immigrants are specially selected and thus different than the countries they come from, but this totally eliminates any implications the deep roots model has for immigration policy. And we don’t even see consistency in labor relations/internal conflict/policy preferences within countries themselves.
P.S. I think the paper you’re thinking of is Pseudoerasmus’ “Labor Repression and the Indo-Japanese Divergence”. If that wasn’t it, I definitely recommend checking it out, it’s certainly something.
Yeah it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, feedback loops. Chinese culture took an anti-militarist turn after all the problems they had with soldiers roaming the countrside looting and plundering. There's a saying something like 'don't use good steel to make nails' which has the meaning of 'don't turn a good son into a soldier'.
Apologies if I sound like I was attacking you but I couldn't believe people would unironically create a mono-factorial explanation for national success that ignored history. It felt like someone had to be strawmanning, whether that's Caplan or someone else.
Good catch on the Pseudoerasmus article, that was what I was thinking of.
In fact the meaning is often made explicit in the commonly quoted phrase:
This phrase dates a thousand years to the Northern Song at the latest.
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I guess what measurement would you like, if you agree that Americans make more money? Americans have higher productivity as measured by GDP per capita than most European countries, more income by ethnic group relative to country of origin, more disposable income, etc. (though after controlling for hours worked I've seen at least one study that put Germany ahead).
[Edit: Since Ioper sourced data on productivity relative hours worked, here's the global rankings. US is in sixth place after Ireland, Norway, Switzerland, Luxemberg, and Denmark, pretty near the top. Aside from Ireland (whose numbers wrt GDP are always crazy from haven-ing so many multinationals), the US is certainly above its European countries of origin, interestingly above the UK in particular by a surprising amount]
I agree geography is an enormous advantage for the US, and argued somewhere down thread that might be what boosts America and Singapore beyond what human capital might suggest (that plus advanced finance sectors). But if we're getting to the point where we're adding factors like geography and sector specialization then we've moved beyond assuming that human capital can directly predict growth - and remember that the deep roots model assumes the US shouldn't just be poorer than Europe but also Brazil, China, and Vietnam
I can believe something like this is true and would like to read more about it. That said, if we’re really trying to compare the British colonists to their homeland then we should probably also include the Appalachians, who underperform in the US. That’s at least part of the problem with this kind of model, even a relatively small country like the UK can have a wide range of differently performing groups all technically with the same length of time in agriculture and the same breadth of technology (though there’s certainly an argument the borderers didn’t really live under a central state). As you say, if selection effects mean you can’t predict which part of a country an immigrant will be representative of, then it’s hard to use deep roots to make immigration policy.
To your point about how England itself changed after mass emigration, my understanding is that rather than native English worker performance dropping, their productivity increased significantly. After moving so much of their agricultural sector overseas they suddenly had English workers freed up to move into higher paying, more productive industry jobs in those boom towns of Manchester and Birmingham, as you mentioned. I think the idea that this fueled a population change is interesting, though I imagine we wouldn’t see it in productivity stats just because it would be swamped by industrialization. I also assume to whatever extent Anglo-Americans did constitute a better preserved snapshot of those older demographics, this too has been faded away by lower birth rates and cross-cultural intermarriage.
Kind of unrelated but on the same topic of emigration, I’ve also heard it argued that the American settler colonies lowered European inequality, since food became so much cheaper via imports. Likewise, there’s an interesting argument that emigration could have strengthened European labor movements/social democracy (at least in one country studied) by shrinking the labor supply, and by emboldening workers to organize because they knew they had a literal exit option if repression got too bad.
I’m pretty sure that Appalachia currently mostly outperforms the relevant regions of the UK, if not the UK overall.
Oh really? I hadn’t realized. That’s remarkably rough for the UK, given that it’s one of our poorest regions
‘Rural northern England’ is also one of the poorest regions of the UK.
The UK as a whole is poorer than every individual state except Mississippi, and I have no doubt that specifying one of their most economically challenged regions makes it even worse.
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At least in Finland, the region with most emigration to US (Southern Ostrobothnia) is also stereotypically the most right-wing region in the country. Since Finnish immigrants to US were known to be often very left-wing (Finns were very strongly represented in CPUSA), one theory is that this right-wing status is partly caused by US emigration - the sort of people who would immigrate to Finnish cities from the countryside in other regions and join the labor movement instead moved to US in Southern Ostrobothnia, probably because the main city in Southern Ostrobothnia (Wasa) is Swedish-speaking and the countryside was more Finnish-speaking.
That’s very interesting and makes sense in the same vein as the Swedish emigration. There’s also this piece on how German participants in the 1848 revolutions fled after they were crushed, and thus made the German immigrant population in the US exceptionally liberal, and even played a disproportionate role in abolitionist movements. All of these are cases where the impact of immigration had the exact opposite effect of what we would assume by looking at native populations, since the immigrants were specifically people who left in part because they didn’t fit in.
You have anything you recommend to read on Finnish immigration?
I don't have any particular recommendations, since this is the sort of a topic where I've basically obtained a bunch of information by osmosis but haven't, say, read a comprehensive book on Finnish Americans.
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Nicer visualization: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-hour-pennworldtable
Wow, japan has really stagnated, it's only barely above czechia, at 60% of the US/richest EU.
Norway's overperformance is clearly due to the oil, its great resources per capita could boost the US score similarly.
When france implemented the 35-hour workweek, productivity jumped. When you work less, you cut the least productive tasks first, so european scores are not truly apples to apples.
I’ve heard legends from expats in Japan about the cultural expectation to be seen doing work at all times, rather than actually working hard.
Remarkable that bit about France’s 35 work day, seems like an interesting deep dive in of itself
And there's working hard vs. working productively. In a lot of Asian countries, I see people working hard, but in jobs that only make sense given the low cost of labour, e.g. lots of people standing about in the corridors to guide you to the right places at the ID card centre, lots people handing out fliers/holding up signs, or people standing outside a big building offering rooms in guesthouses to people passing in the street (the people advertising the rooms are unattractive middle-aged men, so I don't think that this is tacit prostitution).
These low-wage jobs reduce the productivity figures, but the people doing them work hard.
As a resident of Japan for 20 something years let me suggest： The guides guiding people in corridors or whatever are most likely subjected to hours of training for this job, training the likes of which might drive someone more used to, well, 'western' methods (I dislike the term and find it inaccurate but am typing with my thumbs) completely bonkers. They will have been trained in posture, what words to use, how often and how fast to speak these words, the physical delineation of their own realm of responsibility (how many meters squared is their own guide domain) as well as themselves knowing implicitly a ream of other unspoken behavioral unwritten rules that every Japanese worth hiring will know without being taught (this will all have been vetted in the hiring process.) As for the hapless malcontents holding up the poles with signs, these boards are not for pensions or hostels, but more likely either some sort of so-called water trade such as a handjob shop, massage of dubious skill, soapland, hotel health (in-house callgirls), so-called nobura or panchira salons, (that's your-server-has-no-bra or no-underpants) or some other perfectly wholesome venue which may or may not accept non-Japanese. Thus the booze-soaked dregs holding the signs： all they do is stand there, and, if prompted, guide you to your destination like a St. Bernard without the whiskey collar.
The cute girls will be advertising and passing out flyers for more standard fare such as girl's bars, maid cafes, or other less hands-on establishments.
The river runs wide and deep and if it's sexual and you can imagine it, and it's not punishable immediately by interpol, it's probably not much further than a back-alley away.
Just my two bits.
This description of the training is frustrating literally just to hear about haha
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I worked in a small Chinese office that had a full time janitor. She was an older woman who mostly sat around and occasionally swept bit. There was certainly no need for a full time sweeper woman in that small office.
I suppose her wage is so low they don't care. Or a handout to someone's relative? Either way 0% productive. The floor wasn't actually that clean.
Yes, the low cost of labour in most of Asia is really stunning when you first encounter it.
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Also, the longer working hours.
Chat-GPT4 says:
As of my last knowledge update in September 2021, we can consider the following approximate GDP per capita figures (in nominal terms) for the mentioned countries:
United States: $63,000
Germany: $46,000
Nordic countries (e.g., Norway: $75,000, Sweden: $55,000, Denmark: $60,000, Finland: $49,000)
Benelux countries (e.g., Luxembourg: $114,000, Netherlands: $52,000, Belgium: $45,000)
To adjust for working hours, we need to consider average annual hours worked per worker. According to the OECD, the average annual hours worked per worker in 2019 were:
United States: 1,767 hours
Germany: 1,363 hours
Nordic countries (e.g., Norway: 1,427 hours, Sweden: 1,452 hours, Denmark: 1,392 hours, Finland: 1,543 hours)
Benelux countries (e.g., Luxembourg: 1,528 hours, Netherlands: 1,425 hours, Belgium: 1,533 hours)
To adjust the GDP per capita for working hours, we can calculate the GDP per hour worked by dividing the GDP per capita by the average annual hours worked per worker:
United States: $63,000 / 1,767 = $35.65 per hour
Germany: $46,000 / 1,363 = $33.75 per hour
Nordic countries (e.g., Norway: $52.56, Sweden: $37.84, Denmark: $43.10, Finland: $31.75)
Benelux countries (e.g., Luxembourg: $74.55, Netherlands: $36.49, Belgium: $29.35)
Looking at this the numbers are broadly comparable.
"Hours spent working" is a sensible input to national success, though. If Africans worked harder, had whatever traits make Americans work harder, maybe they'd do somewhat better, but this doesn't make us comparable.
Even worse, the actual causes of 'high productivity' might affect working hours and productivity a lot, but most of the effect on productivity goes through mechanisms other than working hours - so your attempt to adjust for working hours assumes that, since they move together, work hours 'causes' high productivity, when it doesn't. And the US's advantages aren't obviously from hours worked - Apple is probably still Apple if its employees work 15% fewer hours, no obvious European competitors are "15% of the way to apple", and hours worked probably compounds less than 'concentration of talent' or 'regulatory regime averse to innovation'. (not intended to disagree with grandparent, just parent comment)
It's not just "network effects, more capital, more talent".
I'll just speak for Germany, which I know fairly well. It's fairly anti-tech -- suspicious of digital technology. It limits, with laws, the ability to innovate or create. Agreed that the pay is much below the US (for top folks) and even fairly far below Switzerland. Start-ups are also harder (for (at least) the reasons you give).
Germany has things like the GDPR, it resists hire & fire (which I think is mostly good, but has economic costs), it requires annoying things like putting email signatures with your company owners in your mails, putting Impressums on your websites listing how to reach, getting double confirmation before being able to send a mail, or even remind you about an upcoming doctor's appointment.
I think mainly it's the lack of payoff, and lack of startup culture.
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If you modify the parameters you get modified results, for sure.
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Clearly Japan is the most successful nation on earth.
Japan wasn't included in your sample!
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Liberalise the economy and China grows exponentially.
Of course China did liberalize their economy some forty years ago, and they did experience growth (although much less growth than Singapore did during their own liberalization, while taking in way more immigrants with “deep roots” in weaker economies).
Still, this is Nowratesh’s whole counterargument - Jones claims deeply rooted culture is what’s supposed to determine your economy, but if you can go from Maoism to Dengism within a decade without experiencing much immigration then clearly your economy isn’t that constrained by your culture.
Looks about the same to me.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locations=SG-CN
Fair, but the results are drastically different if we look at GDP per Capita. Either way the Jones position is that the cultural makeup of China should entail larger growth and a higher level of development, the opposite of what we see on both accounts.
Yea but that’s clearly because it was communist. Clearly. It’s like wondering why Eastern Europe is poorer than Western Europe. It’s possible that the institutions were destroyed by communism, but from what I’ve seen of the west recently it looks like the ex communist nations have dodged a bullet.
Varies a lot from country to country. In general, the countries that had more of a Germanic influence have done better than those with a Turkish or Russian influence: the Baltic States, Central Europe, and the former Austro-Hungarian Empire heartlands (Slovenia, Hungary, Croatia) have done best. At the opposite end of the spectrum are places like Russia, Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus, Macedonia, and Albania. In the middle are Romania and Bulgaria.
However, these differences also correspond to policy differences: the more successful countries underwent faster transitions to capitalism in the 1990s. Hungary, Slovenia, and Croatia had already gone some way towards capitalism before 1989. But was it Germanic cultural influence that made them transition faster?! Social science is very complicated...
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I guess I'm not clear what your point is, that's exactly what Nowratesh is saying: if any given culture can seismically change its institutions (ex: to communism and back again) then economic outcomes aren't fixed by culture.
My point is that China is poorer than other places with Chinese people because of communism. You see to not get that. As for Nowratesh, seems rubbish
No, communism did not leave China any poorer than Singapore; their GDP per capita was neck and neck in the early 70s. Yet it has been a very long time since communism and China now massively underperforms relative to modern Singapore, despite a fifteen head start on liberalization and more supposedly favorable demographics
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Seems relevant to point out Taiwan is one of the wealthiest societies in the world, and that’s Chinese people. Singapore is as well, and it’s also mostly Chinese people.
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1) Come up with a theory about nations
2) Have it miss for three very large nations
2a) Including the one you're trying to use it to make predictions about.
3) Don't immediately discard it.
Sorry, this is just bad science.
It really is. Just awful. Consider if the ROC had managed to hold on to mainland China and not be forced to flee to Taiwan. What would China look like today? Things that happen in history matter. It's not just stats.
This is like trying to judge a baseball player based on his height and weight, ignoring that he tore his hamstring the night before. I don't see what value can be gleaned from this style of analysis.
China would likely look a lot better. But it's not a perfect comparison: Taiwan was already more urban and developed than the mainland at the end of WW2 (owing to Japanese investment and the lack of much bombing).
I'd expect China to have a dozen megacities comparable to Tokyo in development level and size, but still have many straggling rural regions not much better off than today.
Taiwan was more developed, but the gap was trivial relative to the gap that emerged:
http://danieljmitchell.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/china-v-taiwan.jpg
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Sure. But any model of wealth of nations that doesn't include "Did the Country have Communism" is bound to be severely limited.
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(1). Why should the US be poorer? Is it just because we are such an outlier on income compared to everyone else?
(2) Russia has already been gutted of a lot of the intelligentsia. Not sure there’s much left. Vietnam I’ve gotten curious about. I heard they have really high test scores and didn’t know that. But what great scientist has ever been from there or tech developed? Might be a population to target.
(3). I believe institutions do matter. His model isn’t the model that predicts everything but I think it contributes along with institutions and geography. US has badass geography.
(5). Would like to see the math behind this claim. Not reading a whole paper to see why. Internal standard of living in Argentina I’ve heard is much higher than Econ stats. But yes it’s an outlier.
For why some country’s go free market with more immigration I think a lot of that is a native backlash to giving more to poorer communities. In America it’s the blacks and some immigrants. If America wasn’t diverse then I think we probably would be more socialist. And from an Econ perspective it might maximize utility at expense of growth. We would be more like Canada without blacks. And people have a revulsion from paying more in taxes to give to a different tribe. If you have a richer tribe and a poorer tribe you go more free markets because rich tribe doesn’t want to share. Also smaller safety nets and free immigration don’t mix well as it adds negative selection bias.
Honestly I think Jones is a racists hbd and tries to dress up a theory for the view by not saying what he believes directly.
We have lots of immigrants and ex-slaves who drag down the stats, and yet...
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(2) Vietnam is interesting because it’s a dirt poor developing country with relatively good HBD and a significant language barrier to the rest of the world, so you’re going to see things like high test scores and not a lot of high achieving scientists.
(5) Argentina is also a weird economy for a variety of reasons, but as I understand it it had a very strong economy in the early 20th century, some stagnation after WWII, and a major crisis after unwisely starting a war with Britain which they never recovered from. But Latin America in general tends to have higher standards of living than you’d think from looking at their GDP per capita, too.
The three factors are length of time a nation has been organized as a State (US 247 years England 374 years) had settled agriculture (US 415ish years, England 6,000 years), and state of technology lets give these equal weight. These predict that England should have a GDP that's larger than the US (it's had more time under a state and significantly more time using agriculture). But the opposite is true.
This comparison seems wrong from the start. England and America didn't evolve seperately, England passed the torch to America. The US achieved so much in 247 years largely because they could draw on hundreds of years of English political tradition.
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It seems to me that a particular land area being under agriculture longer is either neutral or a detriment when it comes to development, while the ancestors of the inhabitants being agriculturalists for a long time is the source of the advantage.
Iraq today is almost completely desertified after millennia of soil erosion and depletion, while the prosperity of the US is in part due to its natural resources being underutilized until recently, when a population with generations of accumulated experience in agriculture and industry was able to expand with relatively little opposition into virgin territory.
I guess the argument could hold up if the Mesopotamian agriculturalists relocated to a more favorable area and were able to use their accumulated skills to jump ahead quickly, like the American colonists. But this still runs into the problem that their skills are constrained by the environment.
Imo a more predictive version of SAT* would have to include a “G” for geography, encompassing things like natural resources, soil quality, likelihood of natural disasters (ie America and Singapore supposedly have lower human capital than their growth rates would indicate but both are blessed with really favorable geography).
But at that point you can’t really create a simple formula for a simple theory anymore, you’re back to saying “growth is a whole bunch of different factors”
For what it's worth, Arab immigrants from the Fertile Crescent do form a market-dominant minority across much of Latin America (including the president of El Salvador who has been getting a lot of attention recently) and Africa.
And as far as simple formulas go, I'd be surprised if IQ by itself didn't get you a lot closer to the mark than SAT, with the caveat that many, if not most, nations are too diverse to be analyzed as a single unit regardless of what parameters are being considered (e.g. Latin America has Whites, Mestizos, and Natives; India has its castes; every African country is a patchwork of tribes and ethnic groups).
In terms of how this potential, however it is determined, relates to a given country's economic performance, I often analogize it to genetically predicted height, where it's easier to make someone shorter than they would be otherwise through malnutrition, but quite hard to make them taller than their genes indicate. We can easily find pairs of countries where one has been held back from its true potential, usually but not exclusively by communism e.g. North and South Korea or Burma and Thailand. The key challenge in terms of immigration policy would be to identify nations underperforming relative to their potential and encourage migration from those places specifically.
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Yes the key things on agriculture and state is it’s the people who did those things. People who were able to create state capacity at lower levels of technological development. Capable of forming large scale militaries to protect their farmland and resource buildup from rival tribes looking to take their stuff etc.
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As sliders1234 points out, these first two are kinda nonsense. Pretty much all the European, Middle Eastern, and North African countries are similarly situated when it comes to agriculture; at least, as far as I know, agriculture has never been lost and extends to pre-history. And all of these nations descend from states thousands of years ago, though you can sometimes argue continuity. That England colonized the US shouldn't reset the clock, though.
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The people populating America today are not the native Americans. They’re people from technologically advanced countries that had agricultural.
The native Americans are in fact poor. So I don’t think your argument holds any water.
The model seems like bull, but those are the factors that cause it to predict a much lower income for the US than the actual data. The US is pretty weird, in that its population changed dramatically over the last 420 or so years, but there's no did your population change dramatically factor in the model.
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..worse?
You mean better.
A rich country unable to industrialise would have only ended up one way in Europe - as lunch.
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That’s all suppositional. Spain is well run in many ways.
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Agreed, they had a particularly difficult time between trying to make a quantum leap from a country excelling in agriculture to an industrialized nation via extreme ISI, coupled with a broader international economic landscape that didn't support them. I have to assume their export driven economy in particular took a significant blow following the opening of the Panama Canal redirecting shipping, trade, and investment to the North, making their geographical position at the far south suddenly a hindrance rather than a unique advantage. Between the World Wars their FDI also dried way up as their former European sponsors went broke and America remained aloof, distrustful of what it saw as South American fascism (famously prohibiting European countries from purchasing from Argentina with Marshall Plan funds). As economic conditions got worse people naturally protested and the government responded by writing populist checks that its deteriorating trade and investment landscape couldn't really cover, and things spiraled ever farther.
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Not that we are an outlier compared to other countries but compared to other countries with the same SAT*
Tbh the specific countries aren't important here, they were randomly picked. There are supposedly 40 countries ranked higher than the US on SAT*, many of which have lower development, like Brazil, China, etc.
I agree, I assume class unity is a lot easier to accomplish in countries that don't also have ethnic divisions.
On the other hand, the Netherlands and Belgium developed very comprehensive welfare states while riven by pillarization.
My Netherlands history is almost non-existent and my Belgian history is non-existent, but I don't think that Catholics were a notably economically dependent community in the Netherlands, nor Protestants in Belgium?
I don’t know much about the Netherlands but in Belgium the Dutch and French (or Flemmings and Walloons if you prefer their Dr. Seuss names) have had pretty tense relations; pre ww2 the Dutch were poorer and had their language repressed in schools, now they’re richer (and have a a bit of an ethno-nationalist movement). I think they’re all mostly Catholic
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Fair counterpoint tbh
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