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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   38207 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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I keep getting surprised that a Professor Garrett Jones hasn’t been canceled for wrongthink. Granted. He works for George Mason which has been different for decades now.

He just released a new book, “The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left”

I think the title is self-explanatory and it’s going to be Maga supporting and argue to keep certain cultures out from immigrating. His last book “Hive Mind: How your nations IQ matters so much more than your own”. Basically made the point that a lot of low IQ people in a nation will lead to a low trust society and poor government performance.

While he does appear to avoid saying it directly - don’t let in a lot of low IQ immigrants into your country or your country will fail; I believe any rational person would come to that conclusion.

Longer term there will not be assimilation with certain groups and it will cause governance issues. America seems to have different results with assimilation. African Americans outside of a tiny subset never become blended Americans. All kinds of Europeans ended up for the most part blending in. Hispanic people seem to do both - assimilate and at times stay seperate.

It does seem that certain cultures do well anyway. Like Jews or Han Chinese who end up retaining a lot of their culture.

I’m surprised he hasn’t yet been Charles Murrayed because his arguments I believe are based on similar beliefs. And then explaining why allowing more low IQ individuals into a country will lead to bad results.

I obviously can't address any specifics since the book hasn't come out yet, but the entire premise seems absurd on its face. First, I don't know what he means when he says that they "make the economies they move to look a lot like the ones they left". Does he mean that an industrialized economy will revert to an agricultural one? That a capitalist economy will become socialist? That one centered around banking will switch to auto manufacturing? That aside, though, by any definition, I can't think of a single example of a high-immigrant country that has had its economy transformed by high immigration in such a way that the host country started to look like the country from which the immigrants came.

don’t let in a lot of low IQ immigrants into your country or your country will fail; I believe any rational person would come to that conclusion.

Is there any empirical evidence for this? I can't speak to countries, but we can look at various areas around the United States. You don't make it clear which countries specifically you are referring to as "low IQ", but given that most of the HBD discussion as it pertains to immigrants centers around Mexico let's start there, with the caveat that blacks also have low IQs as well. Thus, we should assume that the most successful parts of the country will be the ones with the most non-Hispanic whites. Except this obviously isn't true. I live pretty close to West Virginia, and I can tell you that there are very few people there who aren't non-Hispanic whites (less than 10%, per the 2020 census), yet it ranks 48th in GDP per capita. The state with the highest GDP per capita, on the other hand, is New York, despite being only 54% non-Hispanic white. But maybe that's not fair since West Virginia is rural while New York (and California, and Texas) have big cities that allow them to have high GDPs despite a large number of undesirable low-IQ minorities. So let's compare the cities themselves.

I live in Pittsburgh, one of the whitest cities in the US. Blacks are only 8% of the metro population (compared with 16% in New York and Chicago and 45% in Atlanta), and there is practically no Hispanic population to speak of. Even the housekeepers and restaurant workers are white. All in all, the metro is 83% non-Hispanic white. The only other metro with a population over 2 million that even comes close is Cincinnati, at around 75%. Yet Pittsburgh and Cincinnati sit at 24th and 25th, respectively, in GDP per capita among the 35 US metros with populations of 2 million or more. Again, you could argue that other factors account for this, namely deindustrialization in the rust belt (although other rust belt cities with larger minority populations have higher GDPs) but that's just making my point for me: Even if all of this were true, it's obvious that the average IQ of the ethnicities that inhabit an area has little influence on the economic situation compared to other factors. As a final thought, if the entire population of Mexico were to immigrate to the US tomorrow, it would go from being 18% to Hispanic to 38% Hispanic. That's still lower than the Hispanic populations of Los Angeles, Houston, Phoenix, and San Antonio are currently. I think the US will be fine.

The focus in academia is on preventing new Garrett Joneses from getting tenure rather than reducing the scope of tenure by firing the few openly non-woke professors. Most tenured woke professors are smart enough to understand that if you weaken tenure, changing moral fashions means something they have written in the past could get them targeted, especially by a college administration looking to save money.

After he survived writing a book "10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less", I assume he is immortal. In the preface to that book he mentioned one especially persistent person, who several times mailed his university department and called police to check him. Jones finished preface by dedicating the book to that guy.

His favorite hit-piece on the talk that led to the book is surprisingly funny -- it reads like the Sokal hoax, but with less calm dignity. Perhaps this sort of thing works in his favor; I assume it's easier to weather a cancellation attempt when your foes sound like nutcases to a supermajority of the population. This suggests a strategy for kneecapping criticism of a book that you know will be controversial: send free review copies to the craziest, most frothing-at-the-mouth ideological opponents you can find, and let them inadvertently poison the well. (Bonus points if you can goad them into using the word "knowledges" in public.)

Making toxoplasma of rage work for you sounds reasonable in the hindsight. But he probably endured much more stress and pressure than he openly admits. I think that piece is actually quite accurate at conveying the author's sentiment and Johnson's attitude (even carefully containing "less democracy" within quotation marks).

I've listened to his conversation with Tyler (which I recommend) and although very interesting, I sometimes got the impression that his worldbuilding optimizes for the tacit values I don't share; or that the solution he proposes is too technical and assumes away "real" issue.

Econ departments tend to be less progressive than others. GMU econ in particular trends libertarian; Bryan Caplan is probably the most notable professor out of that department.

Caplan has himself been measured in the IQ debate. Caplan's book The Case Against Education is essentially premised on the relative immutability of IQ. At the same time, he maintains a spirited defense of Open Borders while largely sidestepping the Race question, although he has hinted at awareness of those critiques.

Caplan's Open Borders arguments are obviously correct in a world not run by the stationary bandits referred to in the thread above. My question is: if the Mafia were stuck with only one neighborhood to exploit, and one set of neighbors, how would they behave differently than if those same neighborhoods were continually being repopulated from the outside...? I think the answer frustrates Caplan's easy free-market argument.

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