Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy

**Garett Jones** (0:00)
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 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 time frame. But 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 going real.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:41)
Okay, today I have the pleasure of speaking with Garett 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. Garett, welcome to the podcast.

**Garett Jones** (1:06)
Glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (1:09)
First question, isn't The Cultural Transplant still a continuation of your argument against democracy?
Because 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?

**Garett Jones** (1:28)
Well, I do think that governments and productivity are shaped by the citizens in a nation in almost any event.
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 an autocracy.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (1:56)
If you had to split apart the contribution though, the impact of migrants on let's say the culture versus the impact that migrants have on a country by voting in their political system, how would you split that apart? Is mainly the impact, 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?

**Garett Jones** (2:20)
I'll cheat a little bit because we don't get to run experiments on this. So I just have to kind of guess, make an informed guess. I'm gonna call it 50-50.
So the way citizens influence a country through formal democracy is important, but citizens end up placing some kind of limits on the government anyway. And the people in the country are 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.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (2:52)
I wanna linger on Hive Mind a little bit before we talk about the Cultural Transplant.
If you had to guess, do the benefits of national IQ come from having a right tail of elites that is smarter, or is it from not having that strong of a left tail of people who are low productivity, more likely to commit crimes and things like that? In other words, yeah, go ahead.

**Garett Jones** (3:14)
Yeah, I think the upper tail is gonna matter more than the lower tail in the normal range of variation.
And I think part of that is because nations, at least moderately prosperous nations, have found tools for basically reducing the influence of the least informed voters and for basically being able to keep productivity up even when there are folks who are sort of disrupting the whole process.
The risks of crime from the lower end is basically like a probabilistic risk. It's not like some zero to one switch or anything. So we're talking about something probabilistic. And I think that the median versus the elite is the contrast that I find more interesting. Median voter theorem, normal, the way we often think about democracy says that the median should be matter more for determining productivity and for shaping institutions.
And I tend to think that that's more important in democracies for sure. So when we look at countries, if you just look at a scatterplot, just look at the raw data of a scatterplot. If you look at the few countries that are exceptions to the rule, where the mean IQ is the best predictor of productivity compared to elite IQ, the exceptions are non-democracies and South Africa. So you see a few places in the Gulf where there are large migrant communities who are exceptionally well-educated, exceptionally cognitively talented, and that's associated with high productivity. Those are a couple of Gulf states. It's probably Qatar, the UAE, might be Bahrain in there, I'm not sure. And then you've got South Africa. Those are the countries where the average test score, doesn't that be IQ? It could be just PISA, TIMS type stuff. Those are the exceptions to the rule that the average IQ, the mean IQ, is the best predictor of national productivity.