I’ve written a review of Garett Jones’s new book The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left. You can read it here on Ideas Sleep Furiously. Matthew Archer has kindly recorded himself reading the article out loud. Paid supporters can listen to the article in a beautifully crisp English accent - the way Anglo Reaction should be enjoyed.
To cut to the chase of my review, Jones argues that culture inherited from our ancestors causes prosperity. But I find his indicator of cultural quality, State, Agricultural and Technological (SAT) history strongly correlates with national IQ. When you control for national IQ the SAT no longer predicts GDP… I guess the SAT really is a good measure of intelligence! It’s not apparent any aspect of culture matters other than ‘studiousness’.
I’ve enjoyed some other reviews of Jones’s book. Bryan Caplan reviews Jones’s book for Reason. He focuses on the immigration debate and I think convincingly argues that diversity in and of itself is generally not a great cost. There’s good reason for agreeing with the latter point. After all, in the west “rivers of blood” have not yet arrived as predicted. Not the first nor the last time I’ve agreed with Bryan Caplan. Only after my review came out did I see Caplan’s Substack post on the book. There he also wonders how important culture is relative to IQ.
Helen Andrews has a very entertaining review of the book with a very hot take: “I cannot discount the possibility that he is engaged in a sophisticated satire.”
Of course, a better use of your time than reading reviews is to buy the book here. I greatly enjoyed reading it and I suspect you will too.
Excellent post! Frankly, it seems like IQ is a better predictor in regards to this than the T score from a country's 1500 SAT score. But the countries that are outliers are certainly worth exploring further. Positive outliers, such as India, suggest that these countries might not be performing at their full potential IQ-wise right now, likely due to environmental factors. Meanwhile, negative outliers, such as Mexico, might suggest that these countries have more potential than their 1500 T score would give them. Brazil and Mexico have vastly different 1500 T scores, but it's very far from clear that Brazilians have significantly more intelligence potential relative to Mexicans.
Ultimately, though, what your research here shows, George, is that if we can use a large-scale voluntary eugenics program to massively boost IQ scores, then the 1500 T scores of immigrants' sending countries will become less relevant. Third Worlders are more likely to get quicker and easier access to IQ-enhancing technologies if they will live in the First World. Though one doesn't (or at least shouldn't) want the First World to become a dump either.
Quite interesting that Mongolia has such low T scores and yet has a relatively high average IQ and also was able to conquer much of Eurasia hundreds of years ago!
I haven't read the book (but I plan to), but considering Garrett Jones' previous work on IQ, it's hard not to interpret the "culture" that immigrants bring in a Straussian manner...