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Garett Jones

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105
first
2023-01-24
most recent
2023-01-24
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1
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podcast

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  1. “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 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 scatterplot. 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, 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.”

    2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “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 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. The risks of crime from the lower end is basically like a probabilistic risk. It's not like some zero to one switch or anything. So we're talking about something probabilistic. And I think that”

    2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “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 people, 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.”

    2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Well, I do think that governments and productivity are shaped by the citizens in a nation in almost any event. I think that even as we've seen recently in China, even in a very strong authoritarian dictatorship, which some we 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.”

    2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “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 or anything that lowers the innovation in the world 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. 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. 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 and real.”

    2023-01-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source