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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.
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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