YouSaid · the spoken record

Garett Jones

lines on the record: 105
first: 2023-01-24
most recent: 2023-01-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I mean, it follows from thinking through the fact that we are all externalities positive or negative, right? I don't know when 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 as having an effect on our current productivity for good or ill. Just following through the reasoning, I'd say on average that's most likely, but there could always be exceptions to the rule.”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 probably have to include that as any kind of analysis.”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, notice what he does is he attributes, he says there's some productivity that's just in the land that's just geographic factors. So basically being close. And so that... The moving people away from the equator boost productivity substantially. And again, that's a static result. The reason I mention that ignores all the I-7 stuff that I'm talking about, where anything that lowers the level of innovation in the world most innovative countries has negative cost 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 time frame.”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. So it basically 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.”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, that's a classic short run versus long run effect, right? So libertarians and open bordered 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 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 lower scoring country to a richer 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”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a big fan of the view that part of the Flynn effect is basically nutrition and health. That Flynn wasn't a huge believer in that, but I think that's”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 than 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. 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, 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 brain.”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this is something that I, yes, finding ways, this is what I call a flinn cycle. Like I wish I'm hoping for a world where there are enough public health interventions and probably K through six education interventions.”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rather, I stood 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 has created 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 the high SAT score culture, large population. It's enough of an economic failure for at least a little longer that folks might be able to be interested in moving to a poorer country with lower SAT scores. In a better world, you can do this with North Korea, too, but the population of North Korea is a big enough to make a big dent in the world, right?”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We can check and see what Iceland's a great place, too. Use Iceland as a metaphor, right? Like people are obsessed with running it in America. Like, Some kind of need, I don't know why, so let's try in France. Let's try Northern Ireland.”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because if you have a compelling reason to think that the 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. 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? Running in Iceland first.”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I thought that one of the great ideas of economics is that we have to worry about secondary and tertiary consequences, right?”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And 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 they're the point at which I have to say, like, I don't know. Is diluting the power of the smartest person in America like keeping us from having wondrous miracles all around us all the time? Probably not. But”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This ends up being a math problem that's a little hard to solve on a podcast, right? Because 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, I don't just mean a compositional effect. I mean negative externality. I mean relatively fewer positive externalities. So I'll use the term relatively fewer positive externalities rather than negative externalities, right? I don't exactly know where this 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 is because that person's going to ruin the ruin stuff for the other smart people.”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lower it compared to This is Cedar Faribus 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. If you're ninety nine, the ninety nine is making all compared to the world of average of 100, the world of an average ninety nine is reducing the productivity of all those hundreds.”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, because the median, 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 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.”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what if Yeah, what if the $20 billion turns your $100 bill into like an $80 bill and turns all of your age $100 bill and $80 bills?”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so 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.”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no. The whole point of open borders is that there's institutional quality and there's some exogenous institutions that make that place more productive than other places.”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One that's not an innovation powerhouse and turn that into your open borders country. 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.”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's obviously better to create a couple of innovation powerhouses rather than none, right? So obviously that's right. But instead, I would. 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 what I call the I-7. That's 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.”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think that it's always good to have great things and new ideas. Yes, new ideas are getting harder to find, 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 has a year to life. Just to use a rough ballpark measure there.”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Y axis is change in economic freedom. That's my preferred one. Gotcha. There's also a change in corruption one, which is a noisier indicator.”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yeah, the measure they use, I just took Powell's data set from another study. And it was the percentage. 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.”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you look at tea, then contrary to what Kaplan says, the deep root, that deep roots measure is statistically significant.”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So with tea, which we've always known at the best of the deep root scores, somehow Kaplan never managed to measure that one, just as Paul and Nerasti never managed to run the simplest test, change in migrant corruption versus change in economic institutions. Somehow like the simplest test just never get run.”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The prosperity of the low performance of India and China. He only checked the S and the A in the SAT scores. Which letter did he not predict? Which letter did he never test out?”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we look at when Kaplan made this claim, right, Brian Kaplan has made this claim, right? That the ancestry scores, the deep root scores, don't predict.”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, communism is 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. 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 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 point, actually.”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“China stuck in an currently China 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 for 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.”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think it's just, I think communism is dumb and it has terrible sometimes decades long effects on institutional quality that 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 root outlier than China is, right? Like, 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 something that it's sort of a...”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That are widely used. Two are SNA, that 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 1,500. It's basically what fraction of the world's technology were your ancestors using in 1500 before Columbus and his expansive conquest ended up upping the entire world map. So S A and T are all predictors of modern prosperity, but especially when you adjust for migration.”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. Bring in the second best. You're like, you're not that person's gonna”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're totally right about that. But, like, why wouldn't I want the best thing possible, right? Trying to figure out why you wouldn't want the best thing possible.”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think part of the reason 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? Because the median's shaping the productivity of the whole team, right? This is what it means when you believe in externalities, right?”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there you go. So you find the best people you can. Fourteenth are hiring don't just say we want to hire people who have been what we got. They say, let's get the best people we can get. That was Jimmy Carter's, that was Jimmy Carter's biography. Why not the best?”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All the gains from. Part of the reason is because the entire world depends on U.S. 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?”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's really not my comparative advantage to have opinions about that, but 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 countries that on average have, say, higher savings rates, higher education levels, higher, what I call SAT deep root scores. And countries that say half a standard deviation above the US level in all three, right?”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Equivalent to are better then? Just off the top of my head, maybe 20%? I don't know, 30%? I'll just throw something out there like that. Yeah.”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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.”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We found negative relationships every time. Sometimes to click significance, sometimes not. Always negative. Somehow they never found that, I just don't know how.”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We ran the simplest estimate you could run, right? 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.”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way you do that is on the x axis, you show the change in the money supply. On the y axis, you show the change of prices, right? Milton Freeman's idea money is always everywhere, yeah. Inflation is always never where monetary phenomena. That's what I did. I did this with 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 relationship between an increase in migrants from corrupt countries and subsequent changes in economic freedom. Every single statistical analysis we found had a negative relationship.”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But they never ran the statistical analysis that would be most useful, I think. They said that, so this is Powell in Naroste. They ran a statistical analysis that said, and they said in all of the statistical analyses we've ever run, we've never found 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?”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To the movement of Europeans. English Americans certainly changed a 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.”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More productive, yeah. Taking all the institutions of given, which is what a lot of open borders optimists do, they take institutions as given, they take cultural norms as given. All that micro stuff works out just fine. I'm totally on board with all that sort of Adam Smith division of labor, blah, blah, blah. 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 the burgers and spaghetti. So look, the Italians assimilated. But migrants assimilate us Native Americans certainly changed in response.”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, notice what you did there is you did something that didn't just increase the variant, you simultaneously increase the variant and lower the mean and median, right? And so I think that hurting the mean and median is actually a big cost, especially democracies. And so that is very likely to swamp the benefits of 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 swamped the benefits of increasing variance there. Yeah.”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's people at the top who tend to be coming up with 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 growth theory thing, right? Which is the innovations of the elite, just swamp the negatives of the low skilled among us.”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, I don't think so. Okay, if you could just increase the deviation holding the mean constant. Yeah, I think so in the normal range of variation, yeah, yeah And I think that had more effects at no.”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's probably Qatar of 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 scores of NetBIQ could be just PISA, TIMS type stuff. Those are the exceptions to the rule that the average IQ, the mean IQ, is the best predictor of national productivity.”
2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source