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Notes -
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.
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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