Understanding the Flows of History | Garett Jones & Richard Hanania
Understanding the Flows of History | Garett Jones & Richard Hanania
Appears in this episode
Garett Jones is a Professor of Economics at George Mason University. He joins the podcast to talk about his new book, The Culture Transplant. Richard asks whether IQ is superior to other measures used to predict prosperity, and the relationship between Garett’s new book and Hive Mind. He also presses the author on whether there is a selection effect in data showing that people preserve the traits of their original culture over time.
The conversation then gets into issues of causal inference, namely whether we should focus more on American history or cross-national trends to inform our understanding of US policy. Richard suggests that while immigration might in some contexts lead to larger government, in the US it is arguably the case that diversity has been a hindrance to the expansion of the welfare state.
And how important is trust, actually? It correlates with a lot of good things, but how much is that relationship simply driven by observations from Scandinavia? Garett makes the case for trust having an important causal role. This leads to a discussion of whether trust is simply a proxy for trustworthiness, and whether the latter trait is more important.
Garett also explains why Chinese migration could be a key force in lifting the third world out of poverty. Near the end, he discusses what he thinks America would look like after his preferred immigration policy, and what he’s working on next.
Listen to the podcast here or watch on YouTube.
Links:
Garett Jones on the Institutionalized podcast
Previous Jones appearance on the CSPI podcast
Alex Nowrasteh, critiques of The Culture Transplant, Part 1 and Part 2
Bryan Caplan review
Understanding the Flows of History | Garett Jones & Richard Hanania
I've enjoyed this episode a lot but I think the part about Argentina is wrong. Argentina was a wealthy country at the beginning of the 20th century but it wasn't wealthy in the same way the US or Germany were wealthy back then. It was more the way Poland was wealthy in the 16th century or Oman is wealthy today - purely based on natural resources.
A look under the hood reveals that Argentina's wealth came exclusively from exports of agricultural products, which were very expensive at the start of the century due to unprecedented population growth in Europe that challenged European food production (wheat prices have dropped by 75% between 1920 and 2005). But when it comes to e.g. trade of technologies, Argentina was a net importer of those, and excluding agriculture, it had negative trade balances with nearly everyone.
To sustain the agricultural production, Argentina indeed imported a lot of immigrants but more importantly, put their own kids to work instead of educating them. Attendance at primary schools was half compared to France and Germany at the time because kids were helping parents in the fields. Even in the 1960s, an average coming-of-age Argentine had only completed 5 classes of school. For comparison in Japan, which was 30% poorer in 1960, an average person spent 2 more years in school.
So I doubt that immigration had as much effect on Argentina's economy as indicated in the interview.
On affirmative action, I think Jones's view that its the least costly way to address this is out of date.
1) It presumes that only blacks, who are only 13% of the population, will have access to affirmative action. And that outside of that access they will have very little power.
Obviously, both the number of groups and the size of those groups as a % of the population that benefit from affirmative action/civil rights law has exploded.
2) Everyone wants a good thing. So by definition the AA/Civil Rights regime is always looking to and is incented to expand.
3) I think the fact that data and communication getting cheaper means that its very easy to gather and talk about disparate impact in a way that wasn't possible in earlier eras. This raises its salience and therefore raises its demands.
4) It seems to me that as affirmative action both persists and increases in scope, it must provide its own justification. "We have to buy off this group" is to cynical a justification to be of use and also has no limiting principal. So you inevitably have to invent things like wokeism as justification. This was BTW the fundamental criticism that many critics of affirmative action offered at its start.