Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy

Garett Jones https://mobile.twitter.com/garettjones is an economist at George Mason University and the author of The Cultural Transplant https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Transplant-Migrants-Make-Economies/dp/1503632946/, Hive Mind https://www.amazon.com/Hive-Mind-Your-Nations-Matters/dp/150360067X, and 10% Less Democracy https://www.amazon.com/10-Less-Democracy-Should-Elites/dp/1503603571. This episode was fun and interesting throughout! He explains: * Why national IQ matters * How migrants bring their values to their new countries * Why we should have less democracy * How the Chinese are an unstoppable global force for free markets Watch on YouTube https://youtu.be/ZruyslAe26g. Listen on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/garett-jones-immigration-national-iq-less-democracy/id1516093381?i=1000596300749, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/01PRbmM3q4C3oZ7Od8COgW?si=gpaJYLgaTfeaVZYuxbRRqQ, or any other podcast platform. Timestamps (00:00:00) - Intro (00:01:08) - Migrants Change Countries with Culture or Votes? (00:09:15) - Impact of Immigrants on Markets & Corruption (00:12:02) - 50% Open Borders? (00:16:54) - Chinese are Unstoppable Capitalists (00:21:39) - Innovation & Immigrants (00:24:53) - Open Borders for Migrants Equivalent to Americans? (00:28:54) - Let's Ignore Side Effects? (00:30:25) - Are Poor Countries Stuck? (00:32:26) - How Can Effective Altruists Increase National IQ (00:39:13) - Clone a million John von Neumann? (00:44:39) - Genetic Selection for IQ (00:47:02) - Democracy, Fed, FDA, & Presidential Power (00:49:42) - EU is a force for good? (00:55:12) - Why is America More Libertarian Than Median Voter? (00:56:19) - Is Ethnic Conflict a Short Run Problem? (00:59:38) - Bond Holder Democracy (01:04:57) - Mormonism (01:08:52) - Garett Jones's Immigration System (01:10:12) - Interviewing SBF This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dwarkesh.com https://www.dwarkesh.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Go ahead and run your experiments in Iceland. Let's run that for 50 years and see what happens. It's weird how everybody's obsessed with running the experiment in America, right? They'll balance the long run budget on the kind of the backs of the poor and the middle class. Anything that lowers the innovation in the world's most innovative countries has negative costs for the entire planet in the long run. But that's something you'd only see over the course of 20, 30, 50 years. And libertarians and open border advocates are very rarely interested in that kind of timeframe. But it's worth thinking through why it is that the successful so-called monarchies aren't really monarchies. Right? They're really oligarchies. We should presume that the average skill level of voters, the average traits that we're bringing from our ancestors are having an effect on our current productivity for good or ill.

• 0:41Dwarkesh Patel?

  Okay, today I have the pleasure of speaking with Garrett Jones, who is an economist at George Mason University. He's most recently the author of The Cultural Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To A Lot Like the Ones They Left. But he's also the author of 10% Less Democracy and Hive Mind. We'll get into all three of those books. Garrett, welcome to the podcast.

• 1:06Speaker 00

  Glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

• 1:09Dwarkesh Patel?

  First question, isn't the cultural transplant still a continuation of your argument against democracy? Because isn't one of the reasons we care about the values of migrants, the fact that we live in a democracy? So should we view this book as part of your critique against democracy rather than against migration specifically?

• 1:28Speaker 00

  Well, I do think that governments and productivity are shaped by the citizens in a nation in almost any event.

• 1:39Speaker 00

  I think that even as we've seen recently in China, even in a very strong authoritarian dictatorship, which some would call totalitarian, even there, the government has to listen to the masses. So the government can only get so far away from the masses on average, even in an autocracy.

• 1:56Dwarkesh Patel?

  If you had to split apart the contribution, though, the impact of migrants on, let's say, the culture versus the impact that migrants have on a country by voting in their political system,

• 2:09Dwarkesh Patel?

  how would you split that apart? Is mainly the cultural impact we see from migration due to the ability of migrants to vote, or because they're just influencing the culture just by being there?

• 2:20Speaker 00

  I'll cheat a little bit because we don't get to run experiments on this, so I just have to kind of guess, make an informed guess. I'm going to call it 50/50. So, the way citizens influence a country through formal democracy is important, but citizens end up placing some kind of limits on the government anyway. And the people in the country are the folks who are going to work in the firms and be able to either establish or not establish those complicated networks of exchange that are crucial to high productivity.

• 2:52Dwarkesh Patel?

  I want to linger on hive mind a little bit before we talk about the cultural transplant. If you had to guess, do the benefits of national IQ come from having a right tail of elites that is smarter? Or is it from not having that strong of a left tail of people who are, you know, low productivity, more likely to commit crimes and things like that? In other words? Yeah, go ahead.

• 3:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think the upper tail is going to matter more than the lower tail in the normal range of variation. And I think part of that is because

• 3:26Speaker 00

  nations, at least moderately prosperous nations, have found tools for basically reducing the influence of the least informed voters and for basically being able to keep productivity up even when there are folks who are sort of disrupting the whole process. You know, the the risks of crime from the lower end is basically like a probabilistic risk. It's not like it's not like some zero to one switch or anything. So we're talking about something probabilistic, and I think that

• 3:59Speaker 00

  It's the median versus the elite is the contrast that I find more interesting. Median voter theorem, you know, normal, the way we often think about democracy says that the median should be matter more for determining productivity and for shaping institutions. And I tend to think that that's more important in democracies for sure. So when we look at countries, if you just look at a scatter plot, just look at the raw data of a scatter plot. If you look at the few countries that are exceptions to the rule where the mean is the mean IQ is the best predictor of productivity compared to elite IQ.

• 4:36Speaker 00

  The exceptions are non-democracies and South Africa. So you see a few places in the Gulf where there are large migrant communities who are exceptionally well-educated, exceptionally cognitively talented. And that's associated with high productivity. Those are a couple of Gulf states. It's probably Qatar, the UAE, might be Bahrain in there. I'm not sure. And then you've got South Africa. Those are the countries where the average test score, doesn't that be IQ? It could be just Pisa, Tim's type stuff. Those are the exceptions to the rule that the average IQ, the mean IQ is the best predictor of national productivity.

• 5:15Dwarkesh Patel?

  Interesting. Does that imply the fact that the at least in certain contexts, the elite IQ matters more than the left tail? Does that imply that we should want a greater deviation of IQ in a country? They just push a button and increase that deviation. Would that be good?

• 5:33Speaker 00

  No, no, I don't think so. Uh, okay. If you could just increase the deviation, um, holding the mean constant.

• 5:39Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think so. And the normal range of variation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So.

• 5:44Speaker 00

  And I think that it had more effects, you know, it's people at the top who were, um, tend to be coming up with the, the big breakthrough, the big scientific breakthroughs, the big intellectual breakthroughs that end up spilling over to the whole world. Basically, the positive externalities of innovation. This is a very, almost Pollyanna-ish, Paul Romer, new endogenous, new, uh, new growth theory thing, right? Which is the innovations of the elite just swamp, uh, the negatives of the love's guild among us.

• 6:14Dwarkesh Patel?

  Can we just apply this line of reasoning to low skilled immigration as well then? That maybe the average goes down, the average IQ of your country goes down. If the, if you just let in, you know, millions of low skilled immigration immigrants and maybe there's some cultural effects to that, too. But you know, you're also going to, that the elite IQ will still be preserved and more elites will come in through the borders along with the low skilled migrants. So then, you know, since we're caring about the deviation anyways, uh, more immigration might increase the deviation, uh, and then, you know, the, we just, that's a good thing.

• 6:47Speaker 00

  So notice what you did there is you, you did something that didn't just, uh, increase the variant, you simultaneously increased the variant and lowered the mean and median, right? And so I think that, uh, hurting the mean and median is actually a big cost, especially democracies. And so that is very likely to swallow, uh, the benefits of, um, the small, the small probability of getting higher elite folks in as part of a low skilled immigration policy. So pulling down the mean or the median is that, that's a, that's, that swamps, that swamps the benefits of increasing grades there.

• 7:25Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah. Yes. But if you get rid of their migrants' ability to vote, and I guess you can't do that, but let's assume you could do that.

• 7:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:31Dwarkesh Patel?

  What exactly it, like, what is the exact mechanism by which the, the, the cultural values or the lower median is impacting the elite's ability to produce these valuable externalities? You know, like there's a standard comparative advantage story that, you know, they'll, they'll do the housework and the cooking for the elites and they can just be more productive.

• 7:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. And well, yeah. Taking all the institutions as given, which is what a lot of open borders optimists do. They take institutions as given, they take cultural norms as given.

• 8:01Speaker 00

  All that micro stuff works out just fine. I'm totally, I'm totally on board with all that sort of Adam Smith, division of labor, blah, blah, blah.

• 8:10Speaker 00

  But institutions are downstream of culture. And cultural norms will be changing partly because of what I call spaghetti theory, right? We meet in the middle. When new folks come to a country, there's some kind of convergence, some part where people meet in the middle between the values that were previously existing and the values that have shown up that migrants have brought with them. So, you know, like I call it spaghetti theory because when Italians moved to America, that got Americans eating more spaghetti, right? And if you just did a simple assimilation analysis, you'd say, wow, everybody in America eats the same now, like they eat burgers and spaghetti. So, look, the Italians assimilated, but migrants assimilate us. Native Americans certainly changed in response

• 8:54Speaker 00

  to the movement of Europeans. English Americans certainly changed in response to the migration of German and Irish Americans. So, this meeting in the middle is something that happens all the time and not just through democratic channels, just through the sort of soft contact of cultural norms that sociologists and social psychologists would understand.

• 9:15Dwarkesh Patel?

  Now, I'm sure you saw the book that was released, I think in 2020 titled Wretched Refuse, where they showed a slight positive relationship between immigration and, you know, pro-market laws. And I guess the idea behind that is there's selection effects in terms of who would come to a country like America in the first place.

• 9:33Speaker 00

  Well, they never ran the statistical analysis that would be most useful, I think. They said that, so this is Powell and Naras day. They ran a statistical analysis that said, and they said, in all of the statistical analyses we've ever run, we've never found a negative relationship between low skilled migration, any measure of it, and changes in economic freedom. And I actually borrowed another one of Powell's data sets. And I thought, well, how would I check this theory out? The idea that changes in migration have an effect on economic freedom? And I just used the normal economist tool. I thought about how do economists check to see if changes in money, changes in the money supply, change the price level? That's what we call the quantity theory, right? The way you do that is on the X axis, you show the change in the money

• 10:18Speaker 00

  supply. On the Y axis, you show the change in prices, right? This Milton Friedman's idea, money is always everywhere. Yeah, inflation is always everywhere monetary phenomenon. So that's what I did. I did this with a, with a, um, a student. We co-authored a paper doing this. And the very first statistical analysis we ran, we looked at migrants who came from countries that were substantially more corrupt than the country's average. And we looked at the, the different, the relationship between change and increase in migrants from corrupt countries and subsequent changes in economic freedom. Every single statistical analysis we found had a negative relationship. We ran the simplest estimate you could run, right?

• 11:01Speaker 00

  Change on change, change in one thing predicts change in another. They somehow never got around to running that very simple statistical analysis. One change predicts another change.

• 11:12Speaker 00

  We found negative relationships every time, sometimes statistically significant, sometimes not. Always negative. Somehow they never found that. I just don't know how.

• 11:21Dwarkesh Patel?

  But what about the anecdotal evidence that in the U.S., for example, the, in the periods of the greatest expansion of the welfare state or of government power during the New Deal or Great Society, the levels of foreign born people were at like historical lows. Is that just a coincidence or what do you think?

• 11:37Speaker 00

  I'm not really interested in migration per se, right? My story is never that like migration per se does this bad thing. Migrants are bad. That's never my story, right? As you know, right? But my story is that migrants bring cultural values from their old country to their new country. And sometimes those cultural norms are better than what you've got. And sometimes they're worse than what you got. And sometimes it's just up for debate.

• 12:03Dwarkesh Patel?

  So if you had to guess, what percentage of the world has cultural values that are equivalent to or better than the average of Americas?

• 12:11Speaker 00

  Oh, equivalent to or better than?

• 12:13Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 12:16Speaker 00

  I mean, just off the top of my head, maybe 20%, I don't know, 30%, I'll just throw something out there like that, you know?

• 12:21Dwarkesh Patel?

  So I mean, like-

• 12:21Speaker 00

  For country averages, right? Yeah, yeah.

• 12:23Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah. Currently, we probably don't have, uh, it would probably be hard for like 20% of the rest of the world to get into the US. Would you support some possible policy that would make it easy for people from those countries specifically to get to the US? Just have radical immigration liberalization from those places?

• 12:44Speaker 00

  Um, that's really not my comparative advantage to have opinions about that, but like substantial increases of people who pass multiple tests, like let's take the low-hanging fruit and then move down from there, right? So people from, uh, countries, uh, that, um, on average have, say, higher savings rates, um, higher, uh, education levels, higher S, when I call SAT deep root scores, and, um, countries that are, say, half a standard deviation above the US level in all three, right?

• 13:19Dwarkesh Patel?

  Why do they have to be higher? Why not just equivalent? Like, uh, you get all the gains from trade and plus it can't be, you know, equivalent, so it's, there's no-

• 13:27Speaker 00

  No, part of the reason is because the entire world depends on US innovation. So we should make America as good as possible, not just slightly better than it is. So very few firms would find that their optimal hiring policy would be hire anyone who's better than your current stock of employees. Would you agree with that?

• 13:42Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, but you have to pay them a salary if you're just, uh, if it's just somebody just comes to the US, you don't have to like pay them a salary, right? So if somebody is better than, if somebody's producing more value for a firm than the salary you pay them, I think like-

• 13:53Speaker 00

  Is a firm's job to maximize its profits or to just make a little bit more than it's making right now?

• 13:58Dwarkesh Patel?

  Maximize profits, but-

• 13:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, there you go. So you find the best people you can. You know, sports teams that are hiring don't just say, "We want to hire people who are better than what we got." They say, "Let's get the best people we can get." Why not get the best? That was Jimmy Carter's, that was Jimmy Carter's biography, "Why not the best?"

• 14:16Dwarkesh Patel?

  But you can do that along with getting people who are, you know, in unexpected terms be as good as the existing Americans.

• 14:24Speaker 00

  I don't get what you want this. This seems like crazy, right? What are you talking about?

• 14:29Dwarkesh Patel?

  But I'm not sure.

• 14:31Speaker 00

  Why not the best?

• 14:31Dwarkesh Patel?

  Trade off there?

• 14:32Speaker 00

  Huh?

• 14:32Dwarkesh Patel?

  No, I'm not saying you don't get the best. But I'm saying, once you've gotten the best, what is the harm in getting the people who have equivalent SAT scores and the rest of the things you mentioned?

• 14:42Speaker 00

  I think part of the reason would be you'd want to find out, I mean, if you really want to do something super hardcore, you'd have to find out what's best for the planet as a whole. What's the trade off between having the very best, most innovative, talented, frugal people in America, doing innovating that has benefits for the whole world versus having an America that's like 40% better, but where the median's a little bit, the median of skills a little bit lower, right?

• 15:07Speaker 00

  Because the median's shaping the productivity of the whole team, right? This is what you, you know, what it means when you believe in externalities, right?

• 15:14Dwarkesh Patel?

  But if you have somebody who's equivalent, by definition, they're not moving the median down.

• 15:19Speaker 00

  That's, you're totally right about that.

• 15:22Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 15:22Speaker 00

  But like, why wouldn't I want the best thing possible, right?

• 15:26Dwarkesh Patel?

  Okay.

• 15:26Speaker 00

  I'm still trying to figure out why you wouldn't want the best thing possible. You're trying to go to the start of why you want the best thing possible. Like, why not?

• 15:31Dwarkesh Patel?

  I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm just, I'm a little confused about why that that precludes you from also getting the second best thing possible at the same time. You're, because you're not limited to just the best, right?

• 15:43Speaker 00

  Well, because the second best is going to have a negative externality on the first best. Everything's externalities. This is my worldview, right? Everything's externalities. You bring in the second best, you're like, you're not, that person's gonna make things on average a little worse for the first best person.

• 16:00Dwarkesh Patel?

  But it seems like you were explaining earlier that the negative externalities are coming from people from countries with low SAT scores. By the way, SAT, you can explain what that means, just for the audience who is not familiar with how you're using that term.

• 16:11Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, so there are three prominent measures in what's known as the deep roots literature and that are widely used. Two are S and A, that's state history and agricultural history. That's how many thousands of years your ancestors have had experience living under organized states or living under settled agriculture. And then the T score is the tech history score. I use the measure from 1500. It's basically what fraction of the world's technology were your ancestors using in 1500 before Columbus and his expansive conquest ended up upending the entire world, the world map. So S, A, and T are all predictors of modern prosperity, but especially when you adjust for migration.

• 16:54Dwarkesh Patel?

  Gotcha. We can come back to this later, but one of the interesting things I think from the book was you have this chapter on China and the Chinese people as a sort of unstoppable force for free market capitalism. And it's interesting, as you mentioned in the book, that China is a poorest majority Chinese country. What do you think explains why China is a poorest majority Chinese country? Maybe are there like nonlinear dynamics here where if you go from 90, 40 to 90% Chinese, there's positive effects, but if you go from 90 to 95% Chinese, there's too much?

• 17:26Speaker 00

  No, I think it's just, I think just communism is dumb and has terrible, like sometimes decades long effects on institutional quality. I don't really quite understand. So I'd say North Korea, if we had good data on North Korea, North Korea would be even a bigger sort of deep roots outlier than China is, right? It's like, don't, don't have a communist dictatorship in your country seems to be pretty a robust lesson for national prosperity. China's still stuck with a sort of crummy version of that mistake still. North Korea, of course, is stuck with an even worse version. So I think that's, my hunch is that that's, you know, the overwhelming issue there. It's, it's something that it's, it's sort of a

• 18:07Speaker 00

  China's stuck in an, currently China's stuck in an institutional cul-de-sac and they just don't quite know how to get out of it. And it's bad for a lot of the people who live there on average. If the other side had won the Chinese civil war, things probably be a lot, lot better off in China today.

• 18:22Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah. But what is that just about the deep roots literature? If the three biggest countries in the world, China, India, and America, it under-predicts their performance, or I'm sorry, in the case of China and India, it over-predicts their performance. And in the case of America, it under-predicts. Is that just a side? Maybe the, how reliable is this? If like the three biggest countries in the world are not adequately accounted for?

• 18:45Speaker 00

  Well, you know, communism's a really big mistake. I think that's totally accounted for right there. I think India's underperformance isn't that huge. The US is a miracle along many ways. It's, we should draw our lessons from the typical country. And I think, population weighted estimate, I don't think that basically one-third of the knowledge about the wealth of nations comes from the current GDP per capita of China, India, and the US, right? I think much less than one-third of the story of the wealth of nations comes from those three. And again, in all three cases, though, if you look at the economic trajectories of all three of those people, all three of those countries, they're all China and India growing faster than you'd expect. And also, I want to point out, this is the most important

• 19:29Speaker 00

  point, actually. When we look, when Kaplan made this claim, right? Brian Kaplan has made this claim, right? That the SAT, that the ancestry scores, the deep root scores don't predict the prosperity of, the low performance of India and China. He only checked the S and the A in the SAT scores.

• 19:53Dwarkesh Patel?

  Okay.

• 19:53Speaker 00

  Which letter did he not predict? Which letter did he never test out? He never tested the T. What do you think happens when he tests the T?

• 20:01Dwarkesh Patel?

  Does it predict China and India and America?

• 20:03Speaker 00

  They start, they, T goes back to being statistically significant again.

• 20:07Dwarkesh Patel?

  Uh huh.

• 20:08Speaker 00

  So with T, which we've always known is the best of the deep root scores, somehow Kaplan never managed to measure that one. Just as Powell and Norasde never managed to run the simplest test, change in migrant corruption versus change in economic institutions. Somehow, like the simplest test just never got run.

• 20:26Dwarkesh Patel?

  Okay, and then what is the impact if you include T?

• 20:28Speaker 00

  If you look at T, then, then contrary to what Kaplan says, the deep root, that deep roots measure is statistically significant.

• 20:38Dwarkesh Patel?

  Okay.

• 20:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. The puzzle goes away.

• 20:42Dwarkesh Patel?

  Interesting.

• 20:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, so somehow these guys just never seem to run like the simple things, the transparent things. I don't know why.

• 20:50Dwarkesh Patel?

  The.

• 20:50Speaker 00

  We're done.

• 20:51Dwarkesh Patel?

  The, the one you mentioned from, was it Nerassa, the name of the guy who wrote the Richard at refuse?

• 20:57Speaker 00

  The. Yeah, yeah. Powell and Nerasta, yeah, yeah.

• 21:00Dwarkesh Patel?

  You said you did the regression institutional corruption and from the countries it come from, is that, was that right?

• 21:06Speaker 00

  And so, yeah, the measure they use, I just took, I took Powell's data set from another study. And it was the percentage of, it was basically the percentage of your nation's population, the percentage increase in your nation's population from relatively poor or corrupt countries. They had multiple measures.

• 21:24Dwarkesh Patel?

  Uh huh.

• 21:24Speaker 00

  So.

• 21:25Dwarkesh Patel?

  And what is on the Y axis there?

• 21:27Speaker 00

  Y axis is change in economic freedom, that's my preferred one.

• 21:30Dwarkesh Patel?

  Gotcha.

• 21:30Speaker 00

  There's also a change in corruption one, which is a noisier indicator. You get much clearer results with change in economic freedom, so.

• 21:38Dwarkesh Patel?

  Gotcha, gotcha. Now, does the ideas getting harder to find stuff and great stagnation? Does that imply we should be less worried about impinging on the innovation engine in these countries that people might want to migrate to? Because worst comes to worst, it's not like there are a whole bunch of great new theories that are going to come out anyways.

• 21:58Speaker 00

  Uh, no, I think that, I think that it's always good to have great things and new ideas. Yes, new ideas are getting harder to find, but that, but the awesome ideas that we're still getting are still worth so much, right? If we're still increasing lifespan a month a year for every year of research we're doing, like that just seems great, right? A decade that adds a year to life, so. Just to use a rough ballpark measure there.

• 22:25Dwarkesh Patel?

  But so we have a lot of these countries where a lot of innovation is happening. So let's say we kept one or two of them as, you know, immigrate havens from any potential downsides from radical changes. You know, we already had this in the case of Japan or South Korea. There's not that much migration there.

• 22:41Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 22:41Dwarkesh Patel?

  What is, what is a harm in then using the other ones to decrease global poverty by immigration or something like that?

• 22:48Speaker 00

  Well, um, it's obviously better to create a couple of innovation powerhouses rather than none, right? So obviously that's, that's right. But instead I would prefer to have open borders for Iceland. If the open borders advocates are right and open borders will have noticeable effect on institutional quality, then it's great to move, have our open borders experiment run in a country that's lightly populated, has a lot of open land and has good institutional quality. And Iceland fits the bill perfectly for that. So we could preserve the institutional innovation skill, the institutional quality of the, what I call the I7.

• 23:28Speaker 00

  That's, you know, China, Japan, South Korea, the US, Germany, UK, France. And choose any country out of the hundred, out of the couple of dozen countries that have good institutional quality, just pick one of the others that aren't one of those seven. Pick one that's not an innovation powerhouse and turn that into your open borders country. You could, if you wanted to get basically Singapore levels of population density in Iceland, that'd be about 300 million people, I think. I think that's about what the numbers end up looking like, something like that.

• 24:00Dwarkesh Patel?

  But the entire, but the value of open borders comes from the fact that you're coming to a country with high agglomerations of talent and capital and other things, which is not true of Iceland, right? So it isn't the entire.

• 24:13Speaker 00

  No, no, no. I thought the whole point of open borders that there's institutional quality and there's some exogenous institutions that make that place more productive than other places. And so by move, I, that's my version of what I've been exposed to is open borders theories. That institutions exogenously exist. There's some places have moderately laissez faire institutions in their country and moving a lot more people there will not reduce the productivity of the people who are currently there and they'll become much more productive. And so like the institute, you know, the institutional quality is crucial. So, I mean, if you're a real geography guy, you'd be excited about the fact that Iceland is so far, so close to the North Pole, because latitude is a predictor of prosperity.

• 24:54Dwarkesh Patel?

  I want to go back to the thing about, well, should we have open borders for that 20% of the populate, global world's population that comes from equivalent SAT and other sort of cultural traits as America. Because I feel like this is important enough to dwell on. Yeah, you know, it seems similar to saying that once you picked up a hundred dollar bill on the floor, you wouldn't pick up a $20 bill on the floor because you only won the best bill. The $20 bill is right there. Why not pick it up? So what if we have?

• 25:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. What if the $20 bill makes your, turns your $100 bill into like an $80 bill? And turns all of your $80, $100 bills into $80 bills?

• 25:27Dwarkesh Patel?

  But is it, aren't you controlling for that by saying that they have equivalent scores along all those cultural tests that you're considering?

• 25:34Speaker 00

  No, because the median, so, so take the simple version of my story, which is the median of the population ends up shaping the productivity of everybody in the country, right? Or the mean, the mean skill level ends up shaping the productivity of the entire population, right? So that means we end up, I mean, I try not to math this up. I don't want to math this up for the, you know, in a popular book, but it means we face a trade off between being small, a small country with super awesome positive externalities for all the workers by just selecting the best people. And every time we lower the average skill level in the country, we're lowering the average productivity of everyone else. We're creating-

• 26:11Dwarkesh Patel?

  We didn't, what if we didn't lower it? So you have to have skills that are-

• 26:14Speaker 00

  Lower it compared to the-

• 26:15Dwarkesh Patel?

  Greater than the median of, median American.

• 26:18Speaker 00

  This, this is a ceteris paribus story, right? Like if you could, suppose the US is at 80 now on a zero to 100 scale, right? Just to say, and you have a choice between being 100 and being 99.

• 26:32Speaker 00

  If you're 99, the 99 is making all, compared to the world of average of 100, the world of an average 99 is making, reducing the productivity of all those hundreds.

• 26:45Dwarkesh Patel?

  Okay.

• 26:45Speaker 00

  If we chose 90, we're reducing the productivity of all those hundreds.

• 26:48Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yes. Okay. So let's say we admit all the smartest people in the world and that gets us from 80 to 85. That's a new, that's a new median in America. At that point, and but this is because we admitted a whole bunch of like 99s that have just increased our average.

• 27:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:03Dwarkesh Patel?

  At that point, open borders for everybody who's ever been 85?

• 27:08Speaker 00

  Like I, this is, this is, ends up being a math problem. It's a little hard to solve on a podcast, right? Cause it's the, it's the question of do I want a smaller country with super high average productivity? Or a bigger country with lower average productivity? And by average productivity, it'll just mean a, a compositional effect. I mean negative external, I mean relatively fewer positive externalities. So I'll use the term relatively fewer positive externalities rather than negative externalities. Right? So like, I don't exactly know where this is trade off is going to pan out. But there is a case for a sort of Manhattan. When people talk about a Manhattan project, right? They're talking about putting all, like a small number of the smartest people in a room. And part of the reason you don't want like the 20th smartest person in the room.

• 27:53Speaker 00

  Cause, cause that person's going to ruin the, ruin stuff for all, for the other smart people. When we, it's amazing how your worldview changes when you see everybody as an external.

• 28:02Dwarkesh Patel?

  I'm kind of confused about this because just having, at some point you're going to run out of the smartest, the remainder of the smartest people in the world. If you've admitted all the brilliant people.

• 28:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:14Dwarkesh Patel?

  Given how big the US population is to begin with, you're not going to change the median that much by doing that. Right? So it's, it's almost equivalent to just having more births from the average American. Like if the average American just had more kids, the population would still grow. And the relative effect of the brightest people might dilute a little bit. But I.

• 28:33Speaker 00

  And that, maybe that's a huge tragedy. We don't know. Without a bunch of extra math and a bunch of weird assumptions, we don't know. So like I, they're the point at which I have to say like, I don't know. Right?

• 28:42Dwarkesh Patel?

  Okay. Yeah.

• 28:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, is diluting the power of the smartest person in America like keeping us from having wondrous miracles all around us all the time? I mean, probably not, but I don't know.

• 28:54Dwarkesh Patel?

  But I guess the sort of the meta question you can ask about this entire debate is, listen, there's so much literature here and it's hard to tell what exactly will happen. You know, it's possible that culture will become worse. It's possible it will become better. It's possible it stays the same. Given the fact that there's this ambiguity, why not just do the thing that on the first order effect seems good and you know, just like moving somebody who's like in a poor country to a rich country. First order effect seems good. I don't know how the third and fourth order effect shapes out. Let's just, you know, let's just do the simple obvious thing.

• 29:22Speaker 00

  I, I thought that the, one of the great ideas of economics is that we have to worry about secondary tertiary consequences, right?

• 29:28Dwarkesh Patel?

  But if we, if we can't even figure out what they are exactly, why not just do the thing that at the first order seems good?

• 29:36Speaker 00

  Because if you have a compelling reason to think that the

• 29:40Speaker 00

  direction of strength of the second and third and fourth order things are negative and the variances are really wide, then you're just adding a lot more uncertainty to your outcomes. So, and adding uncertainty to your outcomes that has sizable negative tail, especially for the whole planet, isn't that great? Go ahead and run your experiments in Iceland. Let's run that for 50 years and see what happens. It's weird how everybody's obsessed with running the experiment in America, right? Why not run it in Iceland first?

• 30:04Dwarkesh Patel?

  Cause America's got a great, a lot of great institutions, right?

• 30:07Speaker 00

  But we can check and see what Iceland, Iceland's a great place too. And I use Iceland as a metaphor, right? Like it's, people are obsessed with running it in America. Like there's some kind of need, I don't know why. So let's try in France. Let's try, let's try Northern Ireland.

• 30:25Dwarkesh Patel?

  Are, are places with low SAT scores? And again, SAT, we're not talking about the, in case you're skipping to this timestamp, we're not talking about the college test.

• 30:34Speaker 00

  Deep root test, state history, agricultural history, tech history.

• 30:38Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right, exactly. Are, are those places with low scores on, on that test? Are they stuck there forever or is there something that can be done if you are a country that has had a short or not significant history of technology or agriculture?

• 30:56Speaker 00

  Well, I start off the book with this, which I really think that one thing they could do is create a welcoming environment for large numbers of Chinese migrants to move there persistently. I don't think that, of course, the only thing that could ever work, but I think it's something that's within the range of policy for at least some poor countries. I don't know which ones, but some poor countries could follow the approach that many countries in Southeast Asia followed, which is create an environment that's welcoming enough to Chinese migrants. It's the one country in the world with large numbers of high SAT score, with a high SAT score culture, large population. It's enough of an economic failure for at least a little longer that folks can,

• 31:41Speaker 00

  might be able to be interested in moving to a poorer country with lower SAT scores. In a better world, you could do this with North Korea too, but the population of North Korea isn't big enough to make a big dent in the world, right? China's population is big enough, yeah.

• 31:54Dwarkesh Patel?

  Another thing you have to worry about in those cases, though, is the risk that if you do become successful in that country, there's going to be a huge backlash and your resources will get expropriated, like what happened to...

• 32:05Speaker 00

  Famously so in Indonesia, right? Yeah, there have been many times across Southeast Asia where anti-Chinese pogroms have been unfortunately a fact of life.

• 32:14Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah, or Indians in Uganda under Idi Amin.

• 32:17Speaker 00

  Idi Amin, yeah.

• 32:18Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah. Okay, so actually, I'm curious how you would think about this. Given the impact of national IQ, if you're an effective altruist, are you just handing out iodine tablets across the world? What are you doing to increase national IQ?

• 32:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is something that I, yes. Finding ways, this is what I call a Flynn cycle. Like, I wish, I'm hoping for a world where there are enough public health interventions and probably K through six education interventions. To boost test scores in the world's poorest countries. And I think that ends up having a virtuous cycle to it, right? As people get more productive, then they can afford more public health, which makes them more productive, which means they can afford more public health. I think brain health is an important and neglected part of child development.

• 33:10Speaker 00

  Fortunately, we've done a fair amount to reduce the amount of environmental lead in a lot of poor countries. That's probably having a good effect right now as we speak in a lot of the world's poorest countries. You're right. Iodine, basic childhood nutrition, reliable healthcare to, you know, prevent the worst kinds of just mild childhood infections that are probably creating what economists sometimes call health insults. Things that end up just hurting you in a way that causes an ill-defined long-term cost. A lot of that's going to have to show up in the in the brain. I'm a big fan of the of the view that part of the Flynn effect is basically nutrition and health. Flynn wasn't

• 33:51Speaker 00

  a huge believer in that, but I think that's certainly important in the poorest countries.

• 33:56Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah. I think Brian showed in open borders, if you look at the IQ of adoptees from poor countries who go Sweden is the only country that collects data, but if you get adopted by a parent in Sweden, the half the gap between the averages of other countries. Yeah, yeah, goes away. So I mean, is one of the ways you can increase global IQ just by moving kids to countries with good health outcomes that will nourish their intelligence?

• 34:28Speaker 00

  Oh, that's a classic short run versus long run effect, right? So libertarians and open border advocates tend to be focused on the short run static effects. So, and so you're right, moving kids from poor countries to richer countries is probably going to raise their test scores quite a lot. And then the question is, and over the longer run, are those lower skilled folks, the folks with lower test scores, going to degrade the institutional quality of the places they move to? Right? So if you close half the gap between the poor country and the rich country, half the gap is still there, right? And if I'm right, that IQ has big externalities, then moving people from a lower scoring country to a richer

• 35:10Speaker 00

  scoring country and closing half the IQ gap still means on net, you're creating a negative externality in the country the kids are moving to.

• 35:17Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah, we can come back to that, but.

• 35:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. So it's basically you just look at the question, is this lowering the mean test scores in your country? And if it's lowering the mean test scores, in the long run, it's on average going to lower institutional quality, productivity, savings rates, those things. It's hard to avoid that. It's hard to avoid that outcome. So.

• 35:38Dwarkesh Patel?

  I don't remember the exact figures, but didn't Brian address this in the book, in the open borders book as well, that you can, even if there's a, the national IQ lowers on average, if you're just, if you're still raising the global IQ, that that is still nets out positive? Or am I remembering that wrong?

• 35:55Speaker 00

  Well, that notice what he's, what he does is he attributes, he says there's some productivity that's just in the land, that's just your graphic factors. So basically being close to, and so that, moving people away from the equator boosts productivity substantially. And again, that's a static result. The reason I, I mentioned that ignores all the I7 stuff that I'm talking about, where anything that lowers the level of innovation in the world's most innovative countries has negative costs for the entire planet in the long run. But that's something you'd only see over the course of 20, 30, 50 years. And libertarians and open border advocates are very rarely interested in that kind of timeframe.

• 36:34Dwarkesh Patel?

  Is there any evidence about the impact of migration on innovation specifically? So not on the average institutional quality or on, you know, the corruption or whatever, but like just directly the amount of innovation that happens, or maybe the Nobel prizes won, or things like that?

• 36:49Speaker 00

  No, I mean, I would presume, I think a lot of us would presume that the European invasion of North America ended up having positive effects for global innovation. It's not an invasion that I'm in favor of, but if you want to talk crudely about whether migrations had an effect on innovation, you'd probably have to include that as any kind of analysis.

• 37:07Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yep, yep. Do you think that the people who are currently Americans, but their ancestry traces back to countries of low SAT scores, i- is it possible that US GDP per capita would be higher without that contribution? Or how do you think about that?

• 37:21Speaker 00

  I mean, that it follows from thinking through the fact that we are all externalities, positive or negative, right? I don't know what in any particular, any one particular country could turn out to be some exciting exception to the rules, some interesting anomaly. But on average, we should presume that the average skill level of voters, the average traits that we're bringing from the nations that are the nations of our ancestors are is having an effect on our current productivity for good or ill. It's just following through the reasoning I'd have to say on average, that's most likely. But it there could always be exceptions to the rule.

• 37:56Dwarkesh Patel?

  I guess we see large disparities in income between different ethnic groups across the world, not just in the United States. Doesn't that suggest that some of the gains can be privatized from whatever the cultural or other traits there are? Because if these over decades and centuries, these sorts of, these sorts of gaps continue.

• 38:18Speaker 00

  I don't see why that would follow, right?

• 38:22Dwarkesh Patel?

  If everything is being, if all the externalities are just being averaged out over time, what did you expect that these gaps would narrow?

• 38:30Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, I'm being a little rhetorical when I'm saying everything's literally an externality, right? I don't literally believe that's true. For instance, people with higher education levels do actually earn more than people with lower education levels. So that's literally not an externality, right? So some of these other cultural traits that people are bringing with them from their ancestors' nations of origin could be what are ones likely one source of these income differences. I mean, if you think about differences in frugality, differences in personal responsibility, which show up in the surveys that are persistent across generations, those are likely to have an effect on long run productivity for you yourself and your family. Let alone the hive mind stuff where you find that there's a positive relationship between test scores and productivity.

• 39:13Dwarkesh Patel?

  There was a blogger who took a look at your 2004 paper about the impact of national IQ on GDP. And they calculated, so they were just speculating, let's say you cloned a million John von Neumanns, and assume that John von Neumann had an IQ of 180, then you could, let me just blow the exact numbers. You could, you could raise the average IQ of the United States by 0.21 points. And if it's true that one IQ point contributes 6% to increasing GDP, then this proposal would increase US GDP by 1.26%. Do you buy these kinds of extrapolations?

• 39:54Speaker 00

  1.26%?

• 39:56Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah, because you're only cloning a million John von Neumanns.

• 39:58Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, okay, so it's about 1 million John von Neumanns. Yeah, yeah, that sounds, I mean, that's the kind of thing where I wouldn't expect it to happen overnight, right? I tend to think of that, the IQ externalities of being two, three generations. I lump it in with what economists call organizational capital. That sounds about right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can't remember where I saw this. I think I stumbled across it myself at some point, too.

• 40:19Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah. By the way, his name is Alvaro de Menard, if you want to find out.

• 40:22Speaker 00

  Oh, okay, yes, yes, okay. Yeah, it's, I mean, it's in that ballpark, right? It's just this idea that, and more importantly, a million John von Neumanns would be a gift to the entire planet, right?

• 40:33Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 40:34Speaker 00

  So, yeah, if you had, if you had a choice of which country to have the John von Neumanns, it's probably going to be one of the I7, maybe there, maybe there's a, maybe Switzerland would be a good alternative.

• 40:46Dwarkesh Patel?

  What is the optimal allocation of intelligence across a country? Because one answer, and I guess is the default answer in our society, is you just send them where they can get paid the most, because that's a good enough proxy for how much they're contributing. And so you have these high agglomerations of talent and intelligence in places like Silicon Valley or New York. And, you know, because their contributions there can scale to the rest of the world, this is actually where they're producing the most value. Another is, you know, you actually, you should disperse them throughout the country so that they're helping out communities, they're, you know, teachers in their local community. I think there was a result that... There's an interesting anecdotal evidence that during the Great Depression,

• 41:27Dwarkesh Patel?

  the crime in New York went down a ton and that was because the cops in New York were able to hire, you know, they had like a hundred applications for every cop they hired. And so they were able to hire the best and the brightest and there were just a whole bunch of new police tactics that were pioneered at the time. Anyways, so is the market allocation of intelligence correct? Or do you think there should be more distribution of intelligence across the country? How do you think about that?

• 41:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, the market signals aren't terrible. But this is my, my inner Paul Romer kicks in and says, innovation is all about externalities and there's market failures everywhere when it comes to the field of innovation. And so, you know, I, I personally, I mean, I, I like the idea of finding ways to allocate them to, to STEM style, STEM style technical fields. And we do a fair amount of that and maybe we do the, maybe the US does a pretty good job of that. I don't have any huge complaints at that, at the, at the crudest 50,000 foot level. For the, you know, the fact that people know that there's a status game they can play within academia

• 42:33Speaker 00

  that are perhaps more satisfying or at least as satisfying as the corporate hierarchy stuff. So, yeah, I, I, you don't want them all just, I wouldn't encourage them to solely follow market signals, right? I'd, I'd encourage them to be more Hansonian and play a variety of status game because the academic and intellectual status game is worth a lot, both personally and then it leads to positive spillovers for society.

• 42:58Dwarkesh Patel?

  But how about the geographic distribution? Do you think that it's fine that there's people leave, smart people leave Kentucky and go to San Francisco or?

• 43:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm a big agglomeration guy. Yeah. Yeah, I'm a big agglomeration guy. Yeah. I mean, the internet makes it easier, but then like still being close to peoples, being in the room is important. That there's, there's something both Hansonian and Girardi in here about like, we need to find role models to imitate. And that's probably important for productivity.

• 43:31Dwarkesh Patel?

  Are there increasing or decreasing returns to national IQ?

• 43:37Speaker 00

  No, I think.

• 43:41Speaker 00

  And my findings were that it was all basically log linear. And so log linear looks crudely like increasing returns, right? So yeah, it looks exponential, right? So yeah, there's increasing returns to national IQ. Yeah. But this is, this is a commonplace finding in a sense, because so many like human, all the human capital relationship I'm familiar with, end up having something like a log linear form, which is exponential. So.

• 44:08Dwarkesh Patel?

  Why is that?

• 44:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's something multiplicative. That's what I have, that's all I have to say is like, it's something, somehow this all taps into Adam Smith's pin factory. And we have multiplicative, not additive effects when we're increasing brain power. I have, I suspect it does have something to do with a better organization of the division of labor between people, which ends up having something close to exponential effects on productivity.

• 44:41Dwarkesh Patel?

  Are you a fan of genetic selection for intelligence as a means of increasing national IQ? Or do you think that's too much playing at the margins?

• 44:49Speaker 00

  If it's voluntary, I mean, people should be able to do what they want. And after a couple decades of experimentation, I think people would end up finding a path to government subsidies or tax credits or something like that. I think people voluntarily deciding what kind of kids they want to have

• 45:07Speaker 00

  is a good thing. And so by genetic selection, I assume you're meaning at the most elementary level, people testing their embryos the way they do now, right? So I mean, we already do a lot of genetic selection for intelligence. Anybody you know who's in their mid 30s or beyond, who's had amniocentesis, they've been doing a form of genetic selection for intelligence. So it's a widespread practice already in our culture. And welcoming that in a voluntary way is probably going to have good effects for our future.

• 45:39Dwarkesh Patel?

  What do you make of the fact that GPT three, or I think it was Chad GPT, had a measured IQ of eighty-five?

• 45:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've seen a few different measures of this, right? You might have seen multiple measures. Yeah, I think it's, I think it's a sign that basically, and when you see people using non-IQ tests to sort of assess the outputs of GPT on long essays, it does seem to fit into that sort of not quite a hundred, but not, not off by a lot. Yeah, I mean, I think it's, I think it's a sign that a lot of

• 46:12Speaker 00

  mundane, even fairly complex, moderately complex human interactions can be simulated by a large language learning model. And I think that's, that's going to be rough news for a lot of people whose life was in the realm of words and dispensing simple advice and solving simple problems. That's pretty bad news for their careers. I'm disappointed to hear that. So.

• 46:36Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:37Speaker 00

  At least for the transition. I don't know what, I don't know what's gonna happen after the transition, but.

• 46:41Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, I'm hoping that's not true of programmers or economists like.

• 46:45Speaker 00

  I mean, it might be, right? I mean, it's, if that's the way it is, I mean, I

• 46:50Speaker 00

  I mean, the car put a lot of people who took care of horses right out of, out of work too, so.

• 46:55Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yep. Even, okay, so let's talk about democracy. I thought this was also one of your really interesting books.

• 47:01Speaker 00

  No, thanks.

• 47:02Dwarkesh Patel?

  Even controlling for how much democratic oversight there is of institutions in the government, there seems to be a wide discrepancy of how well they work. Like, the Fed seems to work reasonably well. I, I don't know enough about macroeconomics to know how the object level decisions they make, but you know, it seems to be a non-corrupt, like, technocratic organization.

• 47:23Speaker 00

  Enough.

• 47:24Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah. If you look at something like the FDA, it's also somewhat insulated from democratic processes. It seems to not work as well. What determines, controlling for democracy, what controls, what determines how well an institution in the government works?

• 47:38Speaker 00

  Well, I, I think in the case of the Fed, it really does matter that they the people who run it have guaranteed long-term and they print their own money to spend. So that means that they're basically, Congress has to really make an effort to change anything in the Fed. So they really have the kind of independence that matters, right? You know, they have a room of their own. And the FDA has to come to Congress for money more or less every year. And the FDA heads do not have any kind of security of appointment. They're appointed, they serve at the pleasure of the president. So I do think that they don't have real independence.

• 48:17Speaker 00

  I do think that they're basically, um, they're living in this slack, this area of slack, to use the sort of McNoel gasped, Polly Side jargon. They're living in this realm of slack between the fact that the president doesn't want to muddle with them, uh, meddle with them, excuse me, and the fact that Congress doesn't really want to meddle with them. But on the other hand, I really think that, that the FDA and the CDC are doing what Congress more or less wanted them to do. They reflect, they reflect the muddled disarray that Congress would in over the period of, say, COVID. Hmm, uh, that, I think that's a first order important.

• 48:58Speaker 00

  I mean, I do think the fact, it's the fact that FDA and CDC don't seem to have that culture of, um, raw technocracy, the way the Fed does, that, I think that has to be important on its own. But I think behind that, some of that is just like FDA, CDC creatures of Congress much more than the Fed is.

• 49:17Dwarkesh Patel?

  Should the power of the president be increased?

• 49:20Speaker 00

  Uh, no. No, like the power of independent committees should be increased. Like more of Congress should be like the Fed. My plan for a Fed, for an FDA or CDC reorganization would be about making them more like the Fed, where they have appointed experts who have long terms and they have enough of a long term that they can basically feel like they can blow off Congress and build their own culture.

• 49:42Dwarkesh Patel?

  Hmm. So the European Union is an interesting example here because they also have these appointed technocrats, but they seem more interested in creating annoying pop-ups on your websites than with dealing with, you know, the end of economic growth on the continent. Is this a story where more democracy would have helped? Or how do you think about the European Union in this context?

• 50:04Speaker 00

  No, and the EU like, uh, the European, European voters just aren't that excited about democracy, uh, excuse me, aren't that excited about markets overall. The EU is going to reflect that, right? What little evidence we have suggests that, uh, countries that are getting ready to join the EU. They improve their economic freedom scores, their sort of laissez-faire-ness on the path to getting ready for joining the EU. So, and then they may increase it a little bit afterwards once they join. But basically, it's like, it's like when you're deciding to join the EU, it's like you decided to have your Rocky training montage and get more laissez-faire. And so the EU on net is a mess. It pulls in the direction of markets compared to where Europe would be otherwise. I mean, just look at the nations that are in the EU now, right?

• 50:49Speaker 00

  A lot of them are east of Germany, right? And so those are countries that don't have this great, you know, history of being market friendly and a lot of parties aren't that market friendly. And yet the EU sort of nags them into their version, like as much markets as they can handle.

• 51:04Dwarkesh Patel?

  What do you think explains the fact that the European, Europe as a whole and the voters in there are less market friendly than Americans? I mean, if you look at the sort of deep roots analysis of Europe, you would think that they should be the most, most in favor of, I don't know if the deep roots, actually, maybe.

• 51:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, compared to the planet as a whole, they're pretty good, right? So I, I never get that excited about like the small little distinctions between the US and Europe, like these 30% GDP differences, which are very exciting to pundits and bloggers and whatever. I'm like, 30% doesn't matter very much. It's not really my bailiwick. What I'm really interested is the 3,000% between the poorest countries and the richest countries. So like, I can speculate about Europe. I don't really have a great answer. I mean, I, I think there's something to the naive view that the Europeans with the most, what my dad would call gumption, are those who left and came to America. Some openness, some adventurousness. And maybe that's part of what trans made. So basically, there's a lot of selection working on the

• 52:07Speaker 00

  migration side to make America more open to laissez-faire than Europe would be.

• 52:13Dwarkesh Patel?

  Does that overall make you more optimistic about migration to the US from anywhere? Like, you know, the same story.

• 52:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, center of paradise. Like, America, America gives people who are really great, right? I went with you there.

• 52:25Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah. Does elite technocratic control work best in, only in high IQ countries? Because otherwise, you don't have these high IQ elites who can make good policies for you, but you also don't get the democratic protections against famine and war and things like that.

• 52:41Speaker 00

  Oh, I mean.

• 52:46Speaker 00

  I don't know. I think I think the case for for handing things over to elites is pretty strong in anything that's moderately democratic, right? I don't have to be anything that's substantially more democratic than the official measure of Singapore, for instance. I mean, that's why my book 10% Less Democracy really is targeted at the rich, rich democracies. Once we get too far below the rich democracies, I figure once you put elites in charge, they really are just going to be old fashioned Gordon Tullock rent seekers and steer everything toward themselves and not give a darn about the masses at all. So that's, you know, elite control in a democracy, a lot of elite control in any kind of democracy, I think is going to have good effects if it's you're

• 53:30Speaker 00

  really looking at something that is a that meet the martian sense definition of a democracy, competitive market, competitive parties, free press.

• 53:38Dwarkesh Patel?

  Mm hmm. Does Singapore meet that criteria?

• 53:41Speaker 00

  No, because their parties aren't really allowed to compete. I mean, that's pretty obvious. Yeah, the the people's action party really controls a party competition there.

• 53:52Dwarkesh Patel?

  But I guess Singapore is one of the great examples of technocratic, um, it's yeah, critical control and

• 53:59Speaker 00

  They're just an exception to the rule. Most countries that try to pull off that lower level of democracy wind up much worse. So

• 54:04Dwarkesh Patel?

  What is your, what is your opinion of neo reactionaries? I guess they're not in favor 10% less democracy. They're more in favor of 100% less democracy, but

• 54:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think they're like kind of too much larping, too much romanticizing about the Raverim, I guess. I don't know.

• 54:19Dwarkesh Patel?

  What did they hear him?

• 54:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, all the these guys in the Lord of the Rings, you know, romanticizing monarchy is a mistake. It's worth noting that, as my colleague Gordon Tullock pointed out, as along with many others, in equilibrium, Kings are almost always king and council, right? And so it's worth thinking through why king and council is the equilibrium. Something more like a corporate board and less like either the libertarian ideal of the entrepreneur who owns the firm or the monarch who has the long-term interest in being a stationary bandit. In real life, there's this sort of muddled thing in between that works out as the equilibrium, even in the successful so-called monarchies.

• 55:05Speaker 00

  So it's worth thinking through why it is that the successful so-called monarchies aren't really monarchies, right? They're really oligarchies.

• 55:12Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yep, yep.

• 55:15Dwarkesh Patel?

  If you look at the median voter in terms of their preferences on economic policies, it seems like they're probably more in favor of government involvement than the actual policies of the United States, for example. What explains this? Shouldn't the median voter theorem imply that we should be much less libertarian as a country?

• 55:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a great point from Brian Kaplan's excellent book, Myth of the Rational Voter, right? Yeah, I think part of it, I mean, I think his stories are right, which is that politicians facing reelection have this trade-off between giving voters what the voters say they want and giving the voters the economic growth that will help politicians get re-elected, right?

• 55:55Speaker 00

  So it's a version of saying like, you know, I don't want you to pull off the Band-Aid, but I want my wounds to all get better. So then, so the politician has to, it's the politician's job to handle the contradictory demands of the voters. And by delegating authority to them, to the voter, to the elected politicians, you get some of the benefits of elitism, even in a so-called democracy.

• 56:19Dwarkesh Patel?

  Over the long run, should we expect any of the tensions or all the tensions of ethnic diversity to fade away? Like, nobody today worries about the different Parisian tribes in France butting heads at the workplace, right?

• 56:32Speaker 00

  So over time... And you're right, like, that anti-German ethnic sentiment in the US totally gone, right? So, yeah.

• 56:40Dwarkesh Patel?

  But over time, so then this is another one of those short-run effects that you emphasize we should focus less on, right?

• 56:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a good point. It's possible you don't know which, I mean, the problem is that ethnic ethnic conflict has been a hardy perennial. It's not the only conflict that people can ever have. I don't, I don't know to what extent they'll, these things will fade away. As I emphasize, in the culture transplant, the ethnic diversity channel is actually the least important of any of the channels I discuss. And so I'm open to this thought that what you're saying will actually happen. And maybe we'll just find something else to get mad at each other about, like, social media tribes or religious religious groups. I mean, it hasn't happened yet. In all the documented human history we have, people seem to find some ethnic

• 57:30Speaker 00

  balance for conflict. It is worth pointing out that the one, one study that I report, I think it's a Wajjar co-author piece, but that when the, the real, the source of ethnic conflict happens when private values are correlated with ethnic groups, right? So if cultural values are basically uncorrelated with ethnicity, then basically there's nothing to fight over. And that's really what's happened with a lot of old ethnic battles in the US. And so you're right, some of these things will fade with time. The problem is that human beings are, one of our great evils is that we are always looking for a focal point. And we can, people will use visible appearance as a horrifying focal point around which to peg their conflicts.

• 58:14Speaker 00

  It's an easy one because our brains are looking for visual patterns and I don't like that, but it's something that will probably keep happening.

• 58:22Dwarkesh Patel?

  One of the interesting points you made in the chapter was that the benefits of diversity are greatest when search costs are lower and the cost of vetting are lower. What do, how do we make sure that that is true of non-elite professions? So if you're looking for a plumber or if you're looking for a carpenter, how do you make sure that you can vet them easily?

• 58:42Speaker 00

  I mean, I have to say that this had to be a case where like Yelp and Google and all these online ratings have given us tools for checking these things out. We know we have to be skeptical, of course, but for people who know that they're good at something, the cost of entry into a new field has to be much lower than it was a few decades ago because, you know, 10, 20 good Google reviews and you can actually enter. So yeah, lower, basically not banning, not banning disclosure of data. I'd say that's the most important thing we can do.

• 59:14Dwarkesh Patel?

  Hmm.

• 59:15Speaker 00

  Um, you sometimes hear that medical doctors, I haven't checked up on this a long time, but apparently medical doctors often make it very risky to give bad reviews. Sometimes you get lost, you get a lawsuit or something. So making that a lot harder is worth it. You know, we know that some negative reviews are going to be malicious and inaccurate, but the benefits of information flow seem really high.

• 59:38Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah. I thought one of the really interesting chapters in the 10% less democracy was the chapter on, you know, bondholder democracy.

• 59:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:47Dwarkesh Patel?

  And I'm curious, I mean, corporations are obviously an example to use here where they do have bondholders who hold them accountable, but the average lifespan of a corporation is 10 years, I believe. So do you think it would, it would, it would be even shorter if bondholders had a lesser say on corporations? Or, you know, what is the, what is the transience of the corporation tell us about their controls?

• 1:00:11Speaker 00

  Oh, that's a good point. Well, we can suspect that the average person who's investing in a corporation makes money, right? Because otherwise people wouldn't be doing it, right? On average, people, it must work. So

• 1:00:26Speaker 00

  this is what I, you actually have missed up here. So can you rephrase the question again? I'm trying to think through what the, what the question is there. Yeah.

• 1:00:32Dwarkesh Patel?

  If bondholders do extend the longevity and the long-term thinking of the organizations on who they hold bonds, why aren't corporations who give out bonds, why don't they tend to live longer than I think the average of 10 years? Would it be even shorter without bondholders?

• 1:00:49Speaker 00

  Oh, I'd say, A, I'd say it'd probably be shorter without bondholders or any kind of financial monitor. But second, most corporations just shouldn't live that long, right? Most corporations, there are ideas that you try out and then it like you find out it doesn't work or it should be bought up by somebody else or the IP should be sold off. And so having a lot of companies fade out is actually on net a good sign. I think this is really part of the John Halterwanger line of research, the sort of modern version of creative destruction research, which finds that, you know, low productivity firms exiting, you know, just as naive laissez faire predicts, means that those workers and that capital can get reallocated over to more productive firms.

• 1:01:30Speaker 00

  So the alternative is, you know, stereotypically Japanese zombie firms, right? They're kept limping along by banks that are perhaps under political pressure to lend. And so a lot of human and physical capital gets tied up in low productivity projects. So yeah, a brutal bond market is a good way to send a market signal to move capital from low productivity to high productivity projects.

• 1:01:56Dwarkesh Patel?

  Why are yields on 30-year fixed treasuries, why are they so low? Because theoretically, investors should know that we have a lot of liabilities in the form of, you know, social security to baby boomers and that we've radically inflated the money supply very recently and may do so again. Do you think the investors are being irrational with the low yields or what's going on?

• 1:02:18Speaker 00

  No, no, I'm a fan of the view that the bondholders are going to win in the long run and that inflation, any kind of super like super, super high inflation is not going to be the path of the future. And what's going to happen is that, at least think about the US. The way the bondholders are going to win is that there's going to be a mixture of tax hikes and slower spending growth, especially hurting the poor. And that's how the US is going to close its fiscal gap. I don't know particularly what towns other countries are going to go through, but the US has this basically, this one tool, this one superpower, sitting,

• 1:02:58Speaker 00

  sitting in the room that it hasn't used yet, and it's, it's a vat, right? So the US could dramatically increase its tax revenue through either an overt or disguised value-added tax. And that would raise a ton of money, just like it raises in Europe, and that would, that's the easy way to close the US fiscal gap. We probably won't even have to get to that. Just making Medicaid worse slowly over the long run. Maybe making Medicare worse over the long run.

• 1:03:24Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right.

• 1:03:25Speaker 00

  That, that by itself would close a lot of this fiscal gap. So basically, I think they'll balance the long-run budget on the, kind of the backs of the poor and the middle class. That's probably the most likely outcome.

• 1:03:34Dwarkesh Patel?

  So are you expecting?

• 1:03:35Speaker 00

  Heads no, heads no hyperinflation, so.

• 1:03:37Dwarkesh Patel?

  But so you're expecting the welfare state to shrink either in quality or quantity over time?

• 1:03:43Speaker 00

  In relative terms, compared to the trend. I mean, if America's still getting, say, 1%, 1.5% richer each year, then that by itself means that,

• 1:03:56Speaker 00

  that adds a certain level of quality to healthcare over time. And so basically, if it, if it ends up staying the equivalent of, say, 0%, that by itself, you get healthcare spending in real terms to be 0% over time.

• 1:04:11Speaker 00

  That, that would end up closing the gap when you compound it out long enough, right?

• 1:04:15Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yep, yep.

• 1:04:17Speaker 00

  That kind of thinking.

• 1:04:18Dwarkesh Patel?

  So, you know, when Liz Truss in the UK tried to implement tax reform, there was a bondholder revolt, and, you know, she was ousted.

• 1:04:26Speaker 00

  Yeah. Bondholders won right there.

• 1:04:28Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah. So do you, are we, do we already live in the bondholder utopia, or?

• 1:04:33Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. I mean, I think that that was a nice reminder that basically, contrary to sort of the MMT view, and the sort of Pop, the Pop Keynesian view, the debt is no barrier at all.

• 1:04:46Speaker 00

  I think that showed the bondholders are actually paying attention to long-term signals of fiscal policy credibility and they'll take action. Yeah.

• 1:04:57Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yes. What are the deep roots of Mormonism? Why do they have such high trust and such tight-knit communities?

• 1:05:04Speaker 00

  I mean, I think part of it is that they are, they reflect a lot of this sort of, what for them was Western pioneer culture, upstate New York, Pennsylvania, then Ohio.

• 1:05:17Speaker 00

  I think those communities tended to be high-trust communities necessarily because of the difficult environment that they were living in.

• 1:05:25Speaker 00

  And there was a lot of selection. There was a lot of selection over the first few decades of Mormon history, where those who were willing to sort of trust the group stayed in, and those who weren't willing to trust the group ended up leaving. And not just trust, but trustworthiness. I think a lot of people probably got weeded out because they weren't contributing to the common good. So I think that basically by the time the Mormons got established in Utah, they, they had already selected for a strong culture of a kind of, a kind of in-group pro-sociality. And I think that's helped them, that helped them weather the storms of the 19th century. So the whole 19th century, people were only joining during this, this is during the era

• 1:06:10Speaker 00

  of polygamy in Utah, right? If they thought that they were willing to put up with this, right? And you know, you're, you're signing up for some kind of deep sociality with a mixture of, a lot of unconventional stuff. And that foundation really helped. And the fact that Mormons since then have stayed as a religion that requires a medium-high level of commitment also weeds out people who just aren't willing to make that kind of commitment. So, I mean, I was, I was raised Mormon. You know, I wasn't ultimately willing to make the commitment. And maybe a part of the reason is because I'm too much of a free rider. So Mormons who were left are probably better than me.

• 1:06:46Dwarkesh Patel?

  The Mormon church has, I think, more than $100 billion in assets. What is it planning on doing with all this money? That's a, that's tremendous, that's a tremendous sum.

• 1:06:56Speaker 00

  I don't know. I mean, maybe they're planning to hand it to the Savior when the second coming happens, right? It's, uh, there's, there's gotta be a great argument for this option value of just having the wealth there, right? It does, it must give them a kind of independence from the world when various storms come along, cultural, political storms. Um, you know, I don't actually know what their plans are for what they would do with all the money, but I do know that like, normal economics tells us that just people being frugal is good for the economy overall. So Steven Landsberg has a great essay in Praise of Scrooge. It's especially appropriate for this time of year. And, um, being frugal means you're building up the capital stock and you're giving a sort of invisible gift to future generations.

• 1:07:40Speaker 00

  So Mormon frugality is basically helping build up the US capital stock and indirectly the world's capital stock, helping make us all more productive, which I think is something that fits in with Mormon values.

• 1:07:52Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah. I think people have pointed out that people should be spending more money, given the fact that they have so much left over by the time they die, usually.

• 1:08:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. As an individual level, if you care about your own well-being, that's true.

• 1:08:03Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right. Yeah. Yeah. But okay. So if you, it's interesting, like leaving a large inheritance is, uh, is socially valuable.

• 1:08:09Speaker 00

  Yeah. Leaving a large inheritance means there's, uh, you're leaving, you're, you're, you're producing a lot, but you're not consuming very much. So that means you're building up the capital stock. So.

• 1:08:17Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yep. Yep. Um, and there's also, I think, um, a large amount of multi-level marketing schemes that proliferate in Utah.

• 1:08:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:28Dwarkesh Patel?

  Is that one of the downsides of high social trust?

• 1:08:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, the, cause people predate upon it, right? It strikes me as a total rent seeker sort of thing. I mean, I have to say the knives are really good. So I'm a, uh, everybody I know who's ever had Cutco knives ends up using them protected. So that's one of the popular multi-level marketing schemes that actually gets to, to men. A lot of them are targeted at women through cosmetics, as you might know. So.

• 1:08:50Dwarkesh Patel?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:08:51Speaker 00

  At least the men's one, it works out.

• 1:08:52Dwarkesh Patel?

  If you had to implement an immigration system from scratch, would you actually, uh, would you actually consider these SAT scores and these other deep roots scores as part of somebody's admittance? Or would you just consider the individual level, um, your personal skills and education and things like that?

• 1:09:08Speaker 00

  Now I'd want to launch a 10 year, maybe 20 year research project of figuring how to turn the deep root scores into something useful. So I like I, I think right now with the deep roots literature, we're about where Milton Friedman's monetarism was in the late 60s. You know, Friedman said, hey, I figured out where inflation comes from and we'd be a lot better off if we just grew the money supply 3% a year. And ultimately, nobody thought he was right about the 3% a year thing, but they did think that he had a still had a lot of good advice. So Friedman ended up having a lot of good ideas, but they weren't policy ready. And I think that's about where we are with the deep roots literature right now, which is, I mean, at most, one would use it as a like a small plus factor in a point

• 1:09:52Speaker 00

  system, but I don't even know which points I'd use. But something along those lines is worth thinking about. I would never use a cutoff. I would never use any quotas or hard cutoffs. If you think about points based systems, 10, 20 years of further research, and maybe you'd find a way to put the deep roots into a point based system. Yeah, yeah. Um, how was the SBF thing?

• 1:10:16Dwarkesh Patel?

  What do you mean?

• 1:10:17Speaker 00

  So did he just say like, I'll fly you out?

• 1:10:20Dwarkesh Patel?

  So I was there for the EA Bahamas.

• 1:10:23Speaker 00

  Ah, okay, okay.

• 1:10:24Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah. And then while I was there, I, I, I talked to somebody who knew him. And I'm like, hey, I would love to interview him.

• 1:10:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:10:31Dwarkesh Patel?

  I would ask him.

• 1:10:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:32Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah. It was one of the ones where actually I feel like I would really want to redo that one because I was aware of some things back then that were kind of that we were asking about in retrospect. And of course, it's all in retrospect, but

• 1:10:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:10:46Dwarkesh Patel?

  I should have focused harder at that rather than asking these sort of philosophical questions about effective altruism.

• 1:10:51Speaker 00

  Yeah. Do you think, I mean, is it as simple as like he was co-mingling fund? He, he lent a bunch of FTX money over to a hedge fund and then they lost it?

• 1:11:02Dwarkesh Patel?

  Um, I, I, yeah, I'm guessing.

• 1:11:04Speaker 00

  Brutal approximation.

• 1:11:05Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. So it's like, it's old fashioned financial fraud, partly driven by, uh, not having a really good board over him or a good oversight.

• 1:11:14Dwarkesh Patel?

  You know what? I'm really curious to ask you this because you know, you're talking hive mind about the fact that higher IQ people on average, um, are more cooperative in prisoner's dilemma type situations.

• 1:11:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:26Dwarkesh Patel?

  And I just interviewed Bethany McLean on the podcast. It hasn't been released yet, but you know, she wrote the smartest guys in the room, which about Enron, right?

• 1:11:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:34Dwarkesh Patel?

  There is this thing where maybe they are less likely to commit fraud on average, but when they do, there's so much.

• 1:11:39Speaker 00

  They're really good at it, right?

• 1:11:41Dwarkesh Patel?

  Exactly. Right? Um, so yeah, I, I don't know. Maybe, maybe one of the downsides of having a high IQ society is that, boy, people do commit fraud, they're super successful at it. You know, I don't know.

• 1:11:51Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, the, the evils of, of super smart people are obviously a huge risk to all of humanity, right? I don't have to worry about humanity being wiped out by a bunch of people with sticks and stones, right? I have to worry about humanity being wiped out by nuclear weapons, which could only be invented by smart people.

• 1:12:09Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right? Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:12:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:11Dwarkesh Patel?

  Are, are smart people more cooperative in a sort of very calculating sense that, you know, this game is going to go on, so I want to make sure I preserve my relationships? Or even in the last turn of a iterated prisoner's dilemma game, even in the last turn, they would cooperate.

• 1:12:28Speaker 00

  No, the last turn, they walk away. Yeah.

• 1:12:30Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:12:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. I think, I think the, um, there is no correlation between, uh, intelligence and say agreeableness, right? Normal psychological agreeableness. And I think that's a broader principle or conscientiousness for that matter, right? Psychological conscientiousness. So Machiavellian intelligence, I think, is what's driving the link between IQ and cooperation. So in repeated games, that Machiavellian intelligence, which a lot of intelligence researchers will talk about, turns into Koosian intelligence, where people find a way to grow the pie. But it's a very cynical, self-interested form of growing the pie.

• 1:13:06Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:06Speaker 00

  And so I don't think that has any, um, I don't think it's driven by inherent pro-sociality. I think it's it's endogenous pro-sociality, not exogenous pro-sociality. And that's a reason to worry about it.

• 1:13:19Dwarkesh Patel?

  What it what happens to these high IQ people when if society goes into a sort of zero sum mode, where there's not that much economic growth. And so the only way you can increase your share of the pie is just by cutting out bigger and bigger slices of yourself.

• 1:13:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, like then you are got to watch out, right? It's like the Middle Ages right there, right?

• 1:13:36Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yep.

• 1:13:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:38Dwarkesh Patel?

  Um, yeah, interesting. Um, awesome. Uh, Garrett, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. This was interesting.

• 1:13:45Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me. This is fantastic.

• 1:13:47Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, excellent.

• 1:13:48Speaker 00

  Thanks for reading my books. Appreciate it.

• 1:13:49Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, of course.