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Notes -
Europe is a possible counter-example both to various naive forms of HBD and also to the notion that ethno-nationalism is an advantage.
Europe is much more white than the US and is also much more ethno-nationalist than the US, yet it lags the US significantly both in GDP per capita (although I am not convinced that this is a very good metric) and also, it seems to me, in economic innovation (Europe is responsible for almost no major software companies).
Some possible counterarguments:
"The best talent of Europe came to the US." - But Germany, for example, has a higher average IQ than the US does. In any case, the IQ difference between the US and Europe, in either direction, does not seem to be large enough to be significant.
"Europe has been dealing with the aftermath of WW2." - But that does not explain why Europe had WW2 to begin with, or why the US was not comparably harmed by its Civil War. The US Civil War killed a comparable fraction of the US population to what Europe lost in WW2, but the US Civil War did not fundamentally slow the trajectory of US economic or geopolitical rise.
"Europe has been shackled by socialism." - But similarly to my objection to #2, this does not explain why Europe is, to begin with, more fond of socialism than the US is.
Am I getting something wrong? Is Europe more innovative than I give it credit for?
HBD isn't ever the only factor. North and South Korea are a great example of that. (But note that almost all Americans are recently descended from adventurers, while Europeans on the other hand are descended from the people who didn't go on adventure.)
The EU's economic (and to a point also social) policy is basically corporatism (in the old sense). That makes sense, because that's what Germany has always been like since the Kaiserreich, and France is ultimately quite similar even though it got there via a different route. It's better than communism as an economic system, but it's not going to get you the raw economic performance of USA-style capitalism. (Proponents will defend it on other grounds.) There's been some movement away from it - it was much, much more intensely so as late as the 90s - but only slowly and carefully.
More community cohesion might actually have a drawback as well. People are less independent. If you have to worry about what the neighbours will think, you're less likely to go and try something. The social response to ambition is often: "who does he think he is?". You're not supposed to rise above your station. If you try it you earn the ire of your peers; if you succeed then doubly so, and also your new peers won't quickly accept you.
The USA's quasi-libertarian foundation, though marred as it is by now, helps a lot. You're allowed to be ambitious. The system won't usually actively try to prevent you from succeeding. Worse average human capital - if that even is the case - is mitigated by the fact that the variance is allowed to be a lot higher. The people at the top of the bell curve get to invent things that improve the whole society, and become filthy rich in the process.
Your old friends will generally be proud, not envious. Your new peers will respect you for having managed to climb up, not look down on you for not having 1000 years of nobility behind you. The government won't - at least not nearly as much as in Europe - kick you right back down for interfering with the profits of the 1000 years of nobility.
The ghettos in the cities don't impede that process much. They could, if the problem gets too bad, but the USA is no South Africa yet.
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