Razib Khan and Garett Jones
On immigration and culture
On mutual assimilation:
when people come to America, we Americans, we all shape each other. And so we all meet in the middle. So if you did a statistical analysis of the food, of the dining practices of Americans today, you'd say, well, Americans eat a lot of spaghetti. And Italian Americans eat a lot of spaghetti. So it looks like Italian Americans and other Americans must have like, the Italians must have assimilated to the American norm of eating spaghetti. But of course, that's not what happened.
On nonlinear relationships:
I follow the macro economists approach of when in doubt, assume things are linear, and remember that the quest for nonlinear relationships will mostly lead you down rabbit holes and puzzles, rather than clear answers.
On strong intergenerational families vs. rule of law:
And it turns out that basically, people who migrants who come from countries that have strong family values tend to really believe in a lot of government regulation. This is so called amoral familism as the term it goes by in the literature. … in Northern Europe, where people are more likely to say, I think the boss can be trusted, you're a little more likely to get those kinds of, ironically, more laissez faire policies. …the belief in sort of a universal norms of behavior, rather than just sticking up your for your family at all costs, seems to be a real predictor of de facto market friendly values.
On the Chinese diaspora:
across Southeast Asia, one of the ways that you're trying to predict how rich a country is how market friendly it is, turns out, you're gonna have a tough time doing better than just checking to see the present Chinese, the percent of people whose ancestors came from China, maybe two, three, even more than four generations ago. And so, yeah, percent Chinese descent is a pretty strong predictor of prosperity.
…China is the world's poorest majority Chinese country by far in per capita terms…China itself is the under the Chinese Communist Party's a real laggard. And so that means there's going to be pressure for out migration from communist China for a long time as people try to try to move to places.
on country size:
is there something about billion person countries that makes them incredibly hard to manage? I think the real answer is we don't know the question to that, because we've only got two of them on the planet. And so that's not enough to make any clear conclusions.
Note: if you set the cutoff for “big” at 100 million people, instead of one billion, there are fourteen countries, and only the U.S. and Japan are highly prosperous.
I use the Chinese migration across Southeast Asia as a complementary piece of evidence for people who think, oh, yeah, that's just Western imperialism. That's all his books about. So the relatively peaceful migrations of Chinese migrants across different countries in Southeast Asia had exactly the same statistical relationship right.
On geographic determinism vs. people/culture:
A lazy person might just say, well, it's just that the Europeans went to the good places, those those places would have been great no matter what, no matter what, no matter who was there.
On innovation being concentrated in seven countries:
I've actually found out that the vast majority of the world's innovation, it's r&d, it's patenting. Its high quality scientific research is happening in just seven countries, right. And I call them the world's I7 the most innovative seven countries in the world. So it's the US three countries in Asia, three countries in Western Europe. And together, these seven countries are clearly by any measure, like just they're moving the technology frontier forward for the planet as a whole
…Per capita, China isn't all that innovative. But this is something when it comes to innovation, we don't care about per capita, we care about the actual amount of raw innovation. And so therefore, highly populous countries with high institutional quality, are the places where you're going to look for a whole lot of technology, technological progress, that helps people the world over for decades to come. So I think we should preserve and protect the i Seven and focus, low skilled immigration policies on countries that are not part of the I7
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.