Garett Jones has written an impressive new book on the implications of culture for international migration. In The Culture Transplant (subtitled: How Migrants Make The Economies They Move To A Lot Like The Ones They Left), Jones makes the following arguments:
1. Some cultures are better than others at certain important tasks, including good governance and wealth creation.
2. These cultural attributes relate to deep historical patterns, including the level of development achieved by that society’s ancestors thousands of years in the past.
3. These cultural attributes are relatively persistent and remain intact (to some extent) even several generations after individuals migrate to a new country.
Jones argues that these facts have important implications for immigration policy. In particular, he suggests that migration from cultures that are less successful will tend to degrade the receiving country. He worries about a decline in the quality of governance, less ability to innovate, and even (in extreme cases) more civil strife. I would expect this book to be of particular interest to conservative opponents of immigration.
Reviewers such as Bryan Caplan and Alex Nowrasteh have argued Jones overstates the case against high levels of immigration. I also believe that Jones somewhat overstates his case (which nonetheless may have some merit), and will suggest some additional reasons why.
[Update: I recently became aware of a second post by Alex Nowrasteh, done before mine. He anticipates all my key points, and has a much more thorough discussion of the evidence.]
Jones writes in an engaging style and understands how to keep readers interested. Instead of opening with some dry theory, he begins with a few short chapters that provide extended anecdotes aimed at illustrating his basic point. Thus in the preface, Jones argues that poor countries such as Egypt, Paraguay, and Indonesia would benefit from receiving lots of immigrants from China. By beginning with this example, Jones is signaling that he’s not reflexively anti-immigration; rather he’s specifically worried about immigration from less successful cultures. China has a long history of achievement in three areas that Jones suggests are highly significant: state capacity (S), agriculture (A), and technology (T). He develops an index called SAT, which aggregates these metrics and assigns an SAT score for each country (not to be confused with the college entrance exam.)
In a later chapter, Jones shows that many Southeast Asian nations have benefited from Chinese immigration. I think he’s right, but I also believe he underestimates the problem with using China as an example of the importance of culture. If Chinese culture is so superior at wealth creation and good governance, then why is China itself relatively poor? And why has China been relatively poorly governed over almost all of the past 150 years? There are reasonable responses one can offer, and again I think he’s right about Chinese immigration to Southeast Asia. Nonetheless, it’s odd to start your book with such a poor example, a case that requires adding some “epicycles” to the model in order to explain awkward facts. Yes, China’s been held back by communism, but Jones’s argument is that some immigrants groups are better because they have cultures associated with good governance. So why has China been poorly governed for most of its recent history?
This is just a short opening chapter, and certainly doesn’t discredit his model, which relies on a wide range of empirical studies. But chapter one (“The Assimilation Myth”) also opens with an extended anecdote, which is even less favorable to Jones’s model. Jones explains how Argentina was one of the world’s richest nations back in 1913, but after a century of bad governments has fallen back to a middle-income level. He attributes their relative decline to a massive wave of immigration from Italy (and to a lesser extent Spain) in the early 1900s. (Although Spanish speaking, in an ethnic sense Argentina is dominated by Italians.)
[BTW, Razib Khan says that when people say something to the effect that “the model minority view of Asians is a myth,” it’s a pretty good indication that’s it’s at least partly true. That’s how I feel about “the assimilation myth.”]
The Argentine example has the opposite problem of the China example. Italy and Spain are fully developed Western European nations, with per capita GDPs that are nearly twice as high as Argentina (in PPP terms, there’s an even greater gap in dollar terms). So if these were low quality migrants, why do they produce such bad results in Argentina where they are only a portion of the population, and good results back in their European homelands, where they represent almost the entire population?
Italy is often cited as a case study for the cultural issues that Jones focuses on. Southern Italy has a relatively low trust culture with high levels of corruption and lots of low productivity family firms. Northern Italy has a much higher trust culture, with less corruption and many successful wealth-creating companies. So did Argentina receive its immigrants from the less successful part of Italy?
Actually, only about half of Italian immigrants to Argentina came from southern Italy. In contrast, the overwhelming majority of Italian immigrants to the US came from southern Italy. And yet America’s Italian immigrants successfully assimilated into our middle class, while Argentina’s supposedly superior mix of Italian immigrants did poorly. Why? Jones mentions something about anarchist agitators arriving from Europe. But that sort of reliance on the effect of a few individuals with problematic political views is at odds with the sort of cultural determinism that underlies his model. (Here it might be helpful to recall the longstanding debate between the “great man” theory of history and the deep cultural forces theory. Jones is clearly in the latter camp.)
After completing chapter one, we’ve encountered two important case studies: China and Italy. With China, we have immigrants leaving a dysfunctional society and doing well elsewhere, and with Italy we have immigrants leaving a highly successful society and doing poorly in Argentina. Again, this doesn’t mean Jones’s theory is wrong (I think he’s partly correct), but it’s a bit concerning that the two anecdotes he cherry picks to illustrate his model are such a poor fit for what he will subsequently try to show. He could have opened with any number of case studies, and indeed elsewhere he mentions better examples, such as the fact that Norwegians do well in Norway and also in the US.
In chapter 5, Jones pushes back against the mantra that “diversity is our strength”. He worries that cultural diversity can lead to civil strife and a deterioration in the quality of governance, which will eventually make a country poorer. While this may be correct, it’s difficult to explain why highly diverse America is much richer than any other country with a population of more than 10 million. (Our per capita GDP (PPP) is more than $5000 above second place Netherlands.) If cultural diversity is a strong negative, how can the US be much richer than any other non-small country? Why is America more than 50% richer than Japan?
Some might dismiss the US case as a mere anecdote; what matters are the correlations that show up in statistical regressions involving many countries. But the US is a fairly important case, and I suspect that most readers of Jones book will be Americans. How do we know that the ability to assimilate immigrants is a stable parameter? Casual empiricism suggests exactly the opposite. East Asian immigrants seem to be assimilating relatively successfully into the US, while (as Jones points out) Chinese immigrants in Southeast Asia often maintain quite separate communities. Muslim immigrants to America have done quite well, even as Muslim immigrants to France have done relatively poorly.
Of course you can keep adding epicycles to the theory, such as looking at the specific type of Muslim immigrant to each country. But the nature of the receiving country is also important. In a dynamic market economy with a relatively small welfare state for non-workers, the level of employment is likely to be higher than in a more statist economy where unemployment is high and welfare benefits are strong. Employment is important, as immigrants who work with locals are more likely to adopt the local culture. I suspect that unemployed Muslim immigrants stuck in housing projects outside Paris are less likely to assimilate than fully employed Muslim immigrants in America.
On page 81, Jones does acknowledge that ethnic conflicts occasionally fade over time. I wish he had spent more effort thinking about why they tend to fade more in countries such as the US than in places like former Yugoslavia. I’d also have liked to see a discussion of Switzerland. Jones is famous for writing a book extolling the benefits of having “10% less democracy,” citing Singapore as an example. But Switzerland is an even more successful place than Singapore (if living standards are measured correctly), and it has at least 10% more democracy (and decentralization) than any other country. Might that be why the various language groups in Switzerland get along better than in former Yugoslavia? (Switzerland also has an extremely high proportion of immigrants.)
It is very difficult to predict the impact of immigration on a country’s politics. About 10 years ago, there were many predictions that immigration would make US politics more left wing. This was based on the fact that immigrants are more likely to vote for the Democrats. But this is a simplistic way of looking at the impact of ethnicity. Blacks tend to vote Democratic, but the higher the black population of a state, the more likely it is to be controlled by the Republicans. Immigration to the US seems to have energized the Republican Party, leading to the election of Trump in 2016. (In my view, he would have been re-elected if he had been less . . . er . . . controversial.)
There is also evidence that ethnic diversity leads to a smaller welfare state and lower taxes, as the majority resists paying benefits to lower income minority groups. Some have argued that this explains why the welfare state in America is smaller than in Europe. It’s also been suggested that immigrants from places like Latin America will bring with them a preference for populist authoritarian leaders, the so-called “man on horseback.” But when America was finally presented with such a candidate in 2016 and 2020, it turns out that he was mostly supported by whites, and Hispanic voters tended to opt for the more liberal candidate. In big cities, whites are more likely to support ideas such as “defund the police,” while black voters shy away from these sorts of nutty ideas. In Democratic primaries, black voters tend to be more skeptical of candidates that identify as “socialist.” None of this means that Jones is wrong, but I suspect that the relationship between culture and politics is more complicated than he assumes.
In chapter six, Jones shows that most of the important innovations leading to higher living standards are produced by just a handful of major developed countries in Europe, North America and East Asia. He worries that the quality of these countries may be watered down by mass immigration from less successful cultures, hobbling the primary engines of world innovation. Oddly, he repeatedly suggests that being large makes a country more innovative, even though his own data doesn’t really support that claim. For instance, while his data suggests that big countries produce the most Nobel Prize winners, it also shows that small countries tend to lead in Nobel Prize winners per capita. Thus I don’t understand this claim (p. 118):
So Denmark, with a population of 5 million, probably uses many more ideas from Germany (population 83 million) than the other way around. The small, in this way exploit the large—another reminder that every nation relies on the inventions created in just a few nations.
The term “exploit” seems misleading; he’s confusing total innovation with innovation per capita. If Jones’s claim were correct, then if Germany were to divide up into a bunch of independent nations with the populations equal to places like Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Luxembourg and Netherlands, then global innovation would suffer—because bigger is better. But in aggregate these six small nations are just about as successful in producing Nobel Prize winners (99) as is Germany (with 113), despite having a far smaller total population. If anything, Germany is less innovative than its neighbors. (Adding Sweden would boost the total of Nobel Prizes in this group of small nations to well above Germany, despite still having a lower total population.)
In any case, the bigger is better argument is not necessary for Jones to make his point. It’s enough to point out that at a global level innovation is concentrated in a few areas. Even within the US, innovation is concentrated in places such as Silicon Valley, Boston and Hollywood. The question is whether more immigration will hurt innovation, will “kill the goose that lays the golden eggs”. Jones understands that innovations in places such as Silicon Valley are often produced by immigrants. He’s making a different point. He worries that mass immigration from unsuccessful cultures will degrade our political system, leading to worse economic policies and thereby reducing innovation in the long run. But the book doesn’t present any examples of that phenomenon occurring, apart from the highly suspect example of Argentina.
I am not saying that Jones is completely wrong; indeed I suspect that his hypothesis is partly correct. Culture does play an important role in the wealth of nations. Cultural traits tend to persist over time. But at the margin, I don’t see this concern as having important implications for US immigration policy, for several reasons:
1. Immigrants to the US tend to assimilate better than immigrants to many other nations.
2. Immigrants to the US from even highly dysfunctional places such as South Asia and West Africa tend to do relatively well in the US.
Thus I see no evidence in Jones’s book contradicting the view that the US would benefit from any politically feasible boost in immigration. So what are the policy implications?
1. Jones successfully raises some doubts about a policy of completely open borders, particularly for a small nation. It’s hard for me to imagine the impact of Switzerland removing all border controls and allowing unlimited immigration from the world’s poorest nations. And even for larger countries such as the US, that policy would have to be accompanied (at a minimum) by a removal of welfare benefits for new arrivals. And even then the wave of immigration would probably be too much for the voters to accept, at least until world incomes become somewhat more equal.
But not completely equal. Contrary to popular imagination, not all income differences lead to large waves of migration. Lots of people still live in places such as Bulgaria and Romania, despite free migration within the EU and income levels in the Balkans that are a small fraction of incomes in northwestern Europe. But the world’s poorest countries are far poorer than even Bulgaria, and have vastly larger populations. So completely open borders would be a very hard sell to the rich world’s voters.
The second policy implication is that skill based immigration policies that you see in places like Canada and Australia may have more positive long run cultural effects than policy regimes that don’t favor high skilled immigrants. To be clear, I don’t see any problem in the current mix of skills in US immigrants; they seem to be doing fine in most cases. But there’s at least a respectable argument for shifting the US immigrant mix a bit further toward the highly skilled groups. (Unlike Jones, I’m not convinced that the social science research on culture is strong enough to distinguish between relatively high skilled people from successful places like Norway and similar people from failed states like India and Nigeria, so I’d take them all.)
I’m surprised that Jones doesn’t spend more time discussing the advantages of cultural diversity. The US entertainment industry (broadly defined to include film, comedy, music and sports) dominates the global scene. Why is this? I can’t help noticing that various minority groups play an important role in these industries (notably Jews and African-Americans.) When people discuss the disproportionate share of Indian immigrants among Silicon Valley CEOs, they often point to cultural factors such as a familiarity with the English language (relative to East Asian immigrants.) It seems plausible that America’s diversity helps its economy by allowing various ethnic groups to engage in areas where each has a comparative advantage.
In contrast, Japan did extremely well during the postwar decades when they focused on high quality manufacturing of consumer goods such as cars and TVs, but after the 1990s their monoculture proved unable to smoothly adapt to the post-industrial economy that relies heavily on creating new ideas that break with tradition. An economy with cultural diversity might be less brittle, better able to adapt to a wide variety of economic conditions.
It seems to me that Jones’s book has implications that challenge some long held views on both the right and the left. His research suggests that immigrants from less successful places are better off assimilating into American culture. Yet the “identity politics” of the left increasingly opposes the traditional goal of making America a melting pot, and instead encourages groups to hold onto their ethnic identity. Would Italian-Americans be better off today if they had held firmly to the cultural traditions of southern Italy? Jones’s research does suggest that Italian Americans have not fully assimilated, but it’s certainly true that compared to when I was young one hears far fewer reports of the influence of the Italian mafia. (In contrast, the mafia remains very active in southern Italy.)
If Jones is correct that cultures evolve extremely slowly over time, then conservatives may need to rethink their claim that the legacy of slavery does not provide an “excuse” for current problems in the African American community. Recent West African immigrants that are doing well in America did not experience the brutal suppression of traditional family structures that occurred under American forms of slavery. Conservatives cannot have it both ways, claiming that cultures are almost impossible to change in a period of 100 years, while also suggesting that America’s blacks should have simply rebuilt the cultural structures that were destroyed by slavery.
Bryan Caplan argues that even if Jones is correct, the actual implications of his book are that America should provide open borders with a fairly large range of countries, comprising a few billion people. That would be a radical move toward significantly more open borders. Caplan might well be correct, but it’s not the impression the typical conservative reader will take from the book. I wonder how Jones responds to Caplan’s claim.
Alex Nowrasteh raises serious questions about the quality of the social science research that Jones relies on. In a sense, I’ve implicitly raised some questions with my observations about America’s extraordinary success. We have a fairly substantial share of our population from places with somewhat dysfunctional cultures, such as Africa, Latin America, South Asia, southern Italy, Cambodia, Laos, and the Philippines. And yet we are far richer than places with supposedly (culturally) superior populations, such as Japan and Germany. Why? Size alone doesn’t seem to provide the answer, as the smaller countries of northwestern Europe are roughly as rich as Germany, and some of the smaller economies in East Asia are roughly as rich as Japan (in PPP terms). If Denmark, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Austria can all be richer than Germany, then why can’t Canada be richer than the US? Perhaps our ethnic diversity is not the explanation, but it certainly doesn’t seem to have greatly held us back.
A reader of Jones’s book might assume that many Americans are leaving dysfunctional states such as Texas for the greener pastures of West Virginia. After all, Texas is only about 40% non-Hispanic white, and his model suggests that having a large share of people from places like Africa and Latin American will lead to bad governance. In contrast, West Virginia is mostly white, with relatively few immigrants. So why is it doing so much worse than Texas?
I would encourage people to check their biases. I grew up as a white person in a heavily white area, and tended to view white culture as “normal”. I wonder how many whites realize that Asian Americans often view whites as a violent gun-toting race? Many whites are aware of the phenomenon of “white flight”, the tendency to move out of school systems with large black and Hispanic populations. How many whites are aware of the existence of white flight from school systems where Asian students outperform whites? It’s human nature to view our own group as normal, having just the right amount of murder, just the right number of slacker students and meth addicts. I don’t see evidence of that sort of bias in Garett Jones, but I worry it exists in the larger anti-immigrant community. Yes, immigrants sometimes bring problems. But they also bring in a fresh set of skill and attitudes, which enrich the complex American mosaic.
PS. Don’t be put off by my objections to specific points made by Jones. It’s an excellent book and well worth reading. There are no easy answers in this area.
READER COMMENTS
Brett
Jan 4 2023 at 1:24pm
I’ve always found this a rather interesting result, since it only seems to apply at “larger” levels of governance (such as state and federal governance). Cities in the US have both have tons of immigrants plus often higher taxes and redistribution.
Scott Sumner
Jan 4 2023 at 1:52pm
Do cities do a lot of redistribution?
Brett
Jan 4 2023 at 5:07pm
It’s not as big as it used to be, but NYC has its own public housing system, they have their own income tax above the state and federal tax, and so forth.
Aldo Rustichini
Jan 5 2023 at 1:49pm
Again on: There is also evidence that ethnic diversity leads to a smaller welfare state and lower taxes.
If you guys have in mind results like Alesina et al, 1999, please take into account that the paper considers only one side of the story, that the majority is opposed. There is also the other side, that the minority really looks for transfers, and obtains them through political activism. You should consider Minneapolis between the 80’s and today and see whether redistribution has gone down or up as heterogeneity increased…
Scott Sumner
Jan 5 2023 at 2:35pm
I’ve seen articles suggesting that the welfare state in places like Denmark has been trimmed due to the perception that benefits increasingly go to immigrants.
X
Jan 6 2023 at 10:28pm
But would this still remain the case if Denmark became, say, 25% or 30% or 40% or 50% Muslim? I’m not so sure, unless of course the Danish social safety net would have already imploded and collapsed beforehand due to Denmark getting too many low-IQ people by then.
Andrew_FL
Jan 4 2023 at 3:19pm
It is impolitic to suggest for some reason, but it appears that ideology, not culture, is what matters in these examples.
Consider Argentina’s Italian immigrants vs America’s. You note that most Italian-Americans are Southern Italians. This is the traditionally more conservative region of Italy, with the north being more leftist. Perhaps Argentina’s Italian immigrants drove the country toward the left.
The governance which results in more and less successful places may only partially correlate to the ideology of the people who live there, especially in countries which are not democracies or if the less successful places groups are a minority and the governance is highly centralized. So Chinese immigrants mostly aren’t communists so they don’t bring communism with them. However communist ideology dominates governance holding back the success of China.
Scott Sumner
Jan 5 2023 at 2:29pm
In general, the people that emigrate to America do so because they like our system better than the country they left. Thus lots of Latin Americans who arrive here from Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, etc., hate socialism.
TGGP
Jan 4 2023 at 5:43pm
There was an interesting study on Italian immigration to America vs Argentina a little while back which made the point that most Italian immigrants to the US didn’t stay here, but instead went back home after working here for a while. It was theorized that because the Spanish spoken in Argentina was closer to Italian, it was more congenial to them and thus more of them stayed (and often took on more middle class jobs than they did in the US).
As for more examples of immigrants changing a place, Germanic “barbarians” killed off the western Roman empire, then the Anglo-Saxons eliminated the latifundia economy and Christian culture of post-Roman England. Settlers from Britain killed off native Americans to the point of isolating them onto reservations (the non-Malthusian ratio of land to population then made the US the richest place per capita in the world), and after Anglos migrated into northern Mexico in large numbers they made Texas independent. Reading Phil Magness arguing today about William Hutt reminds me that the discovery of gold in South Africa brought a very large influx of workers to those mines, and that apartheid was created in an (ultimately unsuccessful decades later) effort to stop the change resulting from that population influx.
I have a different takeaway regarding African immigrants. We also see much better outcomes for immigrants from the Caribbean, which also had a history of slavery. We see worse outcomes for Africans who weren’t subject to slavery, but did come over as refugees rather than immigrants. This indicates to me that the important thing is whether there was a selective immigration filter rather than the history of slavery.
Scott Sumner
Jan 4 2023 at 6:23pm
There’s a big difference between peaceful immigrants and invading armies.
tpeach
Jan 4 2023 at 8:25pm
Where I live (Perth, Australia), I know Serbians who seem to get on fine with other Yugoslavian immigrants. When they are all in a new country, the shared Yugoslavian identity seems to be more important than old ethnic divisions from back home.
I’m not Yugoslavian though, so I probably don’t fully understand the situation. It’s just my observation and something I have heard mentioned a couple of times.
Scott Sumner
Jan 5 2023 at 1:55am
That’s also my perception about immigrants from troubled areas.
Phil H
Jan 4 2023 at 9:20pm
I’m not sure if this idea makes any sense, but here goes:
I wonder if most theories of culture, demographics and “outcomes” are theories about what the endpoints or stable equilibria might look like; whereas in the current moment we might still be in a period of swift demographic change. And if that’s right, maybe the theories just won’t work.
So, for example, if Jones’s thesis is right, that emigrants from high SAT cultures will ultimately do well in their new lands, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the high SAT groups will do best in the intermediate/transitional periods. And we might be in one long transition right now.
I don’t really have any idea if that’s right. I just worry about whether these models are robust even at the conceptual level. Because certainly on the empirical level the evidence seems mixed, as Scott points out.
Rajat
Jan 4 2023 at 11:45pm
These factors are interrelated, as the more widely dispersed payoffs faced by migrants to the US from talent and hard work probably draw in a more talented and ambitious class of migrant than those that go to other western countries. Although Australia has a skill-based migration policy, which helps ensure immigrants are fairly immediately employable, the Australian system is unlikely to draw in the hyper-talented CEO-types that would migrate to the US. None of which is to dispute your point that the US would benefit from any politically feasible boost in immigration. In fact, the US is famously difficult to migrate to these days, even for highly-skilled workers.
Scott Sumner
Jan 5 2023 at 1:57am
Good points.
Mactoul
Jan 5 2023 at 1:56am
America lets in only high-IQ immigrants from East Asia, India and Africa. While Europe gets a lot of asylum-seekers from Middle East and Africa.
That largely explains the differences observed.
“Blacks tend to vote Democratic, but the higher the black population of a state, the more likely it is to be controlled by the Republicans.”
And why?
In multi-ethnic societies, politics is tribal and this is what we see here.
“Immigration to the US seems to have energized the Republican Party, leading to the election of Trump in 2016.”
Trump won 2016 on an agenda to restrict immigration and lost 2020 because he failed to deliver.
Scott Sumner
Jan 5 2023 at 12:31pm
“Trump won 2016 on an agenda to restrict immigration and lost 2020 because he failed to deliver.”
This is wrong on so many levels.
X
Jan 6 2023 at 10:25pm
“And why?”Because the most conservative whites live in US states that have the largest percentage of blacks.
stoneybatter
Jan 5 2023 at 12:57pm
Scott, you said: “Muslim immigrants to America have done quite well, even as Muslim immigrants to France have done relatively poorly […] In a dynamic market economy with a relatively small welfare state for non-workers, the level of employment is likely to be higher than in a more statist economy where unemployment is high and welfare benefits are strong.”
In fact, the prime-age (age 25-54) employment rate is higher in France than in the US, at 82.9% versus 80.2% (for Q3:2022, latest available from OECD, here: https://data.oecd.org/emp/employment-rate-by-age-group.htm). The same dynamic, with higher employment in France, is true if you look only at men, or only women, as well.
Scott Sumner
Jan 5 2023 at 2:33pm
That’s extremely misleading data. When leftists are confronted with data that US per capita GDP is far higher than France, they argue that it’s all because the French work many fewer hours, that productivity is just as high. When confronted with accusations that the welfare state reduces work effort, they argue that the French work more than Americans. You can’t have it both ways.
stoneybatter
Jan 5 2023 at 4:37pm
I have no view on those questions. Perhaps it is bad that France works fewer hours and is poorer than the US, perhaps it is worth the tradeoffs. I am only addressing your specific argument that France’s lower employment may inhibit immigrant assimilation. France has higher employment than the US. I am skeptical that employment is a key factor for immigrant assimilation.
Good post overall, as usual.
Scott Sumner
Jan 5 2023 at 8:46pm
“France has higher employment than the US.”
I don’t agree.
X
Jan 6 2023 at 10:25pm
Do US states with a larger welfare state have reduced work effort?
JFA
Jan 5 2023 at 1:00pm
“How many whites are aware of the existence of white flight from school systems where Asian students outperform whites?”
I’m sure there are some examples where a few white people left because they didn’t want their kids to compete against Asians, but do you have any data to support the claim of “white flight” for this reason?
Plenty of white parents want their kids to go to Thomas Jefferson here in northern Virginia… a school not unfamiliar with high achieving Asians. When I lived in California, the presence of Asians didn’t seem to drive away white families either.
Scott Sumner
Jan 5 2023 at 2:34pm
I’ve read many articles discussing this phenomenon. I’m sure you can google them.
Mark Z
Jan 5 2023 at 2:46pm
Isn’t it rather inconsistent to criticize him for underestimating the complexity of the relationship between culture and politics, while also making swipes about ‘adding more epicycles?’ If we accept that the true model is probably extremely complicated, then yeah, more epicycles are inevitable.
The point about whites being more conservative in Southern states is a good example of this. there are very bespoke historical reasons both for why southerners are more conservative, and for why there are more black people there. Contrary to your explanation, though, migration of blacks in/out of those states in the past century or so hasn’t affected the politics of whites in the way one would expect if the presence of nonwhites made whites more conservative. If anything it’s probably the opposite: at the county or city-level the most progressive whites live where there’s the highest non-white population. You yourself seem to acknowledge this in claiming that white voters in diverse big cities tend to be left wing than black voters (though I’m not sure this is actually true).
Scott Sumner
Jan 5 2023 at 4:26pm
Would you also agree that migration from Africa and the Middle East into Europe has not made European politics more left wing? (Probably the reverse.)
X
Jan 6 2023 at 10:24pm
It has made Europeans more like to get murdered for engaging in “Islamophobic” speech, which is a huge drawback. Had someone in Europe drawn Muhammad two or three centuries ago, no one would have cared, because back then there were virtually no Muslims in Europe.
X
Jan 8 2023 at 4:15am
Their politics could become more left-wing if Muslims became a majority or near-majority of their total population.
X
Jan 23 2023 at 11:14pm
Well, left-wing in economic matters, at least. On social issues, Muslims, especially working-class Muslims, might move Europe to the right, such as by making blasphemy illegal if they will make up a sufficiently large percentage of the European electorate.
John Thacker
Jan 5 2023 at 4:39pm
As an aside, I’m not even sure that people all mean the same thing when they say “the model minority view of Asians” in the first place. Do they mean:
“It is a myth that Asian success is a viable model that other minorities like blacks and Hispanics should be able to replicate if they tried hard enough”
“It is a myth that Asians are successful in the US, and that Asian immigrants quickly rise out of low income”
“It is a myth that Asian economic success means that all Asians are economically successful, and none are in poverty.
“It is a myth that Asian economic success means that they face no racism in the US”
or something else?
2 is not a myth; on average Asians are economically very successful; even some adjustments for Asian-Americans commonly living in high cost of living areas doesn’t affect that. Essentially no one believes 3 – surveys overwhelmingly demonstrate that people who hold stereotypes admit the possibility of exceptions (and sometimes “too often” for whatever that means.) 4 is a myth that some people hold (analogous to a claim that Jewish people can’t be oppressed.)
1 is basically in opposition to the other claims because it’s not about Asian people, but literally about whether they can serve as a model, and it has the best argument, because some people do make that argument whereas other people understandably want to distinguish between a group with a high percentage of immigrants who came on student visas or were temporarily dispossessed victims of Communism, and people who immigrated as day laborers or came as slaved, it’s not necessarily reasonable to call the former group a model for the latter.
Jim Glass
Jan 5 2023 at 7:23pm
This seems like the type of idea that superficially seems entirely reasonable, but which upon examination breaks up into hall-of-mirrors confusion and nonsense.
E.g,; in the late 19th Century there was large scale immigration of Jews to New York City from Russia and other countries in Eastern Europe, the cultures of which encouraged the Jews to move along via pogroms and the like. Those countries and their cultures were a horrid, violent mess by our standards even back then. Yet, the Jewish populations that arrived here, as impoverished as they were, immediately overachieved in the public schools. And after a couple generations to get adjusted, they started collecting Nobel Prizes one after the other, while moving into the top levels of many esteemed professions generally.
So applying Jones’s concern in real time circa 1890, what “culture” counts? Is his advice: “Don’t let anyone in from Eastern Europe, they’ll bring their horrid, violent, racist, anti-democratic culture with them and ruin our nation!” Or is it: “Do let the Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe in, because they have a culture that long has highly valued education and self reliance — but keep everyone else over there with their horrid culture out!” And when arguments break out over this, how does he settle them?
Also, for the record, post the US Civil War, how many people immigrated to the USA from countries that didn’t have “less successful” cultures? It looks to me like the USA was for 150 years built on immigration from less successful cultures — certainly, less successful countries. If culture was treating people well at home, why would they leave?
X
Jan 6 2023 at 10:23pm
I wonder if Garett Jones would have advocated using IQ tests 100+ years ago to determine which immigrants to accept, at least from underperforming countries.
jim
Jan 5 2023 at 8:37pm
Scott, thanks for the review.
You make some great points about his theories on cultural migration. With regard to southern Italy and other places with corruption, why would the corrupt people leave when they have the system set up for themselves? Rather, it’s the people who despise the corruption that leave and come to countries like the US for a fair shot.
I’ve thought about that often with regards to the middle east and terrorism. I’ve met many successful Lebanese, Israelis, Saudis, Egyptians etc living here in the US. It’s the people who want peace and a chance to live a normal life that leave the middle east, not the terrorists. It seems to me that, to some degree, that’s why the middle east continues to have problems: the people who want to solve problems leave, and the people who benefit from terrorism stay and perpetuate the system.
That being said, to some degree Jones’ ideas could make sense if there was large flood of immigration from a corrupt country in the face of a systemic collapse, where the good, the bad and the ugly all want to flee
X
Jan 23 2023 at 11:16pm
Yes, it’s quite interesting: Sometimes a country can attract other countries’ best and brightest, such as with the Anglosphere’s cognitively elitist immigrants, and sometimes the quality of immigrants is less good, such as in regards to working-class Latin American immigration into the US and working-class Muslim (and perhaps African) immigration into Europe.
Anonymous
Jan 5 2023 at 8:41pm
Does he talk about IQ in the book? He has a whole other book about IQ’s importance to nations, right? (I haven’t read them)
Scott Sumner
Jan 5 2023 at 8:44pm
I don’t recall much discussion of IQ, but I’d guess that IQ is positively correlated with his “SAT”
X
Jan 6 2023 at 10:22pm
Yes, there certainly is some correlation, though one could argue that some civilizations were more advanced in the past, such as in India and/or the Muslim world, than their average IQs nowadays would suggest. So, SAT scores and IQs don’t have a perfect correlation.
And in any case, a person can have a high IQ but come from a low average IQ country. There could, of course, be some regression towards the mean in the next generation, but if this person’s descendants will still be average or above average in their new homeland, then there should be no problems in regards to assimilation, at least IQ-wise.
Arqiduka
Jan 6 2023 at 3:49am
My thoughts as well. Haven’t read the book, but going by the review, is the author saying “culture” but meaning IQ and/or ethnicity? Is any explicit attempt made in the book to distinguish between these?
Scott Sumner
Jan 6 2023 at 12:59pm
He isn’t just “saying culture”, he is using the specific metrics in his SAT index.
Arqiduka
Jan 6 2023 at 9:30pm
None of the subcomponents correlates there, do they?
Alex Nowrasteh
Jan 6 2023 at 6:57am
Thanks for mentioning the first part of my review of Jones’s book. Here’s the second part:https://anowrasteh.substack.com/p/review-of-the-culture-transplant-184
Jim Glass
Jan 6 2023 at 12:18pm
Doesn’t this assume that immigrants from a given country embody the average culture, SAT score, of that country? During my decades living in NYC I’d have bet my co-op that the Chinese, Caribbean, Yugoslav, recent arrivals I knew had personalities and attitudes far far different from those of the average compatriots they left behind in their homelands.
What about the Jewish population (mentioned in my prior comment) that arrived in NYC in the 1880s-onward. Should their value to the USA as immigrants have been measured by the SAT scores of the Eastern European pogrom-lands from which they fled?
Scott Sumner
Jan 6 2023 at 1:17pm
I see I should have posted this a few weeks ago, when I first wrote it. You’ve anticipated all my key points, and done so in a much more thorough fashion. Great post.
I’ll add a link.
SK
Jan 6 2023 at 10:40am
There is or should not be a clear cut good or bad, black or white view of immigration policy. It is dependent upon so many different variables/factors that such sweeping statements are nonsensical. A better question seems to me to be what is the environment of the new host country where we see immigrants successfully being assimilated, and integrated in to society thereby becoming productive citizens?
Having grown up way long ago in an area where there were kids who immigrated from Cuba , Latin America, some from China, India I can say only this: all got along and all became productive assimilated Americans. Why? Maybe the educational system of that long ago time period was better and learning and understanding how this Country was founded might have been a contributor. Lastly, all came here legally.
James W Oliver
Jan 6 2023 at 12:32pm
Good points I have 3 more to add:
My impression is that the elite of South Africa are pretty creative and are doing fine (I think that it’s the same with Bermuda.)
from the data that I’ve seen the immigrates the USA is getting from Africa and the Caribbean seems to lower the very high murderer rate of ADOS, I think by changing the culture a bit.
Poor Hispanics tend to have lower age adjusted crime rates than poor Whites and ADOS in the USA providing better neighborhoods for our low earners.
Harun
Jan 6 2023 at 1:22pm
“with Italy we have immigrants leaving a highly successful society and doing poorly in Argentina.”
Was Italy “a highly successful society” when they emigrated?
I am skeptical of this claim.
You can find far less emigration as a country gets richer. Fewer Taiwanese emigrate to America now than in the 70’s or 80’s.
Very simple: you don’t leave a country when its rich and offering decent life. I doubt Italian peasants leaving for Argentina in 1913 viewed Italy as a great place.
Scott Sumner
Jan 7 2023 at 1:29am
“Was Italy “a highly successful society” when they emigrated?”
You missed the point of Jones’s book. The point is that Italy has a culture that is prone to success (a high SAT score). It has a long history of success, and is successful today. The fact that it was doing less well 100 years ago is immaterial.
Jim Glass
Jan 6 2023 at 2:45pm
the overwhelming majority of Italian immigrants to the US came from southern Italy. And yet America’s Italian immigrants successfully assimilated…
Well, they did slowly. When my kids were young I looked at the political-economic history of the school system and posted this online (Google is my archive)…
The Italians started arriving en masse circa 1880, so that 0% rate is after about 50 years. Groups successfully assimilate at very different rates.
Of course they did assimilate eventually. I watched Manhattan’s Little Italy evaporate before my eyes. (There’s still one in the Bronx.) And once saw Nicholas Pileggi attribute a good part of the decline of the Mafia to the sons of the Mafiosi coming to believe that the point of joining “the family” was to get Sinatra tickets.
X
Jan 6 2023 at 10:19pm
Garett Jones I feel would have been better off talking about IQs rather than SAT scores. A country could have potentially had high SAT scores in the past but still be backward due to a low average IQ and/or other reasons (such as a legacy of Communist rule) right now, for instance. A country itself could also be below average but still have many smart and talented people in terms of overall numbers. But Yeah, open borders with countries that have high average IQs are a better bet than open borders with countries that have low average IQs. This is why the European Union is a relative success story in regards to open borders and why Europeans are welcoming Ukrainian refugees but not Muslim refugees with open arms.
Re: US Muslims vs. French Muslims: A much larger percentage of US Muslims come from the cognitive elites of Muslim countries relative to French Muslims, so that could play a huge role in explaining the differential assimilation and success rates of these two communities:
https://jsmp.dk/posts/2019-09-26-braindrain/
Generally, outside of Latin America, the US mostly imports cognitive elites from various countries. For Europe, the situation is different, and thus immigrants there sometimes or even often have worse outcomes when it comes to integration and assimilation. But of course even with low average IQ immigrants, not everything is always equal. US Hispanics have much lower homicide rates than US blacks, for instance, and they also don’t have a bad apple minority (such as among Muslims, especially lower-class Muslims) who supports murdering people over the wrong kind of speech.
X
Jan 6 2023 at 10:29pm
“And even for larger countries such as the US, that policy would have to be accompanied (at a minimum) by a removal of welfare benefits for new arrivals.”You’d also have to factor in the welfare costs of their descendants, who will be eligible for welfare in countries that have birthright citizenship, such as both the US and Canada. And in countries without birthright citizenship, well, you’ll just be creating a hereditary caste system, which is likely unsustainable in the long-run. Jim Crow eventually collapsed, as did both colonialism and apartheid.
Jim Glass
Jan 8 2023 at 9:45pm
In NYC immigrants are 37% of the population, 44% of the labor force, speak 200 languages, and 1.8 million or them “are not English Proficient.” That’s a really high level of immigration, and NYC’s done very well with it for a long time. After living the bulk of my life in this, the real “melting pot”, some random observations…
[] I’ve never known a NYCer who was anti-immigration, it would be like a fish being anti-water. Remove the immigrants, what’s left? (Anti-some specific immigrant groups, like the Russian Mob, sure.)
[] A visitor from Texas once expressed unkind words about Mexican immigrants to me. I pointed to all the immigrants walking down the street and said: no problem here, what’s your problem there? She pointed to the street and said, “If they were all Québécois you’d feel differently.” Maybe she had a point.
[] The worst racism I’ve ever heard in my life was immigrants damning native NYCers. This was back before the 1990s welfare reforms, when welfare abuse was bad and a hyped political issue, street and drug crime was high, etc. Caribbean blacks had arrived and with their strong family structure and high work ethic they had succeeded big, taking over much of the regional grocery industry and attaining a top spot on the city’s ethnic income distribution list. They *hated* the racism costs they suffered from being identified with the ‘native welfare blacks’, and I saw them really tear into the latter more than once.
[] The only “native white” resistance to immigration I ever saw was against Chinese families coming into my neighborhood to run vegetable stands and small food stores, by the small grocers already there. The elder Chinese often barely spoke English but had three generations working their shops 24/7. The “native white” competitors wanted to close in the evening to go home. They posted “Buy American” signs around and about, but didn’t last long.
[] At the same time, in a brew pub I met a Chinese youth trying to drown his shame and panic after scoring only a B+ in an NYU course on quantum physics. I kid not, still remember. How could he tell is parents who were working a vegetable stand? His friends were lamenting with him. I was stunned by the whole scene. I told them, be calm, in America an occasional B+ is OK.
[] I used to have an economist friend in Sweden. As to every report of the decline of America he’d reassure me: “Relax, the world votes with its feet and you still get all the best immigrants – we get the worst”. By ‘best’ he meant all the peoples who arrive highly motivated to assimilate and work – and by ‘worst’ he meant Muslims arriving to create colonies financed by government subsidies. It seems he was right as per the growing criminal gangs, violence and riots in Sweden, and the rise of right wing parties that is the result. (In Sweden!)
[] So I am biased very pro-immigration by both experience and theory, but admit it can cause serious problems. I’m very skeptical about broad brush analysis based on “national culture”, national “SAT scores” or the like. I’m certain the Chinese and Caribbean immigrants I met were very different from the average compatriots they left behind. (Isn’t China quite a big and varied country?) That self-selection matters hugely, I don’t understand why it is so absent from the conversation. Their ethnic concentration matters. The societal facts where they land matter…
Details, details, determine results. IMHO, FWIW.
Michael Sandifer
Jan 11 2023 at 9:16am
You would have done the book a greater service by not reviewing it at all, at least where I’m concerned. I see absolutely nothing appealing about the prospect of reading this book or considering the author’s perspective, given what I’ve read here. Based on your review, he doesn’t seem to have a coherent view on the topic at all. Data doesn’t seem to be his friend.
Ian MacDonald
Jan 25 2023 at 8:18am
Read this, “The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous”, a 2020 book by Harvard professor Joseph Henrich that aims to explain history and psychological variation with approaches from cultural evolution and evolutionary psychology.
Probably the single best explanation to date I’ve come across. It likely explains some of the inconsistencies you describe. I suspect WEIRD types tend to be more likely to immigrate while non-WEIRD (despite being of same ethnicity or cultural origin) personalities do not.
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