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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.
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.
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