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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.

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.

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

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.

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'.

In fact the meaning is often made explicit in the commonly quoted phrase:

好男不當兵 好鐵不打釘

Good men shouldn’t be soldiers; just as good steel isn’t used for nails.

This phrase dates a thousand years to the Northern Song at the latest.