Garett Jones
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Economist
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Claims by Garett Jones (20 of 127)
Open Borders Value Comes From Exogenous Institutions
The value of open borders derives from exogenous institutional quality, not from agglomerations of talent and capital: moving more people into places with moderately laissez-faire institutions raises their productivity without reducing the productivity of incumbents, which is why the destination's institutions—not its existing talent clusters—are what matter.
America More Libertarian Due to Migrant Selection
America is more laissez-faire than Europe partly because of selection in migration: the Europeans with the most 'gumption,' openness, and adventurousness left for America, making the US population more market-friendly than the one they left behind.
National IQ Has Increasing (Log-Linear) Returns
Returns to national IQ are log-linear, which looks crudely like increasing or exponential returns, because human capital relationships are generally multiplicative rather than additive—tied to Adam Smith's pin factory and better organization of the division of labor between people.
EU Net Pulls Members Toward Markets
The EU, despite annoying regulations, on net pulls Europe toward markets because countries getting ready to join improve their economic-freedom and laissez-faire scores on the path to accession (and may increase them slightly after joining), nagging less market-friendly post-Germany eastern members toward greater economic freedom—like a Rocky training montage.
We Are All Externalities, Positive or Negative
On average we should presume that the skill level of voters and the ancestral traits we carry affect current national productivity, because everyone is an externality—positive or negative—on everyone else, though particular countries can be exceptions to the rule.
Governments Are Shaped by Their Citizens
Governments and productivity are shaped by the citizens of a nation even under authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, because rulers can only diverge so far from the masses on average, as recently seen in China where even a strong dictatorship had to listen to the people.
Successful Monarchies Are Really Oligarchies
Neoreactionaries romanticize monarchy mistakenly, because in equilibrium kings are almost always 'king and council'—something more like a corporate board than either a sole entrepreneur-owner or a stationary-bandit monarch—so the successful so-called monarchies aren't really monarchies but oligarchies.
Manhattan Project: Exclude the 20th Smartest Person
Like a Manhattan Project that puts only a small number of the smartest people in a room, you exclude the 20th smartest person because that person degrades the productivity of the other smart people—illustrating that adding anyone less able imposes a relative externality on the most able.
Frugality and Inheritance Build Capital Stock
Frugality is good for the economy overall because being frugal builds up the capital stock and gives an invisible gift to future generations; leaving a large inheritance means producing a lot while consuming little, so Mormon frugality (and large bequests) is socially valuable even if individually one might optimally spend more for personal wellbeing.
Mormon High Trust From Selection and Hardship
Mormon high trust and tight-knit communities result from selection: harsh Western pioneer environments required high-trust communities, and over early Mormon history those willing to trust and be trustworthy stayed while free riders were weeded out, with the medium-high commitment of the religion (and the polygamy era) continuing to select for in-group prosociality.
Spaghetti Theory: Migrants Assimilate Natives Too
Cultural assimilation is bidirectional: when migrants arrive, host and migrant values 'meet in the middle' rather than migrants simply converging to natives, so apparent assimilation actually reflects migrants changing the host culture (as Italians made Americans eat spaghetti), and this happens through soft cultural contact, not just democratic channels.
Elite IQ Matters More Than Lower Tail
Within the normal range of variation, the upper tail of IQ matters more for national productivity than the lower tail, because elites generate scientific and intellectual breakthroughs with positive externalities that spill over to the whole world, while crime risk from the lower end is only probabilistic and prosperous nations have tools to limit the influence of the least informed voters.
IQ-Cooperation Link Is Machiavellian, Not Prosocial
The link between IQ and cooperation in repeated games is driven by Machiavellian intelligence that becomes Coasean intelligence—smart people find cynical, self-interested ways to grow the pie—rather than inherent prosociality; in the last turn of an iterated prisoner's dilemma the smart walk away, so it is endogenous, not exogenous, prosociality, which is a reason to worry.
The Fed Works Because It Has Real Independence
The Fed functions as a non-corrupt technocracy because its officials have guaranteed long terms and it prints its own money to spend, forcing Congress to make a real effort to change anything—'a room of their own'—whereas the FDA and CDC must come to Congress for money annually and serve at the president's pleasure, leaving them in a realm of slack and reflecting Congress's muddled disarray rather than a culture of raw technocracy.
Migration from Corrupt Countries Reduces Economic Freedom
A simple change-on-change regression—increase in migrants from countries substantially more corrupt than average against subsequent change in economic freedom—yields consistently negative relationships (sometimes significant, always negative), a transparent test that immigration optimists like Powell and Nowrasteh never ran.
Cultural Traits Produce Persistent Income Gaps
Persistent income differences between ethnic groups across the world reflect partly privatizable cultural traits—frugality, personal responsibility—that show up in surveys, persist across generations, and affect long-run family productivity, alongside the hive-mind relationship between test scores and productivity; not everything is literally an externality (e.g., education raises individual earnings).
Allocate Talent to STEM and Status Games
Market signals for allocating intelligence aren't terrible but innovation is full of market failures, so smart people should not solely follow market signals; they should be more Hansonian, playing a variety of status games—the academic and intellectual status game is worth a lot personally and generates positive spillovers for society.
Low-Skilled Immigration Lowers Mean and Raises Variance
Low-skilled immigration simultaneously increases variance and lowers the mean and median, and the cost of pulling down the mean/median—especially in democracies—very likely swamps the small-probability benefit of admitting a few high-elite individuals.
Mean IQ Predicts Productivity Except in Non-Democracies
The mean IQ of a nation is normally the best predictor of its productivity, and the exceptions where elite IQ predicts better are non-democracies and South Africa, such as Gulf states (Qatar, UAE, Bahrain) with large, well-educated migrant communities, suggesting the median matters more in democracies.
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