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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   38710 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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Why should the US be poorer?

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.

The three factors are length of time a nation has been organized as a State (US 247 years England 374 years)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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