Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy

Go ahead and run your experiments in Iceland. Let's run that for 50 years and see what happens. It's weird how everybody's obsessed with it running the experiment in America, right? They'll balance the long run budget on the, kind of, the backs of the poor and the middle class. Anything that lowers the innovation in the world's most innovative countries has negative costs for the entire planet in the long run. But that's something you'd only see over the course of 20, 30, 50 years, and libertarians and open border advocates are very rarely interested in that kind of timeframe. It's worth thinking through why it is that the successful so-called monarchies aren't really monarchies, right? They're really oligarchies. 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.

Okay. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Garrett Jones, who is an economist at George Mason University. He's most recently the author of The Cultural Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move to a Lot Like the Ones They Left but he's also the author of 10% Less Democracy and Hive Mind. We'll get into all three of those books. Garrett, welcome to the podcast.

Glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Um, first question. Is, isn't The Cultural Transplant still a continuation of your argument against democracy? Because, uh, isn't one of the reasons we care about the values of migrants the fact that we live in a democracy? So, should we view this book as part of your critique against democracy rather than against migration specifically?

Um, well, I do think that, uh, governments and productivity are shaped by the citizens in a nation in, in almost any event. Um, I think that even, as we've seen recently in China, even in a very strong authoritarian dictatorship, which some would call totalitarian, even there, the government has to listen to the masses. So, the government can only get so far away from the masses on average, even in, uh, an autocracy.

If you had to split apart the contribution though, um, the, the impact of, of migrants on, let's say, the culture versus the impact that migrants have on a country by voting in their political system, um, uh, h- how, how would you split that apart? Is, is the m- is mainly the impact we s- the cultural impact we see for migration due to the ability of migrants to vote or because they're just influencing the culture just by being there?

I'll cheat a little bit because we don't get to run experiments on this, so I just have to kind of guess, uh, make an informed guess. I, I'm gonna call it 50/50. Um, so the way people, uh, the way citizens influence a country through formal democracy is important, uh, but citizens end up placing some kind of limits on the government anyway. And the people in a country are the, they're the folks who are gonna work in the firms and be able to either establish or not establish those complicated networks of exchange that are crucial to high productivity.