Very interesting discussion in a recent comments section. Let me start with a quote from an e-mail by Garett Jones to Vipul Naik:
I would emphasize a different conclusion: That the low-IQ immigrants will tend to worsen the institutions of the higher-IQ countries they move to. Low IQ immigrants will, to some degree, tend to make the country they move to more like the country they came from.
Partly this will be due to MRV and Caplan/Miller reasons: low IQ groups vote for bad policies. Partly it’s because they will tend to elect individuals from their constituencies, which will, on average, tend to lower the average IQ of the legislature. And partly it’s because the bureaucracy will tend to hire individuals from low-skill groups, which will lower government quality.
For these and other reasons, new low IQ citizens impose a tax on the nation’s institutions, and this institutional cost should be counted in a candid cost-benefit analysis.
*Shorter version: Good institutions are rare treasures, and institutions are endogenous with respect to (among other things) citizen IQ. *
I would like to bracket the concerns in the second paragraph about voting, because I regard this as a solved problem, as far as the theory of open borders is concerned. Just because you let people in doesn’t mean you have to let them vote. There are already millions of Green Card holders in the US who can’t vote. The keyhole solution (Vipul’s term: I hadn’t thought of it at the time) which I advocate in Principles of a Free Society is open borders with (a) migrants preimbursing the government for their voluntary deportation if they become destitute (at least those under a new open-borders visa), (b) a surtax on (those) migrants, (c) mandatory savings, withdrawable only in the migrant’s home country, or forfeitable as part of (d) a path to “earned” citizenship once a migrant has saved a certain threshold amount in this mandatory savings account. Migrants would thus be given a substantial incentive to return home rather than to stay. Those who would choose to stay would presumably do so: (a) because their homelands were an especially bleak alternative; (b) because they foresaw high earnings in America so that forfeiting the savings account was worth it (these people would probably have relatively high IQs, on average); or (c) because they especially like, admire, and enjoy America (these people would presumably place a particularly high value on American institutions). To mix these migrants into the electorate is a very different, and doubtless much more favorable, prospect, than simply allowing anyone to come and vote. Of course, this is just one of many possibilities that would separate the right to come, live, and work from the right to vote. I made a similar point in the comments of the Garett Jones post, and added that “It’s even easier to maintain high hiring standards for the bureaucracy, which obviously doesn’t have to, and doesn’t, hire a representative cross-section of the resident population.” I also posed the question:
If I were to hypothesize that the maintenance of high-quality institutions depends mainly on the characteristics of an elite, and need not be much affected by adverse changes in the composition of the broad mass of the population, would the evidence that Garett has studied contradict me?
This was the jumping-off point for a very interesting debate between BK and John Lee. BK’s comments, in particular, are highly interesting and informative, yet I find myself unconvinced and dissenting at many points. BK answers my question:
Yes, if we are just referring to the overall demographics of a country. Note that across countries, smart people earn higher incomes as the proportion of smart people rises, not the absolute total.
Chinese-Singaporeans generate income almost twice as great in mostly Chinese Singapore as the large Chinese-Malaysian minority does in Malaysia (about $70,000 per annum vs about $38,000), even though there are less than 3 million Chinese in Singapore but almost 7 million in Malaysia. But the Chinese make up 75% of Singapore vs 25% of Malaysia…
There is a Chinese elite, but this isn’t enough to fix the institutions, which have to represent the general population. All this occurred in the context of strong legal discrimination in favor of Malay majority, racialized anti-business sentiment, and big gaps in political views between Chinese and non-Chinese Malaysians.
OK, but wait. There is a Chinese business elite in Malaysia, but the political elite is Malay. It is this Malay political elite that imposes “strong legal discrimination in favor of Malay majority, racialized anti-business sentiment,” etc. It is also important that (a) the Malays have deeper historic roots whereas the Chinese are relatively recent arrivals, and (b) the Malays are linguistically and religiously homogeneous (more or less, I think: BK and John Lee both know the region better than I do). If we’re looking for lessons from Singapore/Malaysia that cross-apply to a hypothetical open-borders United States, this argument would only be relevant if we’re supposing that voting immigrants would become the majority of the population, develop solidarity among themselves, and vote for “strong legal discrimination” and “racialized anti-business sentiment” against the offspring of today’s natives. With immigration tariffs and a gradual path to citizenship, you could more or less ensure that voting immigrants would never constitute a majority. Since immigrants would come from many different countries, it’s unlikely they’d develop solidarity among themselves except on wedge issues that related to them directly. Instead, they’d want to assimilate with American natives. Given that American society has a powerful absorptive capacity– if you’ve got fluent English and a college education and want to be a normal American, people will treat you like a normal American; and if you wereborn here, it’s taken for granted that you’re a normal American, never mind your background– any scenario resembling that in Malaysia is really quite implausible.
Also, I think the fact that immigrants would know they were immigrants makes a big difference. Malays in Malaysia think of the land as theirs. They’ve been there the longest. South Africa is in a similar situation, as far as I understand: black South Africans see themselves as the rightful owners of the soil, the whites as intruders. Russia, whose history I know better, stands in striking contrast to the 19th-century United States, because while they could both be described as multi-ethnic empires, in Russia the subordinate nationalities had never consented to be part of the Russian Empire, but for the most part had been simply conquered (it’s a little more complicated but never mind), whereas in the United States, the subordinate nationalities (if I may put it that way for the sake of the parallel) had in a real sense consented to rule from Washington by crossing oceans to immigrate. They were therefore much less inclined to question the legitimacy of the government and far more inclined to develop patriotic loyalty to the United States, superimposed on a lingering loyalty to their various mother countries.
BK asserts that “institutions… have to represent the general population.” No, they don’t. Certainly, it’s not a logical necessity. In England after the Norman Conquest, for a couple of centuries, institutions represented the Norman conquerors, not the Anglo-Saxon peasantry, just to give one example. Perhaps BK only meant that institutions do represent the general population in Malaysia. Fine, though even then, I find “the general population” a question-begging reification. Anyway, I do not think it’s the case, in general, that institutions depend all that much on the median voter even in democracies. Caplan’s post on affluence and influence summarizes recent research that politicians listen much more to the rich than to the poor. Meanwhile, courts are staffed by people with law degrees. They are only very indirectly answerable to the electorate. The Federal Reserve is autonomous, and listens to the economics professoriate more than to politicians. BK contradicts my claim about the bureaucracy, saying:
Er…bureaucracies and even private firms are required to hire representative cross-sections along several dimensions under affirmative actions and disparate impact standards. And institutions that are seen as unrepresentative take serious reputational penalties, while there are strong political pressures from subgroup activists for equal representation. This is true of the military, which is relevant for the risk of coups or civil wars, federal bureaucrats setting policy, teachers, PhD programs, science funding agencies, medical schools, law schools, university professors and researchers, and more.
I’m not sure that’s an accurate description of affirmative-action law, but at any rate, bureaucracies are certainly not required to higher a representative cross-section of the population in terms of ability. If you have to hire minorities, you’re certainly not barred from hiring the smartest minorities. Even if an ethnic group has lower than average IQ or education, there will be a few high achievers. Anyway, it’s certainly not infeasible to not extend affirmative-action practices to new immigrant groups; nor do I think it would be particularly difficult to avoid such an extension politically. American blacks (or African-Americans, though I don’t like that word, since it makes them sound like recent immigrants when they’ve been here, on average, longer than European-Americans like me) are a special case, because they never consented to come. Black Americans have an enduring identity in a way that Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, German-Americans, etc., have never had. Proximity and undocumentedness give Mexican immigration a special character– one advantage of open borders is that it would be disproportionately favorable to non-Mexicans for whom undocumented entry by land is not an option, and would therefore likely be less divisive because immigrants coming from many source countries would have nothing to assimilate to except mainstream American culture– but even Mexican-Americans have nothing like the distinctive identity that blacks do. I highly doubt that an open-borders scheme such as that in Principles would threaten American meritocracy. (On the contrary.)
BK writes:
Using the above statistics, if the Chinese-Malaysians could have done as well as Singapore by also seceding from Malaysia into Chinese-dominated countries, total GDP of the region would rise substantially just from letting the Chinese-Malaysians free of the Malaysian electorate, even if incomes back in Malaysia plummeted. But it gets even better: Singapore lets in millions of guest workers from non-Chinese Malaysia, among other places, who send back huge quantities of remittances. Singapore generates more innovations in science and technology with positive spillovers for the rest of the world.
Basically, patterns like this seem to suggest that total GDP and welfare are much increased by international segregation by IQ and other characteristics contributing to productivity and performance, and that giving every country in the world demographics representative of the world would be devastating.
The claims that “total GDP of the region would rise substantially” with segregation and that “total GDP and welfare are much increased by international segregation by IQ” are interesting because they are the kinds of claims that restrictionists would need to make and defend if they wanted to have a really strong case against open borders. If Malaysian Chinese who control 60% of the Malaysian economy could be rendered almost twice as productive by political segregation, that would increase regional GDP by 10% or so even if Malays’ incomes fell to zero. But this is a very suspect extrapolation. First, Singapore is a densely populated city, while Malaysian Chinese are more spread out. City-dwellers always tend to be more productive. So if the Malaysian Chinese escaped Malay rule but were still spread out, we shouldn’t expect Singaporean levels of productivity. More generally, Singapore is probably the world’s most productive society today. That takes getting a whole lot of things right: location, personalities, finding certain economic niches, an institutional history going back to British rule and Stamford Raffles. With all due respect to the Malaysian Chinese, to assume that if they just had independence they’d replicate the world’s most productive society is surely too generous.
That said, no one is suggesting that we should give every country in the world demographics representative of the world population. Open borders certainly wouldn’t lead to that. The US’s internal open borders don’t lead to every city, county, and state having demographics representative of the US population, and moving from Boston to Tampa or Minnesota to Maui would be a lot easier than moving from Bangladesh to Oslo or Beijing to Fairfax, VA, even if all immigration restrictions were removed. (Culture, distance from family, etc.) Certainly, segregation by IQ contributes to productivity; but it doesn’t need to be government-imposed. Harvard segregates by IQ through its admission process. Top research labs segregate by IQ: they hire only very smart people. One doesn’t need to stop uneducated immigrants at the border in order to keep them out of faculty lounges or academic seminars or corporate boardrooms.
For all our dueling, BK and I might not differ all that much. I agree that there’s such a thing as the American polity, and that it’s important to preserve the integrity of the American polity. That polity consists, at the top, of highly educated judges and economists and legislative aides and bankers and the like, but it extends down to all sorts of average voters who watch presidential debates even though they’re not being paid for it, and debate politics on Facebook, and deliberate about whom to vote for, and get indignant, and donate to campaigns, even though single solitary citizens can’t have any effect, so it’s all individually irrational. As important as preserving the American polity is, I think some methods– deportations, separation of families by force, exclusion of individuals whose best chances of religious freedom or economic opportunity lie here– are unacceptable. Fortunately, they are not necessary. With careful policy design, the American polity can endure and flourish with open borders.
My university had a program with the Malaysian oil company to bring people over here to train to become engineers. So we had a lot of Malaysian and Chinese Malaysian people in my dorm. What stuck with me is just how much they hated each other. I mean a lot, worse then much the the racial animosity I was used to in America. If I ever needed a primer on why multi-ethnic societies tended to be miserable, especially those with a superior minority and inferior majority, this was it. I definitely don’t want America becoming like Malaysia and having the same problems I observed in that dormitory.
All of these keyhole solutions are good, but they won’t last. Eventually a politician, race hustler, or something else will find a way to pick that lock and they will be able to vote and get the same rights and benefits. In my own state they are voting on giving some kind of benefits to illegals in this election. It’s inevitable.
BTW, Lee Kuan Yew is a massive racists who hates AA and actively supports immigration of “good” races and tries to shut out “bad” races. Again, none of this is controversial in Asia. People simply get it and try to maintain their own people’s and cultures. Try to listen to the words of the greatest statesmen of our generation.
“Lee says that ‘I started off believing all men were equal. I know now that that’s the most unlikely thing that’s ever been, because millions of years have passed over evolution, people have scattered across the face of this earth, been isolated from each other, developed independently, had different intermixtures between races, peoples, climates, soils…. I didn’t start off with that knowledge. But by observation, reading, watching, arguing, asking, that is the conclusion I’ve come to.”
“Lee has been instrumental in encouraging the immigration of Chinese from Hong Kong. He defended this policy on the grounds that the birth rate of Singapore’s Chinese is lower than that of its Indians and Malays. ‘The numerical superiority of the Chinese must be maintained’, he said, ‘or there will be a shift in the economy, both the economic performance and the political backdrop which makes that performance possible.”
Many thanks, BK, for these richly informative and interesting comments. I appreciate the time you’ve taken to look up data, but it’s not just that: it takes a good deal of insight to know what data to look for. If I may summarize the Jones/BK theory, it seems to be:
1. High IQ (with race as a proxy) => better institutions => higher total factor productivity
2. The boost to total factor productivity from raising average IQ is large enough that the global segregation created by border controls actually raises worldwide GDP.
This is a difficult theory to test empirically– as with any empirical investigation of the determinants of global GDP, you have all sorts of problems of multicollinearity to sort through– but you’re making valiant efforts. My impression of the results of your investigation so far:
1. The Malaysia/Singapore example is suggestive at best, as it seems much too generous to assume that Malaysian Chinese would be as productive as Singaporean Chinese, with its high population density and the genius of Lee Kuan Yew, absent the Malay political elite.
2. South Africa, perhaps surprisingly, doesn’t yield strong support to the hypothesis, as South African growth rose after apartheid. Still, that may reflect resource price trends, and a question mark hangs over South Africa’s future.
3. Rhodesia/Zimbabwe gives some support to the hypothesis, and I might even stress that more than you do. I met a lot of exiled Rhodesian whites while I was in Africa, and it was a haunting experience. A nation, shattered. The tragic struggle against majority rule, reviled by the world, yet receiving a strange, sad kind of half-vindication long afterwards as Mugabe ruined a once-flourishing country and made himself a byword for catastrophic incompetence and thuggish tyranny.
4. You think Brazil/Portugal supports the theory. I looked at the figures a bit and I think it doesn’t. Brazil’s more than half as rich as Portugal and the whites there already make considerably more than the average. But there’s another element here. Portugal and Spain have been taken under the EU’s wing in the past few decades. Their institutions don’t just depend on Portuguese and Spaniards, but on the Europe-wide electorate and technocracy that is probably more answerable to Berlin and Paris and the Benelux countries than to Portugal and Spain. This has probably boosted Portuguese and Spanish incomes significantly. If you dock “natural” Portuguese GDP per capita a bit to remove EU influence, it starts to look like Brazilian whites do no worse for not being segregated.
5. Spain/Spanish America may support your point better. However, what is one to make of countries like Argentina and Paraguay which are a lot poorer than Spain even though they are all-white? Racial admixture doesn’t seem a promising explanation of Argentina’s poor performance over the last century. And once we’ve established that, might the comparative poverty of white Colombians or Venezuelans, relative to Spain or Italy, reflect the same x factor that afflicts Argentina?
In general, none of these examples answers the challenge I think I put a while back and may write up again sometime, namely: Are there any historical examples of low-IQ IMMIGRATION degrading institutions? My priors are that “founder effects” and the element of consent that occurs as part of the immigration process itself is very important. Long-time natives who are overrun by more productive foreigners are less likely to accept the rule of those foreigners and assimilate to their protocols and institutions and norms, than are people who immigrate to countries inhabited by more productive foreigners. I understand that episodes of mass migration into established productive polities may be rare enough that the scope for an empirical study is limited, which makes it attractive to look at multi-ethnic societies that have arisen in other ways. But the lessons may not cross-apply.
Second, for these purposes, dealing with purchasing power parity concerns is crucial. I suspect a lot of things are a good deal cheaper in Brazil than in Portugal. If so, just comparing, say, the dollar incomes of Brazilian and Portuguese whites at international exchange rates would not be appropriate.
Third, the theory behind high IQ => better institutions remains weak. One channel of causation, that low-IQ people vote for inferior policies, would seem to apply only inasmuch as countries are democratic. If the relative poverty of, say, Spanish America vis-a-vis Spain goes back to well before the time when democracy prevailed in these regions, some other theory of high IQ => better institutions would be needed.
I should review Jones’ “Hive Mind” paper at some point. I know that IQ depends on environment at least to some extent, so simply treating it as exogenous may not be appropriate. In any case, this is very fruitful, and gives me much to look into further. It also highlights the importance of exploring the sustainability of keyhole solutions.
re: “I would add that there are also global spillovers from highly productive economies in the form of new technologies, works of art, institutions, FDI, etc. These effects provide the grist for catch-up growth by lower-IQ countries, and may be larger over time. A purely country-GDP-based analysis misses out on these factors.”
But there are also spillovers from rich countries to poor countries via immigration. The most obvious example is remittances: migrants come to rich countries, earn money, and send it home, raising living standards there. Remittances as a form of external finance for development have received some attention and have desirable properties.
Emigrants can also be crucial sources of investment and new ideas. The booming growth in India and China in recent years owes much to the Indian and Chinese diasporas. More generally, though it would be hard to prove, it seems that major migrant source countries to the United States tend to become durable democracies. Thus, 19th-century Europe sent enormous numbers of migrants to the US, then in the 20th century became democratic. Likewise, more recently, Mexico and the Philippines. In general, as Pericles said of 5th-century Athens, America is an education to the world, in both democracy and economic growth, and it is more effective when it lets in many “students.”
Though on the other hand, disproportionate entrepreneurship among immigrants needs to be borne in mind, and it’s a reason to think migration would push the economic frontier forward faster. I think the reason for disproportionate immigrant entrepreneurship is just that throwing more ideas, more perspectives, more customs into the mix generates ideas. I don’t entirely like the meme that “ideas have sex” (long story), but I think exposing people to novelty and opening minds generates growth.
So far, I have talked about *spreading* development. You might say that even if open borders would help to spread development, they might slow down the advance of the economic frontier. But for one thing, spreading development will tend to help the economic frontier move forward, too. It grows the market for new ideas, and it grows the number of minds who know the latest ideas and are ready to contribute. All this is admittedly rather vague. That’s the trouble with “spillovers”: almost by definition, they’re hard to track and quantify. If open borders would grow world GDP in static terms, as Clemens, Kennan, and others argue, they would probably push the economic frontier forward faster in dynamic terms as well. If, as you suggest, they would degrade institutions to the point of actually reducing world GDP in static terms, they might also slow the advance of the frontier.
While there may not be a whole lot of examples of societies adapting to mass immigration, one big one is 19th-century America. And 19th-century America didn’t just raise a lot of people’s living standards because they got to live under better institutions than in the countries they came from. It was also super-innovative. Indeed, I think economic historians nowadays are starting to conclude that the golden age of open borders, plus another decade after it, were the most technologically progressive in the history of the world. Productivity had never grown faster, and much of the growth in the later 20th century was simply the fruits of the gradual commercialization of technologies born in that Golden/Gilded Age of economic progress: electricity, indoor plumbing, the light bulb, the automobile, the airplane, the radio. The precedent of 19th-century America seems at least as relevant as the examples of societies where a more productive racial minority is placed at a political disadvantage because of a legacy of conquest and/or because of being a historical newcomer.
Small point: I found the Caribbean example somewhat unpersuasive because it’s located in the tropics. Worldwide, tropical regions have lower GDP. Singapore is obviously a striking exception, and I think Hong Kong is tropical too, but that’s it. The tropics are overwhelmingly poor. Of course, we don’t really know why that is. It could have to do with the disease burden, contemporary and/or historic, or the unsuitability of the advantageous middle-latitude crop packages evolved in Eurasia over millennia, a la Jared Diamond. Or maybe it’s just hard to work in hot weather. Whatever the reason, a racial/genetic explanation would have to compete with a latitude explanation. The same applies to much of Spanish America.
On a quite different note, even in the cases where a lack of segregation arguably reduces total GDP, you seem to think, and I think too, that the withdrawal of the “market-dominant minority” would reduce living standards for the majority. It’s as if some sort of redistribution is going on, maybe because that’s literally what’s happening– the legal discrimination against the Malaysian Chinese is an example– or maybe through some sort of spillover effects. Now, even if we suppose for the sake of argument that you can raise total GDP through segregation, if you do so by making the productive minority richer and the poor majority poorer, it’s not obvious that that is a good thing. The marginal utility of a dollar tends to be higher for the poor. Total UTILITY, not an empirically observable quantity but one which can still be speculated about, may be raised, even if total GDP fell.
This might have ramifications for the effect of segregation on the frontier, too. My impression is that the most powerful inventions haven’t catered to a small elite, but are for the common man. Thus, Henry Ford built the Model T so that any average farmer could buy it. Contrast modern health care innovation, which indeed extends and eases life for some, but is busting the budget in the process. If “frugal innovation” is more potent than expensive innovation, expanding the global middle class might be more effective for advancing the frontier than securing the wealth of a segregated elite. Admittedly, this is vague. Unfortunately, technological progress remains mysterious enough that it’s hard to talk about it with the analytical rigor or empirical groundedness one would like.
Sorry for the length of this post, but one last point. While I’ve always preferred keyhole solutions and a certain degree of gradualism (though my scruples about deportation prevent from being too gradualist, for it’s just morally impermissible to sustain the present deportationist regime, almost regardless of what the consequences might be), this discussion has not made me more inclined “to have smaller-scale experiments to learn more about the effects, before taking big risks with an economy as big as the US or the EU.” Partly, that’s because I still have confidence in founder effects, consent-by-migration, keyhole solutions, and all that. If, to adapt asdf’s comment, it’s important that “the numerical superiority of [the American-born plus those assimilated to American culture/norms/protocols/productivity levels] must be maintained” lest “there… be a shift in the economy, [and a loss of] both the economic performance and the political backdrop which makes that performance possible,” then I think that numerical superiority (probably of resident population, more probably of voting citizens) can be maintained under open borders. The risk of a sort of institutional upheaval ending in a bad equilibrium– say, with a lot more corruption, tribalism, and populism– exists, but I don’t think it’s very large. But, also, with the exception of Zimbabwe/Rhodesia, the societies that BK uses as examplesare not such bad places. I suppose I’d rather be an American than a South African or Brazilian white, but South African and Brazilian whites don’t have it SO bad. South Africa represents a quite implausible worst-case scenario with open borders. One has to suppose that enough immigrants would flood in to outnumber the existing American population several-fold, drawn from the most impoverished populations on earth, with a certain solidarity against the native-born American population, and would take control of political institutions, leaving the native-born American population fairly impotent politically. Since the keyhole solution in Principles would certainly prevent that, one has to suppose either that pure open borders is adopted in a quite abrupt, unmediated fashion, or else that the keyhole solution for some reason proves unworkable. And even in THAT case, what you get is the situation of South African whites or Malaysian Chinese, a bit under siege, maybe hiring private security agencies, with little political voice, facing some legal discrimination, but still reasonably prosperous and able to maintain their ways of life. If that’s the worst-case scenario, while the upside is we’re likely to double world GDP, accelerating progress at the economic frontier, and eliminate extreme poverty worldwide… yeah, it’s a risk well worth taking.