Dwarkesh PodcastGarett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy
At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Garrett Jones links migration, IQ, and democracy’s long-run tradeoffs
- Economist Garrett Jones discusses how national IQ, culture, and migration shape institutions, productivity, and innovation over decades rather than just in the short run.
- He argues that migrants bring durable cultural traits from their origin countries, which can change institutional quality in receiving nations through both voting and everyday norms, not just via formal politics.
- Jones contends that the mean and median skill level of a country’s population matter more for long-run institutional quality than small gains in elite talent, and that rich, innovative democracies should be cautious about policies—like large-scale low-skill immigration—that may lower national averages.
- He extends his broader thesis from Hive Mind and 10% Less Democracy: smarter populations generate positive externalities and support better governance, and somewhat constraining democracy in favor of expert-led institutions (like central banks) can improve long-run outcomes.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasNational average IQ appears to drive long-run productivity more than elite IQ alone.
Jones’ work suggests that a country’s mean or median cognitive ability better predicts income and institutional quality than just the right tail, because average skill levels shape the overall ‘hive mind’ and externalities everyone experiences.
Low-skill immigration can impose long-run institutional costs even if short-run microeconomic gains look positive.
While standard comparative-advantage stories about cheap labor and specialization hold in the short run, Jones argues migrants also bring persistent cultural and governance norms, which—when imported from more corrupt or lower-trust environments—tend to reduce economic freedom over time.
Cultural change is bidirectional: migrants assimilate natives as much as natives assimilate migrants.
Through his ‘spaghetti theory,’ Jones emphasizes that societies meet in the middle: Italians didn’t just adopt American culture; they changed American eating habits, illustrating how even non-political contact can shift norms and, eventually, institutions.
Policy should prioritize protecting global innovation hubs from institutional degradation.
Because a handful of ‘I7’ countries (e.g., US, Germany, Japan) generate disproportionate innovation spillovers, Jones advocates extreme caution about any policy, including open borders, that could lower their average skill levels and long-run innovative capacity.
Deep historical factors (statehood, agriculture, technology) predict modern development but are not yet policy-ready tools.
Jones uses S-A-T deep roots scores to explain national differences, but says we’re at an early ‘Friedman 1960s’ stage—good for broad insight, not yet for hard quotas; at most they might become small plus-factors in future points-based immigration systems.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesAnything that lowers the innovation in the world's most innovative countries has negative costs for the entire planet in the long run.
— Garrett Jones
Migrants assimilate us.
— Garrett Jones
It's amazing how your worldview changes when you see everybody as an externality.
— Garrett Jones
We should presume that the average skill level of voters, the average traits that we're bringing from our ancestors are having an effect on our current productivity for good or ill.
— Garrett Jones
Go ahead and run your experiments in Iceland. Let's run that for 50 years and see what happens.
— Garrett Jones
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