"when a man immigrates to the United States from a Communist country, the key question is whether he wants us to remain capitalist or become Communist. . . . I suspect [that] the typical immigrant wants us to remain capitalist"
(from Mr. Kling's review of The Culture Transplant)
My experience of immigrants differs. I think of the Irish doctor who found in the US the kind of position unavailable to him in his home nation, and who lamented the absence of socialized medicine here; and of the Jamaican nursing aide who immigrated in order to earn money, and who praised Communism.
I think also of the Americans who leave higher-cost states for lower-cost states, and support the same political party and policies as in their previous places of residence.
I wonder whether Mr. Kling tends to associate with immigrants like the Indian man I know who favors free markets consistently; and whether that narrowness of association distorts his view.
I love his article, but much of this could and has been said and we are still in our equilibrium on all these issues.
Making policy or cultural changes necessary to make desired fertility and achieved fertility match would require a lot of effort (political or social capital if you will). Since such will is in limited supply and competes with other desires, the overall fertility outcomes of society and their likely effects becomes a good barometer for determine how seriously to take this concern versus some other in the competition for resources (in all senses).
For instance, should we spend money addressing climate change or increasing the child tax credit. Did we not literally just address this tradeoff in the Inflation Reduction Act (child tax credit increase out, EV subsidies in).
If we do increase the child tax credit, how much? Many people have noticed that modest child incentives do little. Maybe we need to "go big or go home". I could easily find money in our budget for 5x or 10x the child tax credit of today, but I'd have to take on a lot of interests. How do I take on those interests unless we agree that fertility patterns represent a greater crisis?
Should increased child support only go to the needy? Jones talks about the middle class being married unlike the lower class, but their fertility isn't higher. Most left wing child support programs are severely income limited, creating another effective marginal tax rate.
Personally a big expense in my life lately is private school. We decided to go this route after seeing COVID and wokeness in schools. The is very expensive and scalar. An Arizona style school voucher would go a long way towards reducing the per child cost to me and my wife, without even changing budgets, but would require taking on the powerful teachers unions.
Same with marriage. It's pretty darn obvious that marriage did better under the cultural regime per-1960s, but I don't see anyone advocating for it. Blog author aside, libertarians tend to be pretty libertine and I would be surprised if most are marrying early. Do libertarians have the stomach to shape culture on this issue?
"How big is this problem" is by definition a matter of statistics. There are always personal tragedies, but how often and how big a deal they are determines if it's a problem worth fighting for.
2) Culture Transplant
Jones could have offered a better book, but it would have been radioactive to his desired reader. So he offers him a more tepid but acceptable book. Instead of pointing out say how black migration destroyed Detroit, he offers some convoluted example of white migration destroying Argentina.
It seems unfair to savage a man obviously fighting with one hand tied behind his back.
The bottom line is he is asking people with a perceived 0% chance of immigration killing the golden goose to consider a number greater than 0%, and then hopefully they won't reflectively support excessive low kill immigration.
"If, as I suspect, the typical immigrant wants us to remain capitalist, then we need not worry what other values from his home country he might continue to hold."
Nobody wants to turn the place they move into a shithole, but it happens. Blacks fleeing Jim Crow didn't want to destroy Detroit, but they did. It's just too tempting for them to raise taxes on the whites and vote themselves some benefits. To not care much about infrastructure maintenance or public debt. To engage in ethnic spoils and corruption. They are low IQ, they can't help themselves.
I've come to better appreciate market forces and market-based thinking from some of your work. I do still wonder if anywhere in your work you consider how evolution, which has broadly similar demands, constraints, and stunning successes, also has all kinds of inefficiencies and "irrationalities" (i.e., poor design that is blatant from an informed perspective) built into its products and processes for a variety of historical reasons. And I *think* you are wise enough to avoid the error of presuming human economies have somehow transcended all the problems of evolutionary processes.
> fertility has most plausibly fallen because of economic
Time to drop in the fertility U-Curve. The top 10% and the bottom 50% both have high fertility compared to the middle, and since SES is more likely to be genetic... bio-stratification? (without the need of Alex Jones' conspiratorial thinking of course) https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1538234746416812033
Jones: Doesn't his argument imply the desirability of much higher levels of immigration, just with some "quality" (inclusive net marginal product) indicators?
Re: "Suppose that a big immigration wave from the world’s poorest countries to the richest countries does take place. What are the chances that this would 'wound the goose that lays the golden eggs of global innovation and worldwide prosperity,' as Jones puts it?"
In a spirit of cognitive humility, I have little confidence in most of my intuitions about net, long-term effects of major changes in policy; for example, open borders.
But I do have one strong intuition about political consequences of massive international migration:
-- Migration from a *wide and diverse range* of poor countries/cultures is much less likely to subvert politics in the rich destination country than is concentrated migration from a single "other" country/culture. --
If I may butcher a dictum, the prudent version of open-borders immigration policy is: *Divide & Assimilate."
Let's call wide/diverse migration to a rich country *cosmopolitan immigration.* Compared to mass migration from a single "other" culture, cosmopolitan migration is less likely to create ethnic political polarization at the national level, and more likely to induce assimilation.
Now, cosmopolitan immigration might be tricky to achieve , insofar as a core process in mass migration is "chain migration." Pioneer migrants constitute trusted information-and-opportunity networks for follow-on migration via extensive kith-and-kin relations in the source country. Chain migration naturally produces ethnic concentration.
Perhaps current processes of mass migration *within* large, internally heterogenous countries can provide pertinent evidence about potential consequences of open borders. For example, if I understand correctly, China (a country with sharp regional contrasts/diversity) has substantially eased previous draconian restrictions on domestic migration, and hundreds of millions of poor peasants have migrated to relatively rich cities in China, greatly increasing economic growth. (The opposite of the policy of "sending down" intellectuals to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution!) It seems that massive internal migration from poor regions hasn't subverted politics on planet China. How much weight should one place on this kind of evidence?
Years ago I read an article about a woman that ran a resturant in Westchester County, NY. She prided herself on only using food from nearby sources (if I remember correctly she said 50 miles). There was one exception, an olive oil from Portugal. She felt a great deal of angst about this, but felt it was sufficiently superior to locally grown canola oil to justify its use.
At a different part of the article she took greatr pride that people would drive 50 miles to have dinner at her resuturant. If you drive a Prius that would require at least 2 gallons of gas (one for each way). It never occured to her to compare the gas used to visit the resturant to the amount of energy used to transport a tablespoon of olive oil from Portugal. I suspect that the greatest carbon footprint related to her resturant was the gas used by its customers, something nobody thinks about.
Perhaps a better idea wouild be to limit how far her customers drove (say less than 5 miles) or even insist that they walk or bike.
Specialization and Trade should be read by all!
"when a man immigrates to the United States from a Communist country, the key question is whether he wants us to remain capitalist or become Communist. . . . I suspect [that] the typical immigrant wants us to remain capitalist"
(from Mr. Kling's review of The Culture Transplant)
My experience of immigrants differs. I think of the Irish doctor who found in the US the kind of position unavailable to him in his home nation, and who lamented the absence of socialized medicine here; and of the Jamaican nursing aide who immigrated in order to earn money, and who praised Communism.
I think also of the Americans who leave higher-cost states for lower-cost states, and support the same political party and policies as in their previous places of residence.
I wonder whether Mr. Kling tends to associate with immigrants like the Indian man I know who favors free markets consistently; and whether that narrowness of association distorts his view.
1) Lyman Stone
I love his article, but much of this could and has been said and we are still in our equilibrium on all these issues.
Making policy or cultural changes necessary to make desired fertility and achieved fertility match would require a lot of effort (political or social capital if you will). Since such will is in limited supply and competes with other desires, the overall fertility outcomes of society and their likely effects becomes a good barometer for determine how seriously to take this concern versus some other in the competition for resources (in all senses).
For instance, should we spend money addressing climate change or increasing the child tax credit. Did we not literally just address this tradeoff in the Inflation Reduction Act (child tax credit increase out, EV subsidies in).
If we do increase the child tax credit, how much? Many people have noticed that modest child incentives do little. Maybe we need to "go big or go home". I could easily find money in our budget for 5x or 10x the child tax credit of today, but I'd have to take on a lot of interests. How do I take on those interests unless we agree that fertility patterns represent a greater crisis?
Should increased child support only go to the needy? Jones talks about the middle class being married unlike the lower class, but their fertility isn't higher. Most left wing child support programs are severely income limited, creating another effective marginal tax rate.
Personally a big expense in my life lately is private school. We decided to go this route after seeing COVID and wokeness in schools. The is very expensive and scalar. An Arizona style school voucher would go a long way towards reducing the per child cost to me and my wife, without even changing budgets, but would require taking on the powerful teachers unions.
Same with marriage. It's pretty darn obvious that marriage did better under the cultural regime per-1960s, but I don't see anyone advocating for it. Blog author aside, libertarians tend to be pretty libertine and I would be surprised if most are marrying early. Do libertarians have the stomach to shape culture on this issue?
"How big is this problem" is by definition a matter of statistics. There are always personal tragedies, but how often and how big a deal they are determines if it's a problem worth fighting for.
2) Culture Transplant
Jones could have offered a better book, but it would have been radioactive to his desired reader. So he offers him a more tepid but acceptable book. Instead of pointing out say how black migration destroyed Detroit, he offers some convoluted example of white migration destroying Argentina.
It seems unfair to savage a man obviously fighting with one hand tied behind his back.
The bottom line is he is asking people with a perceived 0% chance of immigration killing the golden goose to consider a number greater than 0%, and then hopefully they won't reflectively support excessive low kill immigration.
"If, as I suspect, the typical immigrant wants us to remain capitalist, then we need not worry what other values from his home country he might continue to hold."
Nobody wants to turn the place they move into a shithole, but it happens. Blacks fleeing Jim Crow didn't want to destroy Detroit, but they did. It's just too tempting for them to raise taxes on the whites and vote themselves some benefits. To not care much about infrastructure maintenance or public debt. To engage in ethnic spoils and corruption. They are low IQ, they can't help themselves.
I've come to better appreciate market forces and market-based thinking from some of your work. I do still wonder if anywhere in your work you consider how evolution, which has broadly similar demands, constraints, and stunning successes, also has all kinds of inefficiencies and "irrationalities" (i.e., poor design that is blatant from an informed perspective) built into its products and processes for a variety of historical reasons. And I *think* you are wise enough to avoid the error of presuming human economies have somehow transcended all the problems of evolutionary processes.
> fertility has most plausibly fallen because of economic
Time to drop in the fertility U-Curve. The top 10% and the bottom 50% both have high fertility compared to the middle, and since SES is more likely to be genetic... bio-stratification? (without the need of Alex Jones' conspiratorial thinking of course) https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1538234746416812033
Jones: Doesn't his argument imply the desirability of much higher levels of immigration, just with some "quality" (inclusive net marginal product) indicators?
Re: "Suppose that a big immigration wave from the world’s poorest countries to the richest countries does take place. What are the chances that this would 'wound the goose that lays the golden eggs of global innovation and worldwide prosperity,' as Jones puts it?"
In a spirit of cognitive humility, I have little confidence in most of my intuitions about net, long-term effects of major changes in policy; for example, open borders.
But I do have one strong intuition about political consequences of massive international migration:
-- Migration from a *wide and diverse range* of poor countries/cultures is much less likely to subvert politics in the rich destination country than is concentrated migration from a single "other" country/culture. --
If I may butcher a dictum, the prudent version of open-borders immigration policy is: *Divide & Assimilate."
Let's call wide/diverse migration to a rich country *cosmopolitan immigration.* Compared to mass migration from a single "other" culture, cosmopolitan migration is less likely to create ethnic political polarization at the national level, and more likely to induce assimilation.
Now, cosmopolitan immigration might be tricky to achieve , insofar as a core process in mass migration is "chain migration." Pioneer migrants constitute trusted information-and-opportunity networks for follow-on migration via extensive kith-and-kin relations in the source country. Chain migration naturally produces ethnic concentration.
Perhaps current processes of mass migration *within* large, internally heterogenous countries can provide pertinent evidence about potential consequences of open borders. For example, if I understand correctly, China (a country with sharp regional contrasts/diversity) has substantially eased previous draconian restrictions on domestic migration, and hundreds of millions of poor peasants have migrated to relatively rich cities in China, greatly increasing economic growth. (The opposite of the policy of "sending down" intellectuals to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution!) It seems that massive internal migration from poor regions hasn't subverted politics on planet China. How much weight should one place on this kind of evidence?
Years ago I read an article about a woman that ran a resturant in Westchester County, NY. She prided herself on only using food from nearby sources (if I remember correctly she said 50 miles). There was one exception, an olive oil from Portugal. She felt a great deal of angst about this, but felt it was sufficiently superior to locally grown canola oil to justify its use.
At a different part of the article she took greatr pride that people would drive 50 miles to have dinner at her resuturant. If you drive a Prius that would require at least 2 gallons of gas (one for each way). It never occured to her to compare the gas used to visit the resturant to the amount of energy used to transport a tablespoon of olive oil from Portugal. I suspect that the greatest carbon footprint related to her resturant was the gas used by its customers, something nobody thinks about.
Perhaps a better idea wouild be to limit how far her customers drove (say less than 5 miles) or even insist that they walk or bike.