Latest / Thinking Class / #034 - Garett Jones - Why We Need Selective Immigration Policies (People Make Countries They Move To Like The Ones They Left)

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#034 - Garett Jones - Why We Need Selective Immigration Policies (People Make Countries They Move To Like The Ones They Left) · Thinking Class

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class.
0:03
SPEAKER_00: I'm John Gillam and today I'm speaking with Garrett Jones.
0:05
SPEAKER_00: Garrett lives in Washington, D.C.
0:07
SPEAKER_00: and is Associate Professor of Economics and BBNT professor for the study of capitalism at George Mason University.
0:13
SPEAKER_00: Garrett's research spans macroeconomics, political economy, and the foundations of economic growth.
0:18
SPEAKER_00: Along with many scholarly articles, Dr.
0:20
SPEAKER_00: Jones is the author of three books, his Singapore trilogy, all published with the Stanford University Press, which are The Hive Mind, How Your Nation's IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own, Ten Percent Less Democracy, and The Culture Transplant, How Migrants Make the Economies They Moved To A Lot Like The Ones They Left.
0:37
SPEAKER_00: Each book in the trilogy offers an inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations.
0:41
SPEAKER_00: In this episode, Garrett and I talk about how the West became rich and stayed rich, how the economic prosperity of nations is linked to its culture and its institutions, and increasingly the culture of immigrants, the success of Chinese diaspora and why they should be favoured in immigration policies, the long-term implications of unselective mass immigration for countries like the UK, France, the US, and Italy, and the unsettling notion that economic prosperity is boosted by fewer family ties and that welfare dependency is linked to strong family values and bonds.
1:11
SPEAKER_00: We also talk about the benefits, costs and conflicts that arise from ethnic and cultural diversity and why it's important to care about the world's seven most innovative economies if the rest of us want to live comfortable lives, and much, much more.
1:23
SPEAKER_00: Garrett is a lot of fun to talk to, and as you would expect, his findings on the link between economic prosperity and culture and the long-term cultural impact of immigrants on host nations don't exactly make him popular within the typically left-leaning academical circles, and nor would I expect to find his proposed immigration policies to be particularly acceptable to those more conservatively inclined.
1:43
SPEAKER_00: Anyway, before we dive in, you'd be really helping me out if you click subscribe on whatever platform you're listening to or watching on.
1:50
SPEAKER_00: The more subscribers we have, the more guests we can attract, and the faster Thinking Class grows.
1:54
SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the show, classmates.
2:08
SPEAKER_00: Glad to be here.
2:08
SPEAKER_00: Thanks for inviting me.
2:10
SPEAKER_00: Well, thanks for joining me.
2:11
SPEAKER_00: I always appreciate it when I come out of Left Field an anonymous email address with a bunch of questions saying, let's dig into your work and people respond and jump on.
2:22
SPEAKER_00: So it's always a very pleasant surprise when people choose to do that.
2:26
SPEAKER_00: I came aware, became aware of your work, I think, through I was reading Ed West's Substack, The Wrong Side of History, and he had he had referenced you as he was talking about uh the impact of immigration economically, culturally, and he name-checked your book and I thought that sounds good.
2:43
SPEAKER_00: So got into it.
2:44
SPEAKER_00: And not long after I started reading it, I then saw you appeared on the SDP Talks podcast with William Clewston, who is also from my part of the world.
2:52
SPEAKER_00: I live I'm from the northeast of England.
2:54
SPEAKER_00: And um and I thought, well, he's obviously he's obviously up for the podcast game, so I'll get in touch with him myself.
3:02
SPEAKER_00: Um, so without much further ado, your book was it is called The Culture Transplant.
3:08
SPEAKER_00: And the subtitle is um how migrants make the economies they move to a lot like the ones they left.
3:14
SPEAKER_00: So without me butchering your thesis, let's begin with a brief outline of what it is that you are putting forward in that book.
3:21
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, um, part of my uh one way to sum up my story is that the world hasn't changed that much since 1500 economically, um, once you keep track of who moved where.
3:30
SPEAKER_01: Um so if you look in the old world, uh if you think about 1500, I picked 1500 because that's what researchers look at.
3:36
SPEAKER_01: And it's before Columbus and the uh European migrations overturned population movements completely.
3:43
SPEAKER_01: Um so if you look at the just the order in the old world, uh in 1500, the two most economically prosperous places were Western Europe and Eastern Asia.
3:53
SPEAKER_01: Uh the Islamic world had already fallen into decline for a couple of centuries.
3:57
SPEAKER_01: Um, Sub-Saharan Africa was uh substantially less technologically sophisticated, although the areas of the close to the Sahel, the uh just below the Saharan Desert, um, those areas were relatively within Sub-Saharan Africa more sophisticated.
4:14
SPEAKER_01: And um what happens if we look at the old world and compare 1500 to today, we'd say the rank order is about the same.
4:22
SPEAKER_01: Technological sophistication in 1500 in the old world roughly predicts um economic productivity, income per person, prosperity, lifespan, whatever today.
4:31
SPEAKER_01: Um, so what is old as new again in that respect?
4:34
SPEAKER_01: There were things were jumbled a bit for in the 1700s, 1800s, and early part of the 1900s.
4:40
SPEAKER_01: But what is old as new again in the old world?
4:43
SPEAKER_01: And then if we look at the new world, the world ran a series of horrifying experiments moving populations.
4:48
SPEAKER_01: And that um lets us test the theory what matters more for prosperity, uh geography or uh people?
4:56
SPEAKER_01: And as anyone who would just know anything about the world knows, uh the parts of the Americas that are prop are the most prosperous are the places that have had the most European migration on average.
5:07
SPEAKER_01: Those also tend to be the places that are furthest from the equator, right?
5:10
SPEAKER_01: So um Canada, the US um are, of course, quite economically productive, quite rich countries.
5:18
SPEAKER_01: Uh, but also if we look at the uh southern part of South America, the highest income parts of South America are the parts that are again furthest from the equator.
5:28
SPEAKER_01: Chile, Uruguay, uh, Argentina.
5:31
SPEAKER_01: You might think, well, maybe that just fits this theory that it's geography again.
5:34
SPEAKER_01: Just being close to Santa Claus or being close to the penguins makes you productive.
5:38
SPEAKER_01: Uh the thing is, in the old world, in the new world, uh the most productive places before Columbus were actually closest to the equator.
5:45
SPEAKER_01: So the importance of geography completely flipped between pre-Columbus and post-Columbus.
5:50
SPEAKER_01: So places, so the European migrations offer a horrifying natural experiment that we can use to learn something about whether people matter more than places.
5:58
SPEAKER_01: But also the peaceful migrations of people across from China to the rest of Southeast Asia offer another experiment.
6:05
SPEAKER_01: Uh the migration of uh folks from China to places like Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines uh offer us a new experiment, which lets us look at um whether migrants can peacefully by migrating to a new place change the economy.
6:21
SPEAKER_01: And indeed they do.
6:22
SPEAKER_01: The term that's widely used in academia is that these that the Chinese migrants across Southeast Asia are market-dominant minorities.
6:29
SPEAKER_01: Um they did not assimilate to the lower productivity of the places they moved to.
6:34
SPEAKER_01: So full assimilation, as we know in so many ways, is a myth.
6:37
SPEAKER_01: And in particular, the countries that have had the most Chinese migration since 1500 are actually the most productive and seem to have the best institutions by normal measures.
6:47
SPEAKER_01: Uh a rough, a pretty good predictor of whether a place has something like liberalism or neoliberalism across Southeast Asia is percentage of migrants from China.
6:58
SPEAKER_01: So Singapore at the top of the list, Hong Kong and Macau, depending on how we counts that.
7:02
SPEAKER_01: Um Malaysia's sort of in the middle, it's about 20, 30% Chinese of Chinese descent.
7:09
SPEAKER_01: Uh market dominant minority there that gets persecuted, but nevertheless, uh they're make important contributions to the economy.
7:15
SPEAKER_01: Then you look at a place like the Philippines, where Chinese minorities are very small but economically dominant uh community within the Philippines.
7:23
SPEAKER_01: And 4% just looks like it's not quite enough to completely change the institutions of the country.
7:28
SPEAKER_01: So if I wanted to pick give some advice to a lot of poor countries in the world, um they should be more like Malaysia and they should welcome sizable amounts of migration from China so that they can have these market-dominant minorities move in, improve the culture and the economy over the course of a couple of generations, become much more productive 50, 60 years from now.
7:47
SPEAKER_01: Long-term investment, I think it's worth doing.
7:50
SPEAKER_01: And it's a reminder that migration can be used as a way to improve your nation's institutions if you're choosing wisely.
7:58
SPEAKER_00: Interesting.
7:59
SPEAKER_00: So the how about the and you've touched on it, you've implied it.
8:05
SPEAKER_00: Where do you typically find the immigrants that make the least economic contributions to a society?
8:13
SPEAKER_00: So China seems to be right up there, and you include tables upon tables within your book of showing here's the economic contribution.
8:20
SPEAKER_00: So so which parts of the world typically provide those kind of migrants?
8:26
SPEAKER_01: Well, um, so yeah, as you would imagine, I try to focus on the positive to give people a sort of imagine a way to imagine a good outcome.
8:34
SPEAKER_01: Um the answer there is that again, we look at the way things were before 1500 and we say uh migration from uh the communities that had the were least successful, least technologically sophisticated before 1500 would be those that are on the weaker side today.
8:50
SPEAKER_01: Um and the two big the two big groups that one would look at would uh if you look at uh the data assembled by uh Coman, Easterly and Gong in this really nice 2010 paper, um you would have to say that it'd be people that Native Americans on average have the least technological sophistication from that age 1500 score, that year 1500 score.
9:12
SPEAKER_01: And if we look within the New World, um the countries that have the highest proportion of Native American populations closer to the equator as it happens, um, tend to be have the biggest economic problems.
9:25
SPEAKER_01: Um similarly, uh again, I have to emphasize this is important to point out in this line of work, there are always exceptions, and much migration is selective, which is well worth pointing out.
9:36
SPEAKER_01: Um, but the migrations of uh from Africa to the New World um have not succeeded as culture transplants that led to a lot of productivity, right?
9:46
SPEAKER_01: Um so if one looks across uh Nate, if one looks within the US, uh Alex Naraste and uh Ryan Murphy of uh have done some work.
9:56
SPEAKER_01: Naraste's at the Cato Institute, and he showed that, for instance, within the United States, that um migration of uh folks with lower deep root scores, which in the US case is substantially from Sub-Saharan Africa, those places tend to have lower incomes today and have lower freedom scores, lower measures of institutional quality, higher measures of corruption.
10:18
SPEAKER_01: So these are things that are just true on average.
10:21
SPEAKER_01: There are many exceptions, uh, but those are those are the norms as reported by researchers in the field.
10:26
SPEAKER_00: So you used the term selective immigration before.
10:31
SPEAKER_00: And I know in the book you pull out how there are some countries like Australia, New Zealand, and up until relatively recently Canada, who've used very selective immigration policies.
10:43
SPEAKER_00: And when you look at their economic performance, they seem to be booming, I suppose.
10:48
SPEAKER_00: I guess there are other things, they've got natural resources and what have you.
10:52
SPEAKER_00: But lots of things going on.
10:54
SPEAKER_00: Um, and then we've got the US, the UK, the French, and the Italians who have been less selective.
11:01
SPEAKER_00: And being a Brit, uh we know that there has been a mass immigration policy since 1997, which has only ramped up and we're now importing 1.2 million per year the last two years, and then subtract half a million current British residents out of that equation.
11:18
SPEAKER_00: And we're very unselective.
11:19
SPEAKER_00: So I don't know the exact numbers, but we we definitely have tens of thousands of Chinese.
11:26
SPEAKER_00: We have also many thousands Indians, Pakistanis, and um lots from sub-Saharan Africa too.
11:34
SPEAKER_00: Um I suppose my question to you then is if there's such a long lag, multi-generational, consistent economic outcome depending on where people are coming from, is for a country like Britain, for France, this unselective immigration, how how long is that impact going to be on both their economy and their institutions?
11:56
SPEAKER_00: And do you effectively lock yourself into that kind of economic fate by the people that you you you bring in?
12:04
SPEAKER_01: Uh yeah, so so it's you know, there's a form of selection that you mentioned there that's really important for me to dive into.
12:10
SPEAKER_01: Um so my first book, Hive Mind, was about IQ, national average IQ, and uh so just using test scores as a proxy of a person's productivity.
12:19
SPEAKER_01: Uh my third book, um, The Culture Transplant, is about using more or less the nation you came from as a proxy for your productivity.
12:25
SPEAKER_01: So a lot of selective migration stories that people talk about really are about uh using education um as some kind of proxy or educational potential as some kind of proxy for select for um being selective, right?
12:37
SPEAKER_01: Well, you know, in the British case, my understanding is a lot of folks are coming in through uh university, right?
12:43
SPEAKER_01: They're coming in through university admissions.
12:45
SPEAKER_01: And so that's at least one screen that gets one uh that makes sure that you're not likely to have people who are in the bottom half of, say, their country of origins distribution, right?
12:53
SPEAKER_01: So it's a form of selection that matters a lot.
12:56
SPEAKER_01: So um, but let me take your case as a hypothetical, right?
12:59
SPEAKER_01: Um I've in in 10% less democracy in my second book.
13:03
SPEAKER_01: I actually looked at British um uh uh GSCE passage rates.
13:07
SPEAKER_01: Did I get the acronym right there?
13:08
SPEAKER_01: I said it quickly.
13:10
SPEAKER_00: Um I don't know what oh, GCSE.
13:15
SPEAKER_00: GCSE.
13:16
SPEAKER_00: I got it backwards.
13:16
SPEAKER_01: I'll say it fast, yeah.
13:18
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
13:18
SPEAKER_01: Um so yeah, uh and within Britain, all of the uh well-studied migrant uh ethnic groups that are in the in the British data all have at least a 70% passage rate on that exam, right?
13:31
SPEAKER_01: Um that is not, I mean, 70% isn't perfect, but it's well over half, right?
13:35
SPEAKER_01: So um my first answer to your question is that by the standards of the possible, British immigration is kind of selective, right?
13:44
SPEAKER_01: Um when I've been checking the data lately on this to prep for this, um you know, the usual estimate uh for the UK is that migrants have higher education levels and earn more than the rest of the than the average person of the British population.
13:59
SPEAKER_01: So I mean that could be a London effect, right?
14:01
SPEAKER_01: Of course.
14:02
SPEAKER_01: Um but within that group, as you know, but I should say for the audience, um migrants from China and India tend to be obviously above the UK average, and migrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh tend to be below the UK average, right?
14:17
SPEAKER_01: So um, and I my understanding is that uh a sub-Saharan African migration to the UK is fairly selective, so they might actually be above the UK average.
14:26
SPEAKER_01: I'm open to data, to further data on that question.
14:29
SPEAKER_01: Um, but if we look at the two groups that are the two categories, India and China above average and uh Pakistan and Bangladesh below average uh in terms of educational attainment, it's reasonable to expect that that'll be intergenerationally persistent.
14:43
SPEAKER_01: Some of this stuff has been has already been studied in the second generation.
14:46
SPEAKER_01: Um and you are sort of um a nation is um setting itself up for a future with that, right?
14:55
SPEAKER_01: Because these outcomes tend to be intergenerationally persistent.
14:58
SPEAKER_01: We don't know a lot about how to fix this, we don't know how a lot how to about how to create intergenerational equality where there was intergenerational inequality beforehand.
15:08
SPEAKER_01: So that's a that's a hand you're stuck with.
15:10
SPEAKER_01: And so it's safe to predict that basically party coalitions will be having to decide within the UK, like which parties are going to fight for which ethnic groups uh as part of their voting coalition.
15:24
SPEAKER_01: And so it'll be shaping politics for generations to come.
15:27
SPEAKER_01: The general story of my research would be that um if you're bringing in folks from countries that have a lot of ancestral technological sophistication, what we call the uh a strong deep root score informally, that's gonna help you in the very long run.
15:42
SPEAKER_01: There'll be some social conflict, there'll be some bickering, there may be um ethnic, ethnic frictions that are important.
15:48
SPEAKER_01: But uh bringing in folks from the highest performing countries um using these fit these era 1500 scores is a good is a good is a good way to um set your future on a better path.
16:00
SPEAKER_01: And uh the the obvious the bringing in folks from countries where the scores are lower means you're just gonna have some difficulties in the foreseeable future.
16:10
SPEAKER_00: It'll be interesting to see when politicians start to grapple with those questions because I I feel as though that's a real hot button topic that no one wants to go near, which is okay, we're gonna have an immigration policy, but who are the right immigrants?
16:24
SPEAKER_00: And I know particularly here, one of the one of the conversations you can typically see playing out is if anyone tries to challenge the current status quo around mass immigration, um, you'll have those who are more supportive of it saying, Oh, so you want to sort immigrants into good immigrant, bad immigrant.
16:42
SPEAKER_00: And the thing is, and from an economic perspective, it actually sounds like those kind of immigrants, at least at a group level, and as we've already talked about, so I'll put a caveat in there, is there's always exceptions.
16:54
SPEAKER_00: But economically, you can start to see data, um, particularly in the UK, that's starting to show particular groups and nationalities that are much more dependent on the state over the long term.
17:04
SPEAKER_00: And you picked up something in your book, which in one ways is totally heartbreaking as well, um, insofar as you you said that um groups of people with strong family values and strong ties tend to have lower wages, lower economic outcomes, and reliance on government support.
17:21
SPEAKER_00: And the thing is, outside of the West, um most people have those, right?
17:28
SPEAKER_00: Is actually one thing that we uh decry here in Britain is we there's a big conversation about being the loneliest country in Europe.
17:37
SPEAKER_00: And obviously there's a long, there's a long tail off the back of the Catholic Church decision to um clamp down on clannishness and become much more of a universalist creature.
17:49
SPEAKER_00: And maybe we're just very far downstream of that.
17:52
SPEAKER_00: And I find that interesting that most groups of people, particularly outside of Europe or people who have ceded from European nations, are going to come from strong family Thai backgrounds.
18:03
SPEAKER_00: And you can see it in the data that there's much more reliance on government support.
18:07
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, this is something that Alberto Alessina of Harvard, who passed away much too young, um, what that he documented in some work, um, um, basically work on family values and the regulation of labor.
18:18
SPEAKER_01: And it turns out that people who come from strong family values countries are more likely to want the government to regulate the labor market.
18:25
SPEAKER_01: Uh so that's a correlation, and then economists come along and theorize about the causation, right?
18:29
SPEAKER_01: Um, that's our job.
18:30
SPEAKER_01: But once we report the candid correlation, that folks who come from high strong family values countries are more likely to demand strong government labor regulation, making it harder for the boss to fire you, requiring minimum wages, things like this.
18:45
SPEAKER_01: Um, these are things that a lot of people on the political left would say, hey, that's a great idea, right?
18:50
SPEAKER_01: But uh those of us who are economists, um those of us who are sort of more or less proud neoliberals, we say, gosh, all those frictions are um, you know, gonna be a barrier to innovation, a barrier to starting up new companies, a barrier to shutting down unproductive companies.
19:06
SPEAKER_01: So it's gonna make your country poorer in the long run.
19:08
SPEAKER_01: And so family values are a big tax on um the government directly.
19:15
SPEAKER_01: Uh they're they're a big tax on government regulation and seem to push it in a way from the values that most economists would embrace, which is these values of innovation.
19:23
SPEAKER_01: But notice, it's if we think about it in the simplest way, like if we most stereotypical way, northern versus southern Europe, um, that northern individualism, those that uh interest in um treating all people equal and treating strangers as basically morally quite similar to your family, those are strange values historically.
19:44
SPEAKER_01: And that strange set of values is help is part of what helps get us neoliberalism and laissez-faire and high productivity.
19:49
SPEAKER_01: So realizing that difficult um, that basically being meaner to your family, uh being uh not being willing to favor your in-group very much is part of the path to prosperity.
20:00
SPEAKER_01: That's a difficult lesson to come to.
20:02
SPEAKER_01: Um, but once we realize those values are intergenerationally transmitted, we can be pretty sure that this is going to have implications for the long run.
20:09
SPEAKER_01: If nations choose to um have whether they choose to do it or whether they do it accidentally.
20:14
SPEAKER_01: If you have a lot of migrants coming from strong family values countries, that'll put pressure on your government to uh have stricter labor market regulations, worker protecting, and employer disfavoring labor market regulations.
20:28
SPEAKER_00: Well, I think we're starting to see the tide turn even amongst nations uh that would have typically been much more predisposed to social welfare.
20:38
SPEAKER_00: Sweden's a great example, and I'm sure you will be well aware of people who lean politically left within your country and anywhere anywhere else that looks to the Scandinavian countries and go, look at what they they do, and they've got such high social trust and they can do XYZ.
20:53
SPEAKER_00: But it's quite interesting that in Sweden they have started to um cool off on their welfare system because of the big influx of migrants since 2015, which I can't remember exactly the percentage, but it's you know at least 10%, if not approaching 20% of foreign-born people in the population.
21:11
SPEAKER_00: And now the Swedes, who typically have been held up held up as a model of social welfare, um, we now see that trust is eroding because of that uh civic conflict arising with the with the greater ethnic religious diversity.
21:26
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, this is something that a lot of libertarians get excited about, right?
21:29
SPEAKER_01: Libertarians think, well, we'll bring in a lot of uh migrants from uh other countries and that where uh and what we expect we expect that the people in our country will dislike the new migrants and that will weaken social trust and a weaken the government uh voter support for a strong safety net.
21:48
SPEAKER_01: And so this is all great news if we basically increase social disharmony as an indirect way of weakening support for the safety net, right?
21:57
SPEAKER_01: Um so there are I don't know about policymakers, but I mean libertarians never get elected to office, right?
22:04
SPEAKER_01: So they're just a bunch of pundits and bloggers.
22:06
SPEAKER_01: But, you know, folks at the Cato Institute and some folks in my own department will get very excited about the prospect of uh low-skilled immigration because they think that that'll create an ethnic backlash.
22:17
SPEAKER_01: Um and that ethnic backlash will and a rise in ethnic hatred will indirectly weaken the welfare state.
22:24
SPEAKER_01: And that's great news for them.
22:26
SPEAKER_01: Um as long as you see if you know if weakening the welfare state is your most important goal and you're not, and you don't think there are going to be any other important consequences, well, good for you.
22:35
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
22:36
SPEAKER_01: But um it's worth thinking through whether uh that will have other unintended consequences.
22:42
SPEAKER_01: I mean, and the academic research into social conflict is rife, was once rife with the term um ethnic conflict, right?
22:50
SPEAKER_01: And so ethnic conflict as one of many causes of civil wars, for instance.
22:54
SPEAKER_01: Um and so, you know, human beings have found a lot of things to fight over over the centuries, but uh ethnic conflict is another one of them.
23:02
SPEAKER_01: And whether it's a low-grade ethnic conflict or a full-blown civil war, uh, those are those are things I think to be avoided.
23:08
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, fingers crossed.
23:11
SPEAKER_00: You you draw a distinction about different levels of diversity in the book as well.
23:16
SPEAKER_00: Diversity that works and that diversity that doesn't.
23:19
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's downstream from what you were just talking about there, which was well, actually, the strength of diversity is typically found in the boardroom.
23:27
SPEAKER_00: You say it works there, and skill set diversity is pretty much the only thing that guarantees good performance.
23:32
SPEAKER_00: But actually, diversity out in the wider public is a source of conflict in the neighborhood.
23:38
SPEAKER_00: Um and also within firms, right?
23:41
SPEAKER_01: So I I place a lot of weight in the in the book on looking at business studies of ethnic diversity, uh, because businesses have a strong incentive to make diversity work if they can, right?
23:53
SPEAKER_01: Um, because there's they have money riding on it.
23:56
SPEAKER_01: And so it turns out that uh the best uh one of the cliches that people now use in the business world is no longer the phrase that our diversity is our strength, but instead a cliche that they often use is the double-edged sword of diversity.
24:10
SPEAKER_01: So it has strengths and it has weaknesses, and um, it can, it can cut to it can it can cut to help you or it can cut to hurt you.
24:17
SPEAKER_01: And the clearest bright line in this messy literature is that, as you said, skill diversity, having having basically an engineer and a human resources person and a user experience professional on a software project, these things, that's that kind of diversity is obviously a plus.
24:34
SPEAKER_01: Whereas ethnic diversity per se, holding the skill set constant, is more likely to be a minus.
24:40
SPEAKER_01: It could be neutral, it kind of depends on who's doing the work, but um, neutral to minus is probably the way to think about ethnic diversity in the workplace.
24:47
SPEAKER_01: And that's your best case scenario.
24:48
SPEAKER_01: So again, we have this other research on ethnic diversity, social conflict, breakdowns in social trust in local neighborhoods that are all putting things where ethnic diversity per se looks more like a minus in the general population.
25:02
SPEAKER_01: I mentioned the corporate boards are one place where I'd expect it to be a plus because there it's a um it's a correlate of being an independent outsider.
25:10
SPEAKER_01: And if there's one thing corporations need on their boards, it's independent outsiders.
25:15
SPEAKER_00: The conflict in firms you're talking about.
25:18
SPEAKER_00: I have spent time around the corporate world and I know lots of people in the corporate world, and there are a couple of instructive examples that have taken place since 2020.
25:29
SPEAKER_00: So specifically the the George Floyd um uh killing, and then corporate responses to that.
25:35
SPEAKER_00: I think we're probably all well versed with them right now, is lots of firms went out and specifically started to think about ways in which they could increase the life outcomes of black employees and have outreach to black communities.
25:48
SPEAKER_00: And one of my first experiences of seeing how this then annoyed people who weren't part of that group were not from, say, white British people, but other groups that were set up under the multicultural network.
26:02
SPEAKER_00: So these companies um would say we celebrate our multiculturalism.
26:06
SPEAKER_00: They were uh proponents of that model, which is subvert, host culture, promote all the others.
26:12
SPEAKER_00: But then everyone started to find that this equality of promotion actually wasn't so equal at all, and they didn't actually like it when some groups were focused on other than uh instead of theirs.
26:24
SPEAKER_00: Um, and then you'd find companies were scrambling to try and find ways to appease the other groups because they'd spent time promoting all of the differences.
26:33
SPEAKER_00: And also most recently, and this was particularly topical in in Britain, is around um Easter time, um, Ramadan is around the same time.
26:43
SPEAKER_00: In the last couple of years, it's become more noticeable to see Ramadan being promoted on public transport networks in London and increasingly within the workplace as well, and and often might be one of the only religious festivals that is talked about.
26:58
SPEAKER_00: And you know from the commentariat and various talkings amongst people that it's it's rankling, people of other religions and backgrounds.
27:09
SPEAKER_00: And this is where I think companies may well have gone a bit of a step too far with their raising of all groups to say, let's celebrate everyone's ethnic religious diversity, but then anything that starts to focus on one instead of the other starts to create resentment.
27:26
SPEAKER_00: And I don't know how companies start to pull back from that, and it shows where diversity and a myopic myopic focus on it can become a weakness.
27:34
SPEAKER_01: It's just a reminder that it's uh that managing people in general is a high margin of cost activity.
27:40
SPEAKER_01: I mean, people are difficult.
27:41
SPEAKER_01: We're a difficult species to work with.
27:42
SPEAKER_01: Collab, pulling us together onto team projects in the best of circumstances is really hard.
27:48
SPEAKER_01: And when we're adding new um higher marginal cost frictions, that's just going to increase the coordination costs.
27:54
SPEAKER_01: So, unless there's a big countervailing benefit to increasing ethnic diversity per se, we should keep in mind that there's there are clear costs there.
28:03
SPEAKER_01: And we need uh, we should be looking for evidence of benefits that outweigh those clear, well-documented costs.
28:10
SPEAKER_01: Again, all human beings are difficult to manage.
28:12
SPEAKER_01: Putting us on teams is hard.
28:14
SPEAKER_01: Part of the reason I'm a professor is because I get to do things by myself most of the time.
28:18
SPEAKER_01: Um, because you know, I don't enjoy management and I don't enjoy being managed.
28:23
SPEAKER_01: So um that that human trait of that we're hard to pull together, but sometimes we can create magic is worth keeping in mind.
28:31
SPEAKER_01: We need to keep in mind that that's a sometimes.
28:34
SPEAKER_01: It's only sometimes we can create that magic of uh where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
28:39
SPEAKER_01: And keeping an eye on which things make that harder and which things make that easier will help our uh help boost productivity for nations everywhere.
28:49
SPEAKER_00: The central uh thesis and the data points you share in your book and the implications of them, I mean, they're probably quite explosive in the eyes of some.
28:59
SPEAKER_00: What's been the reaction to this amongst those that you rub shoulders with, whether it's policymakers, politicians, other academics?
29:06
SPEAKER_00: How's it been received?
29:07
SPEAKER_01: Well, you know, um, so people who are actually experts in the field, who've written books uh in the field, they've had good things to say about it.
29:13
SPEAKER_01: You know, I got a great blurb on the back of the book from Arine Damshanda, who's a great publisher in the field.
29:19
SPEAKER_01: Um, and uh Justin Cook wrote a nice review of the of my book recently in a in a journal.
29:26
SPEAKER_01: And um so people who are actually experts publish in the field say, like, yeah, this is a very routine literature review and synthesis of what's got what the research is in the field.
29:36
SPEAKER_01: Um, academics who are really committed to mass migration or nearly open borders, uh, they tend to be very hostile to it.
29:44
SPEAKER_01: And their hostility is it's obvious, right?
29:46
SPEAKER_01: What I'm doing is I'm pointing out mainstream science that you weren't supposed to point out.
29:51
SPEAKER_01: You weren't supposed to mention this stuff to the masses.
29:54
SPEAKER_01: We were supposed to just keep this among the academics and only speaking it in whispers and with caveats when we talk to the normies.
30:01
SPEAKER_01: What I did is I let the cat out of the bag.
30:03
SPEAKER_01: So I think they're very upset that um, and again, it's people who are migration activists who are academics, uh, they tend to be quite upset about um the culture transplant as a book.
30:14
SPEAKER_01: Um and again, I think the core reason is because I'm telling I'm telling secrets that I was supposed to keep among the academics.
30:22
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30:24
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30:36
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30:58
SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the rest of the show, classmate.
31:02
SPEAKER_00: How was it that you came up with the concept of the book?
31:05
SPEAKER_00: So was it you had observed things throughout your career and thought, I'm gonna look into this, or was there a a set a set amount of literature you'd come across and thought, right, there's there's something to be pulled together here?
31:16
SPEAKER_00: It was really the second.
31:17
SPEAKER_01: Um so basically, I'd say when Alberto Alasina and Paola Giuliano, Giuliano was at uh UCLA, they did a literature review called Culture and Institutions.
31:27
SPEAKER_01: And it was published in one of our top journals, the Journal of Economic Literature, I think maybe in 2012, that had been floating around as a working paper.
31:34
SPEAKER_01: And that's the um that's an article that pulled together the that pointed out that um immigrants, when they move to a new country, bring their values from their old country to the new country and that it lasts for multiple generations.
31:48
SPEAKER_01: And so basically, second generation Italian Americans are in a lot of ways a lot like Italians in Italy, right?
31:54
SPEAKER_01: Second generation Mexican Americans are in a lot of ways, statistically, a lot like Mexicans in Mexico, right?
32:00
SPEAKER_01: And this shows up with things like attitudes toward trust, which for some reason gets all the attention, um, savings rates, um, attitudes toward the proper role of government, um, and you know, features that we would think generally matter, right?
32:16
SPEAKER_01: Um so when Alessina did that, when Alessina and Giuliana wrote that, and around the same time, this other work about the people from the fifth people from 1500 migrating um over the centuries and making the new places they moved to a lot like the ones they left, what's known as the deep roots literature.
32:34
SPEAKER_01: That's when I just started thinking about this.
32:36
SPEAKER_01: And I thought there ought to be a book about this.
32:39
SPEAKER_01: And it took me a while to basically pull it all together, but it was seeing that there were not just that the literature, not just that the individual papers existed, but they'd already been summed up in big lit reviews, and yet they were still not being talked about by academics.
32:55
SPEAKER_01: My fellow academics somehow were just absolutely terrified of letting this stuff out into the public.
33:00
SPEAKER_01: And if there's one thing that I am not, it's terrified.
33:03
SPEAKER_01: So I just thought, like, somebody, there needs to be a book out here that pulls together this stuff that all the professors know.
33:09
SPEAKER_01: Um, and it was it was time for somebody to do it.
33:13
SPEAKER_01: I waited a couple extra years checking to see if somebody else would, and they didn't.
33:15
SPEAKER_01: So I did it.
33:16
SPEAKER_01: I told a couple people, like, you got to write a book about this.
33:20
SPEAKER_00: Have you found that being in have you found that there's been interest in it from policymakers, politicians, people trying to pull you in to help shape immigration policy?
33:29
SPEAKER_00: Not at all.
33:30
SPEAKER_01: I have to say, no, not at all.
33:31
SPEAKER_01: For whatever reason, that hasn't happened at all.
33:33
SPEAKER_01: So I mean, I had a great interview with um the uh head of the SDB, uh the William uh Clouston, I believe.
33:40
SPEAKER_01: Is that that how the one does the vowel there?
33:42
SPEAKER_01: Um and um I uh so yeah, the SDP is the one party that's shown you know substantial interest in my work.
33:51
SPEAKER_01: And I'm glad uh I was I had a great experience talking with them over my uh spring break here.
33:56
SPEAKER_00: Well, let's say you were asked to chip in on immigration policy.
34:02
SPEAKER_00: Um how would you how would you summarize your approach to it?
34:07
SPEAKER_00: So what would you say are the key tenets to lead to a successful immigration policy based on economics and culture?
34:13
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean I think that uh I I think something like the points-based approaches that you know Australia, New Zealand, Singapore go for, and now Japan, uh where there's something like you know, a system where there are pluses and there are minuses and no strict cutoffs.
34:28
SPEAKER_01: Uh but and uh you would want it to be some mixture of skills-based, um, education-based, for instance, and um country of origin-based.
34:40
SPEAKER_01: You'd want some plus factors for both of those, right?
34:42
SPEAKER_01: So I think there's there are reasons for countries to say we would favor having migrants who come from successful democracies.
34:48
SPEAKER_01: That should be a plus factor.
34:49
SPEAKER_01: Um, if you have a degree from a great institution, that should be a plus factor.
34:53
SPEAKER_01: If you've got a uh nearly perfect score on the scholastic aptitude test or some other um high status, well-run cognitive skill test, that should be a plus factor.
35:04
SPEAKER_01: These are things that should all be given substantial weight.
35:08
SPEAKER_01: So um yeah, I don't know if the world is quite ready for using uh the deep root scores, the tech history scores as a weighted factor in migration, but I think you know, another 10 years of data crunching by government bureaucrats, and we'll be ready for saying um where your ancestors came from a couple generations ago, we should we should be looking at we should look be looking at bringing in people from countries that have high savings rates, for instance.
35:32
SPEAKER_01: So this is one that I think normal economics says frugality, that's a good thing.
35:38
SPEAKER_01: Saving, that's a good thing.
35:39
SPEAKER_01: And by now we have studies from the UK, Germany, and the US showing that at least into the second generation, people tend to import a part of their savings behavior from the country that their parents or grandparents came from.
35:51
SPEAKER_01: So I think that's pretty important.
35:53
SPEAKER_01: So plus factors for um, so let me let me just boil it down here and treat this as just a beta version, right?
35:59
SPEAKER_01: This isn't the final version.
36:01
SPEAKER_01: Um substantial credible signals of high cognitive skill, right?
36:07
SPEAKER_01: Going to going to a good school, having a really great SAT score, something like that.
36:11
SPEAKER_01: And that that gets maybe half the weight.
36:13
SPEAKER_01: And then the other half of the weight is are you coming from a country with a rich history of democracy and you're coming from a country with a high savings rate in the post-World War II era?
36:22
SPEAKER_01: Those would be things that'd be clear plus factors backed up by good economics research and that would probably have multi-generational benefits for the countries that uh bring in immigrants from those places.
36:35
SPEAKER_00: And and what of culture would you put something in there about culturally a lot more culturally aligned to, for instance, if we're talking about Western countries, Western values?
36:47
SPEAKER_01: Well, like you know that this is that so then the question is like which value?
36:50
SPEAKER_01: Like I already mentioned frugality is a value, right?
36:52
SPEAKER_01: I think that's a very um important value.
36:55
SPEAKER_01: Um, there is a case to be to argue for um that general family values vector, right?
37:02
SPEAKER_01: That general vector of um individualism versus uh clannishness um that uh my colleagues at George Mason have worked on, the Jonathan, um Jonathan Schultz and Jonathan Beauchamp.
37:16
SPEAKER_01: And uh with with this with work with Joe Henrich, uh weirdest people in the world and all that.
37:20
SPEAKER_01: So um great book, by the way.
37:23
SPEAKER_01: Um so there's some case for that.
37:26
SPEAKER_01: Um I'm gonna stay conservative for today, just at least on this podcast, and say like savings is enough of a value that I think uh and I think I can get I can command some agreement on that.
37:35
SPEAKER_01: So uh that in the history of democracy.
37:38
SPEAKER_01: That's okay.
37:39
SPEAKER_00: This is a digital conversation.
37:40
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
37:41
SPEAKER_00: So I can't put my arm your arm behind your back and force you to give an answer.
37:45
SPEAKER_01: So um I mean, I'm glad to have people like kick these ideas around for another 10 years because there are a lot of countries that are going to be thinking this through.
37:54
SPEAKER_01: And if they look through you know just the index of my book for ideas of where you could put uh plus factors in a points-based migration system, um, you know, the culture transplant and hide mind together offer a lot of ideas, food for thought, for where you'd want to come up with elements of a points-based uh migration system.
38:14
SPEAKER_00: We've spoken a bit about institutions and you talked about how you chose a data set beginning from the 1500s, because that's where most of them begin.
38:23
SPEAKER_00: But you also talked about that being a particularly instrumental time for strong institutional governance norms within the West, which then helps transform the West from previously, you know, a fair to middling economic um powerhouse, as it were, not a powerhouse, but an economic um um competitor, uh, to all of a sudden stronger institutions led to much better economic outcomes, all the technological advancements you talked about.
38:52
SPEAKER_00: What is a sound basis for an institution?
38:55
SPEAKER_00: So when you talk about proper role of government and strong institutions, what are those characteristics that you'd expect to see and be promoted?
39:03
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think this element of neutral rule of law, sort of a classic idea going back to at least Adam Smith and Hume, um, that's really crucial, right?
39:10
SPEAKER_01: And that gets at this sort of loosely northern versus southern European angle.
39:15
SPEAKER_01: Um uh is when you get into power, is your goal to basically do you spend most of your time just making sure you help your buddies out?
39:21
SPEAKER_01: Or do you spend most of your time saying, I have some neutral rules I need to enforce?
39:25
SPEAKER_01: Um I'm not I'm not naive about this.
39:27
SPEAKER_01: I know there's always some continuum of the two.
39:29
SPEAKER_01: Uh, but being willing to neutrally enforce rules is, I think, central to um modern good institutions.
39:38
SPEAKER_01: And the cliches, all the sort of Adam Smith cliches, right?
39:41
SPEAKER_01: Um piece, easy taxes.
39:44
SPEAKER_01: Um, these are real uh peace, peace, easy taxes and a, you know, a uh government that enforces routine property rights in a mundane way.
39:53
SPEAKER_01: These are things that are reasonable.
39:55
SPEAKER_01: I have to say that uh economists have been looking for a long time for evidence that high tax rates really totally destroy economies, and it's pretty tough to find it.
40:02
SPEAKER_01: Like compared to when I was a younger person, I placed much less weight on um tax rates per se, and more weight on the ability to start um start and stop businesses, hire and fire employees, basically making legalizing building.
40:17
SPEAKER_01: So the things that a lot of the progress studies folks look for.
40:21
SPEAKER_01: And having that happen through um neutral rules that just let people do stuff is important.
40:26
SPEAKER_01: So uh what's often known as permissionless innovation.
40:29
SPEAKER_01: That's really important.
40:30
SPEAKER_01: A lot of countries it's just hard to get things done.
40:32
SPEAKER_00: So a really interesting example of strong institutions, plus that point you've made about Chinese diaspora in particular being being very economically productive and good with institutions, is Singapore.
40:49
SPEAKER_00: So former British co uh former British colony, but an economic powerhouse in its own right, full of a Chinese diaspora that are Singaporean.
40:59
SPEAKER_00: And uh as we've been talking, touching on points of tripwire for institutions like, for example, the overpromotion of ethnic diversity that might lead to some kind of conflict or less cooperation, is there was a story recently in the press with the Singaporean Prime Minister where the story was about uh him closing down a Stanford University campus in the country because, and this is his quote, he said, in the West, they've got a movement called wokeness where you are super sensitive about other people's issues.
41:32
SPEAKER_00: It leads to very extreme attitudes and social norms, particularly in some academic institutions and universities.
41:38
SPEAKER_00: And I wonder, is this response down to his ethnic Chinese traits, or because of the governing roots of the country that was ceded by the the British colonial administration?
41:50
SPEAKER_00: I I suspect we've become institutionally weaker since those points, based on some of the things we've spoken about.
41:56
SPEAKER_00: But what do you think might be behind that response?
41:59
SPEAKER_00: Are other countries just less tolerant of these new ideological uh mutations because you know it's not part of that, they've got a strong immune system against it.
42:09
SPEAKER_00: It's a it's a Western thing and it doesn't translate, or is it something else?
42:12
SPEAKER_00: Is it to do with cultural traits?
42:14
SPEAKER_01: You know, it's hard to diagnose an N equals one case, right?
42:17
SPEAKER_01: So there are multiple causes.
42:18
SPEAKER_01: Um I don't know what um the Prime Minister of Singapore's uh personal reasoning was, but I can tell you that a central part of the history of Singapore has been how do you manage ethnic diversity, right?
42:29
SPEAKER_01: That they've known this for a long time, and that it's that it's going to be a difficult thing to manage.
42:34
SPEAKER_01: And uh the the three major ethnic groups that one would think of in Singapore today um would be would be uh the majority is currently ethnic Chinese, right?
42:48
SPEAKER_01: Um mostly diaspora folks, multiple generations, overwhelmingly, and then folks from the a from the Indian subcontinent, and then Europeans.
42:57
SPEAKER_01: Those would be the and among the economically dominant groups, right?
43:00
SPEAKER_01: People of European descent.
43:01
SPEAKER_01: And just managing that level of diversity has been difficult, right?
43:06
SPEAKER_01: And Li Kwan Yu um basically encouraged a lot of forms of assimilation and neutrality.
43:13
SPEAKER_01: And one thing that Li Kuan Yu says in his memoirs, I'm sure he gave a lot of speeches about it, was that a very important decision he made was to make English the language of the country, not Chinese.
43:24
SPEAKER_01: By making English the language of the country, it was nobody was being favored.
43:28
SPEAKER_01: Basically, everyone, all the large groups were being equally disfavored by the decision to use English.
43:34
SPEAKER_01: And so that's the kind of linguistic neutrality, in his view, was an important part of creating a successful multi ethnic culture.
43:45
SPEAKER_01: Now, an additional thing that works in Singapore's favor is that uh it's a country where people on average are just really smart.
43:53
SPEAKER_01: Um, the new PISA scores in math came out, and Singapore was at the top by a lot.
43:58
SPEAKER_01: Um, that's these are averages.
43:59
SPEAKER_01: These Aren't like you know the top 5%, which the average person in Singaporean school is really smart.
44:04
SPEAKER_01: And uh smarter people on average are more able to handle the costs of managing an ethnically diverse society in a reasonable way.
44:11
SPEAKER_01: So having sharp folks and making some big institutional decisions that um encourage that reduce the likelihood of ethnic conflict, that's what has to happen.
44:23
SPEAKER_01: I think he's right that basically the wokeness uh movement, for whatever its benefits are, and there are some, um, has the cost of basically dialing up the cost of ethnic diversity, right?
44:34
SPEAKER_01: Um, it just makes it uh more salient in each and every decision in daily life.
44:39
SPEAKER_01: And that's a cost that is not trivial.
44:43
SPEAKER_01: And so Singapore has made a lot of decisions to try to reduce the cost of ethnic diversity, and not through homogenizing everyone, but making, but there's some of that.
44:52
SPEAKER_01: But making, like, like I said, choosing English is a sort of galaxy brain choice that ended up probably solving a lot of problems and preventing a lot of problems that we never have to talk about because the decision was made decades ago.
45:07
SPEAKER_00: Earlier on in the conversation within the book, you you talk about how a smart thing to do to have uh an economically productive country and strong institutions would be inviting a bunch of Chinese over because they would be able to do that.
45:24
SPEAKER_00: Uh-huh.
45:24
SPEAKER_00: Well, the poorest countries for sure, yeah, definitely.
45:27
SPEAKER_00: Okay, yeah, the poorest countries.
45:28
SPEAKER_00: Because I suppose thinking about this from a British perspective and knowing how former colonial governments were once considered, you know, we've got these a small number of European elites here who are pulling the strings of the economy, is whilst I think there is actually quite there is probably a more balanced view of that than we perhaps give it credit for, but clearly not particularly liked.
45:56
SPEAKER_00: And no one really liked that there was this alien elite that were was running the show.
46:01
SPEAKER_00: Would would there be a danger there, thinking about that that civic conflict that can arise, that by inviting in, you know, even if they are very high performing, very intelligent foreigners to effectively rise the ranks over multi-generations, that being your policy, that you're inviting a kind of colonialism on a country which wouldn't necessarily be accepted over time.
46:26
SPEAKER_00: And and I'll put a bit more colour on this question.
46:29
SPEAKER_00: There's a relatively well-known passage in one of C.S.
46:32
SPEAKER_00: Lewis's books where he talks about um how he agrees with Chesterton that and I can't remember the quote exactly, that there'll that there's some kind of an uneasy feeling, a sense of loss when you are governed by those who are not your own, which I thought was interesting because he was writing at the time of colonial administration.
46:54
SPEAKER_00: So I don't know if there was some kind of empathetic feeling toward those who were under our uh suzerainty, as it were, in in Britain.
47:03
SPEAKER_00: Um what what do you think might be the long-term consequence of that?
47:07
SPEAKER_00: You know, I know Africa are allowing the Chinese to run lots of um things within African countries at the moment with regards to business.
47:15
SPEAKER_00: Do you envisage some kind of civic conflicts that you'd be inviting on, even if it ends up being a better economy?
47:21
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, I mean, my part of my way, one response to this is that this is what we did in in North America, and it made uh the United States and Canada vastly more productive.
47:32
SPEAKER_01: And it meant that they were became nations that could create innovation that would grant gifts the whole world over, right?
47:39
SPEAKER_01: So um the European migration to North America ended up indirectly giving massive gifts to the entire planet.
47:47
SPEAKER_01: And was there cultural loss?
47:49
SPEAKER_01: Were there horrors that were visited?
47:51
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
47:52
SPEAKER_01: And um at the same time, uh the world that we exist in now is a world that uh benefits uh on a regular basis from innovation, um, from technological excellence that very likely would not have existed otherwise.
48:07
SPEAKER_01: Another way to put this is that uh the poorest countries in the world um are just so, I mean, the level of poverty, the incredibly low level of infrastructure of healthcare is so low that some risk of ethnic conflict is worth, is worth paying, is worth taking on in order to be two, four, perhaps eight times richer, right?
48:32
SPEAKER_01: The poorest countries in the world, if we just do like the 90th 10th percentile to the 90th, that's about a 25x difference in income per person.
48:40
SPEAKER_01: And that's adjusted for all the fun to funny things you'd want to adjust for.
48:44
SPEAKER_01: So basically, in the world's poorest countries, um it's worth it's worth the risks of serious ethnic conflict.
48:50
SPEAKER_01: It's worth some people feeling sad that um people who look like them aren't the most dominant people in the economy at times, um, in order to have um running water that works and a medical system that's uh that's much more functional than beforehand.
49:05
SPEAKER_01: Uh the Chinese diaspora is making um Thailand and Malaysia like obviously far richer than they would be otherwise, and more countries should sign up for that prescription.
49:17
SPEAKER_00: Well, we'll see, we'll see if they do.
49:19
SPEAKER_00: Um they probably won't, right?
49:21
SPEAKER_00: People people don't want a lot of people just don't want good things.
49:23
SPEAKER_00: So uh you you also touched there on the innovative parts of the world, and I think within the book you make a bit of a a call, well, maybe not to action, but you you do do try to call to people's consciousness that we should all be obsessed with the governance of the seven most innovative economies in the world because the whole of the world depends on them.
49:47
SPEAKER_00: I mean, this must be also a pretty unfashionable idea because no one likes the idea of dominant parts of the world, but it's a reality.
49:55
SPEAKER_00: And what you're saying is that, you know, if we mess around with the institutions of those particularly innovative economies and we hamper them in any way, then it's not just them that suffers.
50:06
SPEAKER_00: And as much as people might have, and these aren't your words, but people might have a bit of Schadenfreude, which is excellent, we're seeing those neo-imperialist types going down, is that actually everyone suffers from them going down?
50:19
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
50:20
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I'm sure a lot of people got really excited about seeing the Roman Empire fall.
50:24
SPEAKER_01: Oh, look, those pagans, they're finally uh getting what they deserve for worshiping the false gods, right?
50:29
SPEAKER_01: And then you know, it took like a thousand years to get back.
50:32
SPEAKER_01: Um so that's a universal human trait, just a reminder that uh, you know, uh what was it?
50:39
SPEAKER_01: Uh was it was it Chesterton who said it?
50:41
SPEAKER_01: Uh that the one doctrine of Christianity that's been um empirically proven is uh original sin.
50:48
SPEAKER_01: So yeah.
50:49
SPEAKER_01: Um yeah, they're just people, there are a lot of people who just love bad things.
50:52
SPEAKER_01: So um no, I think that, yeah, the I7, uh, these are the seven nations that by multiple measures are just doing most of the world's idea creation.
51:01
SPEAKER_01: Um it's three in Asia, uh China, uh Japan, and South Korea, uh three in Europe, Germany, the UK, and France, and then the US, right?
51:12
SPEAKER_01: Um you could uh like India, Canada deserve some kind of honorable mention there, but I had to pick seven.
51:19
SPEAKER_01: So and you know what these nations, what they have in common as um, there are a lot of ways to sum up what they have in common, but they all have big populations.
51:28
SPEAKER_01: Um all but China has good institutions by normal measures.
51:33
SPEAKER_01: China's making it up on scale, right?
51:35
SPEAKER_01: Um you know, with over a billion people.
51:38
SPEAKER_01: And uh the three measures I look at most intensely are is total RD, not RD per capita, basically research and development spending, and uh patents uh that are actually measured that are reported in multiple countries that are actually seem to be economically useful.
51:54
SPEAKER_01: And the third one is scientific publications.
51:56
SPEAKER_01: And you can you can complain about any one of these measures, but uh you put them together and they're all telling a very similar story.
52:02
SPEAKER_01: So they're all all of our, they all point nobody's gonna come up with a a list that has seven that looks totally different from mine.
52:10
SPEAKER_01: And if uh migration policy, if say low-skilled migration policy um or ends up uh setting off ethnic conflict and uh weakening institutional capacity in these countries, even slightly, that means the whole world pays a cost.
52:25
SPEAKER_01: So if people want to run their migration experiments, I think people should do it in a country like Iceland, country with its low population, um separate, you know, physically separate from a lot of other countries.
52:36
SPEAKER_01: So we can run the experiment there.
52:38
SPEAKER_01: And we don't want to put institutions of the US or China or Japan at risk because they're just creating stuff that we're all using.
52:46
SPEAKER_01: Um the US and these I-7 countries, they are the RD labs for the entire planet, and they should start hiring like it.
52:53
SPEAKER_01: Immigration policy should be treated like employment policy, multi-generational employment policy.
52:58
SPEAKER_01: And that's how we should be thinking about these decisions.
53:01
SPEAKER_01: Um that should get a very important part, top of mind should be that these I-7 countries are doing the innovation that the whole world relies upon, and that we don't have a deep bench to go to if one of these countries falls.
53:15
SPEAKER_01: Or even weaken slightly.
53:18
SPEAKER_00: Gara, you've put forward a lot of interesting ideas, lots of food for thought, and the data, the receipts are there to back it up.
53:26
SPEAKER_00: I'd tell everyone they should go out and read your book because it is a fascinate, fascinating read.
53:31
SPEAKER_00: Before we let you go, a question that I'd like to ask all of my guests is what have you changed your mind on recently or in the course of your life, and what was it that made you think differently?
53:44
SPEAKER_01: Uh, so I'm gonna pick uh an easy one, I guess.
53:48
SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, the my origin story goes back to me being a Mormon missionary back in 1990.
53:55
SPEAKER_01: And uh I had spent years thinking about whether the claims of the Latter-day Saint church was true, uh, whether the golden plates were really there and the angels came and whatnot.
54:05
SPEAKER_01: And um I ultimately decided that I did not did not believe it, that this stuff was very unlikely to have happened.
54:12
SPEAKER_01: Uh, part of the reason that mattered so much for me is it meant that people who were really Mormons, Latter-day Saints are very smart people, and on average, they're well educated.
54:20
SPEAKER_01: The folks that I was raised around were exceptionally well-educated, really sharp folks.
54:25
SPEAKER_01: And they're incredibly kind.
54:27
SPEAKER_01: So, what I learned from leaving Mormonism is that people could be both smart, really smart, and really nice and still be wrong.
54:34
SPEAKER_01: And the difference between uh my experiences with the Mormons and my experiences with academics is that academics are really smart.
54:45
SPEAKER_01: And but in both cases, they can both be wrong, right?
54:49
SPEAKER_01: So I can be around people who are smart and wrong, and I should keep that in mind every day.
54:53
SPEAKER_01: And so that means that the cliche is true.
54:56
SPEAKER_01: To some extent, you do have to do your own research.
54:58
SPEAKER_01: I do trust the work that I see around me, partly because I've dug in deep into figure finding out the foundations, the um the methodological critiques of the research that I look at.
55:11
SPEAKER_01: Um but at the end of the day, I found a lot of people lack a lot of information I trust.
55:15
SPEAKER_01: And at the same time, I find that there are smart people who I have to publicly and candidly disagree with.
55:20
SPEAKER_01: And being willing to do that um is a lot easier uh since I left Mormonism.
55:25
SPEAKER_00: I noticed when you were holding Mormons and academics side by side, the one thing which you didn't include for the academics was nice.
55:33
SPEAKER_00: That's true.
55:34
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
55:35
SPEAKER_00: Mormons are a lot nicer than academics.
55:37
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's true.
55:38
SPEAKER_00: I've that we we have Mormons here in in Britain and frequently get stopped on the street by Mormon missionaries and some of the nicest people you'll be able to do.
55:46
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
55:47
SPEAKER_00: I mean, the missionaries are doing it.
55:48
SPEAKER_01: The nice thing about Mormonism is that they only put you in that role, uh, most of it, most of them, they're only put in that role of having to basically do advertising work for two years, and then they get back and they get to go back to living more normal lives.
55:59
SPEAKER_01: But those two years of training really stick.
56:01
SPEAKER_01: So it uh it really gives folks um a sort of sales training and relationship management that's really good, um, especially since Mormons tend to come from Northern Europe, which is uh where personalities tend to maybe be a little bit more introverted, and Mormonism get the training of Mormonism gets you just to be a little bit more extroverted and get a little bit put yourself a little out there just a little bit more.
56:20
SPEAKER_01: So I think that's a sign.
56:21
SPEAKER_01: Well, one of these reminders that basically your environment, your upbringing can have some kind of effect.
56:26
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, two years of just nonstop elevator pitch training.
56:30
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
56:30
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no one's gonna buy it from you unless you you're smiling and make them feel good.
56:35
SPEAKER_00: Garrett, where where can people find you?
56:37
SPEAKER_00: Where can people find your work outside of your book and follow you if you have a presence online?
56:41
SPEAKER_01: Well, fortunately, my parents gave me a unusual spelling of an already unusual name.
56:45
SPEAKER_01: So I'm very easy to find on Google.
56:47
SPEAKER_01: Um, one R2Ts.
56:49
SPEAKER_01: If you can spell Garrett Jones, you'll find me.
56:51
SPEAKER_01: Um I'm also on Twitter.
56:52
SPEAKER_01: That's probably where I'm most active on a regular basis.
56:54
SPEAKER_01: I love it.
56:55
SPEAKER_01: I signed up early, so I got my own name, Garrett Jones.
56:57
SPEAKER_01: No space.
56:59
SPEAKER_01: Um and uh at Amazon, you'll find a little pit a little pitch page for me where I have all three books in my Singapore trilogy: Hive Mind, 10% Less Democracy, and the Culture Transplant.
57:09
SPEAKER_01: Uh Amazon is nice enough to always give people a little discount if you buy all three of them together.
57:12
SPEAKER_01: So if you do read them, uh please let me know.
57:15
SPEAKER_00: Well, get clicking listeners and watchers.
57:17
SPEAKER_00: Garrett, it's been an absolute pleasure.
57:19
SPEAKER_00: And as you said earlier in the podcast, let's see how the conversation develops over immigration in the next decade or so.
57:26
SPEAKER_00: And as it does, I hope you'd be able to come back on the Thinking Class.
57:29
SPEAKER_00: I'd love to.
57:30
SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having me, John.
57:31
SPEAKER_00: Thanks, Garrett.
57:32
SPEAKER_00: Take care.
57:36
SPEAKER_00: To keep up to date with all that I am doing, please subscribe to the Thinking Class YouTube channel at Thinking Class and follow me on X at Thinking Classes.
57:46
SPEAKER_00: Thinking Class seeks to understand the civilizational issues we face and why what our leaders do in response matters.
57:52
SPEAKER_00: Here I seek to explore the ideas, values, and culture that made our civilization, those that are unmaking it, and how leaders at our public and private institutions should respond.
58:02
SPEAKER_00: Engage with me on YouTube or X or write to me at thinkingclasspod at gmail.com to tell me who you want me to speak to and what topics are important to you.
58:11
SPEAKER_00: I look forward to seeing you there and for joining me on this journey.