We used to be a high trust society, but we are becoming a low trust society. The problem with government regulation filling in the gaps is that the government is incompetent at doing this.
We are basically pissing away the cultural heritage that made us, the US and Western Europe, what we are. At the present rate of deterioration, that culture will be gone by the dawn of the next century.
It is an important insight that the inputs to cultural evolution are an ongoing amalgamation and adding culturally different people can potentially have profound costs and/or benefits. It is entirely plausible that the current best check against the heritage of Puritan original sin guilt has not only been the borderer culture, but its fusion with Hispanic Americans. This linearity of culture is very evident if one comes from a place with the institutional founder effect of an Albion Seed group, but is no longer populated by these groups, ie the Midwest. Minnesota and Massachusetts have the same Yankee institutions at base, but Minnesota is roughly 80 percent German and Scandinavian by descent and there are some norms and signaling aspects of the Upper Midwest that have a through line from these places. It can be easy to elide these differences when looking at the legacy of Albion's Seed. Also of some note was a podcast Tyler Cowen did with Niall Ferguson where Ferguson offhandedly referred to Scotland of the 16th and 17th century as the equivalent of Afghanistan in terms of its Clan structure and that the implementation of the institutions on this populace made Scotland what it is today in terms of wealth and productivity. I have the book on my to buy list and look forward to your review.
He follows the method of making society/culture about gov't vs market; and in this case, trying to figure out whether 'family' is on one side or the other as opposed to a third independent axis.
The question of 'how many axes are there' is both important and really difficult. 'Dichotomy' and its friend 'dimensional reduction' are common and intuitive models/tools. Ultimately my objection is his problematic assumption about linear systems. Just like Fourier transforms can connect everything to a polynomial (at arbitrary precision, with enough terms...) - locally all systems can be summarized as a set of linear relationships. That doesn't actually teach you much about the underlying relationship and gets misleading so very quickly... and in the extreme case of reductionism, every question becomes a choice between two axes and some apparently linear relationship between them.
I say focus our (US) immigration policy on attracting high potential immigrants including/especially from India and China. Imagine the incentive this will create among ambitious youngsters worldwide! We get a double selection effect.
It obviously isn't, not in reality. 95%+ of the immigrants come in illegally across the Mexico/US border, and 95% of those are from Latin America, with the rest from Africa and the poorest parts of Asia. Of course, Thomas above is only advocating this improved policy as a defense for the lack of one at the border.
This is so obviously factually false I’m almost impressed by your confidence. Illegal immigrants as of 2020 aren’t even 1/4 of immigrants and nowhere near 95% are from Latin America.
But let me guess what your reply is going to be- that the 2 million from Mexico since January 2021 are legal entries because they are under consideration for refugee status..
LOL! 2 million plus illegal immigrants have entered the US by the Biden Administrations own estimates, almost all of which come from Latin America over the Mexican border. So, unless we we admitted 6 million legal ones in the same time frame, you are lying flat out.
I will refrain from speculating on Ward's motivation for speculating one mine.
It is true, however, that the failure to control relatively low value immigration at the border DOES distract attention to the huge gains from allowing many more high-potential people to immigrate to the US.
Thomas you have facetiously offered, on several occasions in these threads, a "deal" on expanding legal immigration in return for amorphous controls on illegal immigration. In other words, I think you are a liar on this topic. So, you don't have "speculate" on my motive.
There are certainly some people who are mainly focused on reducing low value immigration with better border controls and others who are mainly focused on increasing high value immigration. (I am in the second group) There ought to be a "deal" there. What's wrong with that?
You are not in the second group, Thomas, and I think pretty much anyone reading your comments understand that. Just stop pretending, and I wouldn't say thing about it.
Here is that people like Thomas below, and most Democrats in Congress and a few Republicans, are offering on an immigration deal: full amnesty for the "Dreamers", higher legal immigration, and more immigration courts to adjudicate the illegal entries. The last part of that deal is a joke, and isn't intended to secure the border, or deport people who enter illegally. There are never any additional measures to stop the flow of illegal immigrants, nor any additional measures to deport them either. The US border is essentially an open one, and no one is doing anything today to stop it, nor offering any policy additions that would.
I am tired of being lied to by people who aren't even good at lying to others.
If your consider the suggestion by Thomas L. Hutcheson and the fact that it doesn't contradict what Jones said, then I think it's anti-open borders, but not anti-immigration.
I listened to the interview though, didn't read the book.
Myself, I rank non-IQ cultural differences higher than I used to. Awhile back I would have put the cutoff much lower, but these days I'm pretty much at 130 IQ or higher if its a non-white origin, at least as far as America goes given our current context.
Let me offer an example our host has talked about a lot. Letting women into academia, even when they have the same IQ, had a profound impact on the culture of academia. Similarly, letting in non-Europeans into western institutions has had a profound effect, even in cases where they have above average IQs.
2) Can countries actually fine tune immigration?
I understand that certain countries have some impressive geographic barriers (Australia, Canada) and others are tight knit authoritarian states (Singapore). But it seems to me that the large western states with porous natural borders, like the USA, can't really control low skill illegal immigration unless there is a strong anti-immigrant consensus across society, especially its elites. Exceptions can of course be made (operation paperclip), but controlling borders seems to require something like the cultural consensus of 1924-1964.
I don't see why we need an "anti-immigrant" consensus to have strong (but not ridiculously expensive strong) border controls to screen for mostly highly skilled/potential immigrants. I accept assimilation "capacity" as a conceptual constraint, but don't think its important in practice at likely levels of immigration. But that said, we could proceed iteratively. Increase high skilled immigrants by X or so per year, have a look. and then adjust up or down.
Because it is anti-immigration. If (1) the quality of a society generally reflects its inhabitants, (2) assimilation is mostly fake, and (3) people generally move from worse to better societies, then most immigration will be bad. (1) and (2) are clearly buttressed by this book, and (3) is obvious.
Also, I don't understand, assimilation is "mostly fake." I use contractors who use Spanglish words instead of correct terms for many things and I know LA Immigrant families whose children barely speak Spanish at all.
This overlooks the difference between the marginal and the average. I favor allowing/encouraging highly unusual people from other countries to immigrate, which BTW should encourage more people to self-invest in becoming unusual in ways to increase their imageability.
This is an important point: relative to the more Canada-like immigration policy that the median American voter prefers, the higher level of low-skill immigration preferred by the American political class creates moderately worse incentives re: global human capital formation.
It is possible to overcorrect, of course. But Canadian politics suggests that this is unlikely; anti-Asian racists exist there, but they're a powerless fringe. In practice, Canada has *more* immigrants relative to its population size than the US, and this shouldn't be surprising given the effect of the marginal immigrant to Canada vs. the marginal immigrant to the US.
I don't this there IS a "political class" "preference" for low skill immigration. My views is we have a historically determined complex mess of policies that gives us lots of illegal, mainly low skill immigration, possible too little legal low skilled immigration and hugely too little high skill/potential immigration.
I think the US is a more attractive destination for high skilled/potential immigrants than Canada and with the right policies we would out compete them on a per capita basis.
I would also point out that Canada, being a member of the British Commonwealth, probably counts as immigrants people from the UK, Australia, New Zealand, etc.
We used to be a high trust society, but we are becoming a low trust society. The problem with government regulation filling in the gaps is that the government is incompetent at doing this.
This might be my number one concern.
We are basically pissing away the cultural heritage that made us, the US and Western Europe, what we are. At the present rate of deterioration, that culture will be gone by the dawn of the next century.
It is an important insight that the inputs to cultural evolution are an ongoing amalgamation and adding culturally different people can potentially have profound costs and/or benefits. It is entirely plausible that the current best check against the heritage of Puritan original sin guilt has not only been the borderer culture, but its fusion with Hispanic Americans. This linearity of culture is very evident if one comes from a place with the institutional founder effect of an Albion Seed group, but is no longer populated by these groups, ie the Midwest. Minnesota and Massachusetts have the same Yankee institutions at base, but Minnesota is roughly 80 percent German and Scandinavian by descent and there are some norms and signaling aspects of the Upper Midwest that have a through line from these places. It can be easy to elide these differences when looking at the legacy of Albion's Seed. Also of some note was a podcast Tyler Cowen did with Niall Ferguson where Ferguson offhandedly referred to Scotland of the 16th and 17th century as the equivalent of Afghanistan in terms of its Clan structure and that the implementation of the institutions on this populace made Scotland what it is today in terms of wealth and productivity. I have the book on my to buy list and look forward to your review.
He follows the method of making society/culture about gov't vs market; and in this case, trying to figure out whether 'family' is on one side or the other as opposed to a third independent axis.
The question of 'how many axes are there' is both important and really difficult. 'Dichotomy' and its friend 'dimensional reduction' are common and intuitive models/tools. Ultimately my objection is his problematic assumption about linear systems. Just like Fourier transforms can connect everything to a polynomial (at arbitrary precision, with enough terms...) - locally all systems can be summarized as a set of linear relationships. That doesn't actually teach you much about the underlying relationship and gets misleading so very quickly... and in the extreme case of reductionism, every question becomes a choice between two axes and some apparently linear relationship between them.
I say focus our (US) immigration policy on attracting high potential immigrants including/especially from India and China. Imagine the incentive this will create among ambitious youngsters worldwide! We get a double selection effect.
Isn't this already the case?
It obviously isn't, not in reality. 95%+ of the immigrants come in illegally across the Mexico/US border, and 95% of those are from Latin America, with the rest from Africa and the poorest parts of Asia. Of course, Thomas above is only advocating this improved policy as a defense for the lack of one at the border.
This is so obviously factually false I’m almost impressed by your confidence. Illegal immigrants as of 2020 aren’t even 1/4 of immigrants and nowhere near 95% are from Latin America.
But let me guess what your reply is going to be- that the 2 million from Mexico since January 2021 are legal entries because they are under consideration for refugee status..
LOL! 2 million plus illegal immigrants have entered the US by the Biden Administrations own estimates, almost all of which come from Latin America over the Mexican border. So, unless we we admitted 6 million legal ones in the same time frame, you are lying flat out.
Since January 2021 is the time frame.
I will refrain from speculating on Ward's motivation for speculating one mine.
It is true, however, that the failure to control relatively low value immigration at the border DOES distract attention to the huge gains from allowing many more high-potential people to immigrate to the US.
Thomas you have facetiously offered, on several occasions in these threads, a "deal" on expanding legal immigration in return for amorphous controls on illegal immigration. In other words, I think you are a liar on this topic. So, you don't have "speculate" on my motive.
There are certainly some people who are mainly focused on reducing low value immigration with better border controls and others who are mainly focused on increasing high value immigration. (I am in the second group) There ought to be a "deal" there. What's wrong with that?
You are not in the second group, Thomas, and I think pretty much anyone reading your comments understand that. Just stop pretending, and I wouldn't say thing about it.
Here is that people like Thomas below, and most Democrats in Congress and a few Republicans, are offering on an immigration deal: full amnesty for the "Dreamers", higher legal immigration, and more immigration courts to adjudicate the illegal entries. The last part of that deal is a joke, and isn't intended to secure the border, or deport people who enter illegally. There are never any additional measures to stop the flow of illegal immigrants, nor any additional measures to deport them either. The US border is essentially an open one, and no one is doing anything today to stop it, nor offering any policy additions that would.
I am tired of being lied to by people who aren't even good at lying to others.
Overall, Jones argument seems quite plausible. It's odd that is is perceived as being anti -immigration.
His conclusion in the book can only be read as anti-immigration.
If your consider the suggestion by Thomas L. Hutcheson and the fact that it doesn't contradict what Jones said, then I think it's anti-open borders, but not anti-immigration.
I listened to the interview though, didn't read the book.
I agree if we consider only immigration of the average inhabitant of of low income countries, but we can select for much above average.
That Jones would agree with
Can we?
There are two problems.
1) What constitutes above average?
Myself, I rank non-IQ cultural differences higher than I used to. Awhile back I would have put the cutoff much lower, but these days I'm pretty much at 130 IQ or higher if its a non-white origin, at least as far as America goes given our current context.
Let me offer an example our host has talked about a lot. Letting women into academia, even when they have the same IQ, had a profound impact on the culture of academia. Similarly, letting in non-Europeans into western institutions has had a profound effect, even in cases where they have above average IQs.
2) Can countries actually fine tune immigration?
I understand that certain countries have some impressive geographic barriers (Australia, Canada) and others are tight knit authoritarian states (Singapore). But it seems to me that the large western states with porous natural borders, like the USA, can't really control low skill illegal immigration unless there is a strong anti-immigrant consensus across society, especially its elites. Exceptions can of course be made (operation paperclip), but controlling borders seems to require something like the cultural consensus of 1924-1964.
https://www.aei.org/articles/diversity-and-its-limits/
I don't see why we need an "anti-immigrant" consensus to have strong (but not ridiculously expensive strong) border controls to screen for mostly highly skilled/potential immigrants. I accept assimilation "capacity" as a conceptual constraint, but don't think its important in practice at likely levels of immigration. But that said, we could proceed iteratively. Increase high skilled immigrants by X or so per year, have a look. and then adjust up or down.
Because it is anti-immigration. If (1) the quality of a society generally reflects its inhabitants, (2) assimilation is mostly fake, and (3) people generally move from worse to better societies, then most immigration will be bad. (1) and (2) are clearly buttressed by this book, and (3) is obvious.
Also, I don't understand, assimilation is "mostly fake." I use contractors who use Spanglish words instead of correct terms for many things and I know LA Immigrant families whose children barely speak Spanish at all.
This overlooks the difference between the marginal and the average. I favor allowing/encouraging highly unusual people from other countries to immigrate, which BTW should encourage more people to self-invest in becoming unusual in ways to increase their imageability.
This is an important point: relative to the more Canada-like immigration policy that the median American voter prefers, the higher level of low-skill immigration preferred by the American political class creates moderately worse incentives re: global human capital formation.
It is possible to overcorrect, of course. But Canadian politics suggests that this is unlikely; anti-Asian racists exist there, but they're a powerless fringe. In practice, Canada has *more* immigrants relative to its population size than the US, and this shouldn't be surprising given the effect of the marginal immigrant to Canada vs. the marginal immigrant to the US.
I don't this there IS a "political class" "preference" for low skill immigration. My views is we have a historically determined complex mess of policies that gives us lots of illegal, mainly low skill immigration, possible too little legal low skilled immigration and hugely too little high skill/potential immigration.
I think the US is a more attractive destination for high skilled/potential immigrants than Canada and with the right policies we would out compete them on a per capita basis.
I would also point out that Canada, being a member of the British Commonwealth, probably counts as immigrants people from the UK, Australia, New Zealand, etc.