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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35515 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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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.

  1. “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?

  2. 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.

  3. 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!

  4. 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).

  5. 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.

  6. 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:

  1. 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?

  2. 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 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.

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.

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

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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